In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho’s own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.
Questions to Consider:
1. What did you think of the use of second person
perspective?
- Places you into the story but removes you from the
character
- Makes it
2. Did this make the stories feel more or less
personal?
- In the action, but removed from the people
3. Do you see Human Acts as a novel or a collection of short
stories?
- The second person made
4, Did you have a favorite (memorable?) chapter/story?
- Torture scenes were terrible
5. Throughout the different perspectives, we missed the
perspective of one of the soldiers fighting in the uprising. Would you have
liked to read about this as well and was there another perspective you missed
on the story?
- We didn’t feel that anything was missing
- If soldiers are killing innocent people, they don’t
deserve a story
Our own questions
6. What do you think the story is about?
- What’s in the minds of people with trauma from war
- That traumatic stuff impacts your ability to relay the
traumatic experience
- Koran War in the 1980’s
7. Emotional thoughts?
- Graphic details
- Difficult to read
- Rated a 6 or 7 out of 10 (best)
8. What did we learn? How do we feel about not having
learned this?
- Historical context was unknown before reading this (We
were alive during this time)
- There was a Korean Civil War and teenagers were rising up
- There is very little value placed on Asian folks
- Things would be very different in this country if the true
history of the USA was being taught
- News stories didn’t even carry these stories
Eloquent rage: a black feminist discovers her superpower /
Brittney Cooper
I’m still here: black dignity in a world made for whiteness
/ Austin Channing Brown
Why Rich Kids Are So
Good at the Marshmallow Test
Ultimately, the new study finds limited support for the idea
that being able to delay gratification leads to better outcomes. Instead, it
suggests that the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in
large part by a child’s social and economic background—and, in turn, that that
background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’
long-term success.
The failed replication of the marshmallow test does more
than just debunk the earlier notion; it suggests other possible explanations
for why poorer kids would be less motivated to wait for that second
marshmallow. For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food
in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that
comes with waiting. And even if their parents promise to buy more of a certain
food, sometimes that promise gets broken out of financial necessity. …poverty
can lead people to opt for short-term rather than long-term rewards; the state
of not having enough can change the way people think about what’s available
now. In other words, a second marshmallow seems irrelevant when a child has
reason to believe that the first one might vanish.
These findings point to the idea that poorer parents try to
indulge their kids when they can, while more-affluent parents tend to make
their kids wait for bigger rewards. Hair dye and sweet treats might seem
frivolous, but purchases like these are often the only indulgences poor
families can afford. And for poor children, indulging in a small bit of joy
today can make life feel more bearable, especially when there’s no guarantee of
more joy tomorrow.
Summary: Human Acts by Han Kang
The following version of this book was used to create this
study guide: Kang, Han. Human Acts. Hogarth, 2016.
Dong-ho is a middle school boy who wanders into the
Provincial Office looking for the corpse of his best friend, Jeong-dae. There,
he meets Eun-sook and Seon-ju, two girls who are volunteering to tend to the
corpses. They ask Dong-ho to help them out, and the three soon become friends.
In the main square, memorial services are carried out to honor the dead
civilians.
One night, the army enters into the city, invading the
Provincial Office. Even though Jin-su, one of the young men in the civilian
militia, warns Dong-ho to go home to his family, he does not leave. He and a
few other middle school boys are ordered to surrender to the army with their
hands above their head. Dong-ho and the boys follow the instructions, but are
shot down and killed.
The narration switches to Jeong-dae’s perspective after he
has been killed. His body is piled up with hundreds of others and set on fire.
Jeong-dae recalls the strange nature of being a soul stuck to one’s body after
death. He is finally freed once the fire totally consumes his body.
The novel travels five years forward through time to 1985. Eun-sook is working as an editor in a publishing company, and she gets slapped seven times in an interrogation room, even though she has committed no crime and has no answers to help the police. She picks up a manuscript of a play from the ledger’s office, only to find that it has been severely censored. Later, she attends the play in person. The actors do not speak the words that were censored, but silently mouth them. Having read the manuscript dozens of times, Eun-sook is able to read their lips and recognize that they play is about Dong-ho’s death.
Five more years forward, the narrator takes the reader to a
Gwangju prison in 1990. The prisoner explains the harsh beatings that he
frequently received in the interrogation room, along with the minimal food and
water that the guards provided for them. He reflects on his friendship with
Jin-su, who was also held prisoner. Years after being released, they maintained
their friendship, but struggled to deal with the pain of the past and became
alcoholics. Eventually Jin-su took his own life. The prisoner frequently asks
himself why he survived when Jin-su died.
The next chapter features Seon-ju’s experiences before and
after working in the Provincial Office. As a young girl, she was part of a
labor union and worked in a factory under inhumane conditions. She and several
hundred other girls from the factory went on strike, and protested naked in the
streets, under the impression that the police would not dare to harm bare,
young girls. But the police brutally beat the girls, and Seon-ju was sent to
the hospital. In 2002, she works in a small office as a transcriber for an
environmental organization. Yoon, a professor writing a dissertation on victims
of the Gwangju Uprising, contacts her and asks to interview her. She declines,
unable to bring up the pain of the past once again.
In 2010, the novel shifts to the perspective of Dong-ho’s
mother. Thirty years after the death of her son, she is still dealing with
grief and loneliness. She remembers some of the most precious moments she
shared with her son, and she reflects on his friendship with Jeong-dae.
In the epilogue, the writer, Han Kang, explains her
connection to Dong-ho. Before the Gwangju Uprising, Kang and her family moved
to Seoul. Her father sold their childhood home to Dong-ho’s father, so he ended
up sleeping in the same bedroom in which Kang herself had slept. She remembers
hearing about the violence unfolding through her parents’ hushed voices when
she was a child. In the present moment, it is 2013 and she returns to Gwangju
to visit her brother and do some research for the novel. She meets with one of
Dong-ho’s brothers and he tells her, “Please write your book so that no one
will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again” (157). In the final
scene of the novel, in a silent and somber moment, Kang visits Dong-ho’s snowy
grave.
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