Atrocities made a South Korean city infamous; a novelist made it immortal

GWANGJU, South Korea - The wound from where the soldier struck her is long gone, but Ms Jang Sang-nam, 88, can still trace its outlines on her head.

“Here, with the butt of a rifle,” she said when asked where she was hurt while she was out looking for her son, reflexively taking her trembling, sinewy fingers to her right temple. “This eardrum was burst. I still can’t hear.”

Her injury was inflicted 44 years ago, when this ginkgo-tree-lined midsize city in the south-west of South Korea erupted in a student-led uprising for democracy, a day after the military ruler declared nationwide martial law. Paratroopers stormed the city, Gwangju, and brutally beat, stabbed and indiscriminately fired upon throngs of citizens young and old. Hundreds were left dead or missing.

This week, when President Yoon Suk Yeol stood in front of the South Korean people and declared martial law for the first time since then, the outrage was deepest in Gwangju, where memories are still raw of resistance paid for in blood.

In the intervening decades, in a country whose modern history has been defined by rapid change and swift adaptation, Gwangju has sought to remember and be remembered for the bloodshed that marked a foundational moment in South Korea’s path to democracy.

Those efforts are apparent in the city today. On the pockmarked exterior wall of a former newspaper building in the city centre, bullet holes are encircled in neon orange to make them visible from a distance. The bus line that winds through town on the way to the cemetery where victims of the uprising are buried is number 518, for the date the protests began in 1980: May 18. Each May on the eve of the date, thousands of people take to the streets to march the route the first protesters took.

When this year’s Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Gwangju-born author Han Kang, whose sparse, stark novel Human Acts was based on those fateful days, the people of Gwangju shed tears, yelped with disbelief and felt shivers down their spine with a sense of validation and recognition they have long sought.

“It was our story that won the highest honor in the world. That brings solace,” said Mr Kim Tae-yun, who was 20 when he was hit in the face with a bullet while trading fire with soldiers. He wears a false eye to this day.

Speaking in Sweden on Dec 6 before she receives the Nobel next week, Ms Han said she had been “deeply shocked” by Mr Yoon’s martial-law decree. In writing Human Acts, she said, she had spent a lot of time studying how martial law was imposed before the Gwangju massacre.

“For me to witness a similar situation unfold in real time before my eyes in 2024 was startling,” she said through an interpreter.

One place where the pain from the military crackdown of 1980 endures strongest is the May Mothers House, a two-storey building near a stream on the eastern edge of Gwangju. Originally a support and advocacy group for relatives of people incarcerated for their role during the protests, it was established as a physical centre in 2006. It is now a gathering place for women in their waning years who lost their children or husbands during the uprising, or were themselves injured. Among them is Ms Jang; the son she’d been looking for that day, Chul, was imprisoned and tortured for taking part in the protests.

Its director is Ms Kim Hyung-mi, whose older brother was severely beaten and never fully recovered. He spent seven years in mental institutions before he ultimately died from the after effects. Ms Kim is married to Mr Kim Tae-yun, whom she met through their activism.

She calls each of the now-elderly women who visit the home regularly – for meals together, and for yoga and art classes – “umma”, or “mother”. Her own mother continued to pine for her son years after his death: Never discarding his books, seeing his face in the face of every man who was around the age he would have been had he lived. Only the dementia that ate away at her memories in the final three months of her life, Ms Kim said, seemed to give her some relief.

“Mothers only forget when they die,” she said.

During the 10-day uprising, Gwangju was utterly isolated. The military cut phone lines and closed all roads. Censors blocked or minimised reports of what was happening in the city, having seized control of the news media through martial law. In the immediate aftermath, the military junta in power depicted the unrest as a violent riot instigated by communist sympathisers and agents from North Korea, deserving of the brutal crackdown. Numerous citizens were arrested, tortured and imprisoned.

In the months and years that followed, the people of Gwangju fought to get their story known in the rest of South Korea and beyond. Through their efforts, the uprising has become widely acknowledged as a catalytic moment in South Korea’s path to democracy. The events have been retold and commemorated in books, television dramas, films, poetry, orchestral music, plays and even a couple of operas.

Human Acts, which depicts the uprising and its aftermath from the perspectives of six ordinary people who experienced it, is possibly one of the most intimate and visceral retellings.

In the original Korean text, the city that forms the backdrop is hardly mentioned by name, as if to invoke it would be too painful. “That city,” a couple of the characters call it. At times, it is referred to as “gohyang” (hometown), and sometimes, simply “there”.

Mr Lee Jae-eui, a 24-year-old college student in Gwangju at the time, dodged detectives and government agents to work on the first influential volume that recounted the uprising, published in 1985. In an interview, he recalled the urgency that people felt to tell their story even in the midst of the protests.

“It really felt like we could all die here, and no one would ever know,” he said. “We were desperate to tell the outside world.”

Reading Human Acts, he said, brought back everything about those spring days – the all-consuming rage, the anxiety and sleeplessness, the commingled smell of the chloroform and decaying bodies.

With the prize, he said, more people around the world will read Ms Han’s book and come to experience the history that he lived through and has devoted his life trying to make known.

“For all our efforts, there was a limit, but the book did what we could not for decades until now and for decades to come,” he said. NYTIMES