On October 10, 2024—the day after Hangeul Day, which celebrates the invention of the Korean alphabet—I and millions of other Koreans were able to do something we had never been able to do before: read a novel by a Nobel Prize laureate in our native language.
And what extraordinary grace that the laureate should be Han Kang. Last year, I had the honor of interviewing Han about Deborah Smith and e. yaewon’s English translation of her novel Greek Lessons. We became friends who now meet up whenever I’m in Seoul, and I can testify that she embodies in real life the gentleness she demonstrates in her books. Beyond her individual worthiness, it is significant that South Korea’s two laureates—former president Kim Dae-jung received the Peace Prize in 2000—have both led careers shaped by the long fight for democratization. For decades, conservatives have denied or dismissed the Gwangju Uprising, the atrocity in which the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan killed hundreds of pro-democracy protesters, and wounded or maimed thousands more. Because of Han’s Nobel win, more of the world will know that it not only happened, but also that it continues to matter.
The Gwangju Massacre is central to Han’s magnum opus, Human Acts—a harrowing and clear-eyed yet somehow tender look at the weeks-long uprising against Chun that began on May 18, 1980, resulting in exorbitant death and enduring collective trauma. The novel also means a great deal to me personally: For as long as I can remember, my mother, who is four years older than Han, has resisted thinking about life under Chun in the 1980s, so much so that she avoids TV shows and movies set in that decade. She does not refuse to talk about it per se, but over the years I have gathered that discussing it causes her pain, so I prefer waiting for her to volunteer information rather than asking her for it. Once, we were wandering the campus of her alma mater in Seoul when she looked up at a building and remarked that her classmates set themselves on fire and jumped off the roof as a form of protest. And then, I fill the gaps in my knowledge with books.
It wasn’t until I read Human Acts, I recently told Han, that I truly understood my mother’s silence and was able to imagine what might lie on the other side. In the novel, an editor named Eun-sook tries to forget the seven slaps she received from a detective interrogating her about the translator of a banned book. As Deborah Smith writes in her English translation of Human Acts: “She was struck so hard, over and over in the exact same spot, that the capillaries laced over her right cheekbone burst, the blood trickling out through her torn skin.” An activist named Seon-ju recalls how the police brutalized her in jail with such force that she “[continued] to bleed for the next two years . . . leaving [her] permanently unable to bear children.” I don’t believe my mother had these experiences, but the novel offers a glimpse into what it was like to live with that fear. And while I did not grow up in that climate of violence, I did grow up in its aftermath. I took to heart Han’s belief, which she expressed in The New York Times, that “the last line of defense by which human beings can remain human is the complete and true perception of another’s suffering.”
The literary critic Shin Hyoung Cheol notes that after the uprising, in which many students participated, the task of attending to the dead bodies fell mostly to high school girls who never received any kind of thanks, but “Han Kang gave those nameless young women the names ‘Eun-sook’ and ‘Seon-ju.’”* Giving names to the nameless and, likewise, voices to the voiceless is something Han does consistently. In The Vegetarian, the central character Yeong-hye never narrates her story in the first person, but her decision to stop eating meat is comprehensible to the reader even when it baffles those around her; in Greek Lessons, one of the protagonists has literally lost her ability to talk. Han’s latest novel, We Do Not Part—which, thanks to e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris’s forthcoming translation, will be available in English this January—is about a different historical massacre: the Jeju Uprising of 1948–1949, when the government killed tens of thousands of citizens in the name of anticommunism.
This is the power of Han Kang: With little more than paper and ink, she acts as a conduit for the memories of generations that suffered state violence, passing them on to generations that inherited these traumas but not necessarily the long-suppressed facts beneath them. She makes that pain legible, indelible, meaningful. Human Acts
forced me to reckon with my inheritance, this formless and weighty thing, to recognize at what cost South Korea’s democracy was won. The novel is not a promise to heal all wounds but an invitation to mourn them together.
Her complete oeuvre—much of which is not yet available in English but hopefully will be soon—further bears out her intuitive compassion for the vulnerable, her unyielding awareness of the thin boundary between life and death. In the novel The Wind Is Blowing, Go, a woman tries to understand her friend’s death through the art she made in life. In the short story “Farewell,” another woman inexplicably turns into a snowman; as she melts, she reflects on her life and all the ways that society has already rendered her obsolete. The Swedish Academy noted Han’s “intense poetic prose.” But she also spent years writing actual poems with similar themes, such as two poems where she imagines herself as the reincarnation of Mark Rothko, who died nine months before she was born, or “One Late Evening I . . . ,” a poem about the simple act of sitting down before a bowl of steaming rice and realizing “that something has passed by forever, / that something is passing by forever even now.”*
After winning the Nobel, Han reportedly told her father, the writer Han Seung-won, that he should refrain from hosting a celebratory banquet for her because of the two wars raging in Ukraine and Palestine. In a relentless year of state violence and hostile attempts to silence resistance against it, this is whom the Swedish Academy chose to honor: a writer whose work in both life and literature has been to recover some dignity from the ruins of trauma. As Han writes in Human Acts:
After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.
In the past year, how many people have lost loved ones for whom they could not hold funerals? How many lives will now become funerals? Han Kang’s writing, her triumph, shows that histories of trauma from Gwangju to Gaza do not belong in the shadows. They belong to the world of literature. They belong to world literature.
*Editor’s Note: Translations marked with an asterisk are the author’s own.
