Even more disturbing for Kang was that children of school age didn’t know anything about it. The truth was getting mangled in different ‘official versions’ and a single textbook is currently being written by the democratic regime. The memory of what had happened had been fading from the very moment it had happened it hadn’t been acknowledged and no information had been released until 1997 – seventeen years after the fact – and it hadn’t really been written about in literature since the turn of the millennium. Researching and writing the book, Kang explained, took her to the edges of losing faith in mankind: “I almost gave up”. How could people challenge such extreme violence? How could people commit such extreme violence? She later ‘discovered’ it on seeing a photographic record of the massacre and the ‘riddle’ of the book was what she needed to solve through Human Acts, motivated by what she calls a form of ‘survivor guilt’.
Kang was born in the city in 1970 and lived there until she was around 9 or 10 before moving with her family to Seoul, closely missing the atrocity itself. Human Acts explores the student uprising and massacre of 1980 where around 600 people are estimated to have been killed protesting the government in the South Korean city of Gwangju. I never knew where one word ended and another began, it was simply warm, textured sound. When she read an extract of her book, Korean sounded like nothing I’ve ever heard before it was rolling and smooth, I couldn’t decipher a rhythm, only brief pauses. It’s a voice that commands your attention because you must listen carefully.
The room shifted from silence, to an absolute void where Kang’s voice was the only sound, as if whispered to each person individually. Everyone shuffled around, worried that they wouldn’t be able to hear. When she started speaking (an interpreter was present, but Kang only asked her to translate one term in the course of the evening) her voice was incredibly quiet, the softest of speaking voices, practically non-existent even through a microphone. Kang’s second book in translation, Human Acts, had just come out with Portobello Books, following on from its ‘sister’, The Vegetarian. Here we all were, in a large, packed out room, for a Korean writer.
A few weeks ago I went to Foyles Bookshop in London to see an appearance by Korean author Han Kang, mainly because there had been something around her that doesn’t usually happen to a non-European author in translation: excitement.
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