From Haunting to Healing: On the Gwangju Uprising and ‘Human Acts’

To this day, I don’t know how my father experienced the Gwangju uprising.

This is Gwangju Daughter, a column by Hannah Bae that uses art about the 1980 Gwangju uprising to unpack political and personal traumas.

Andrew, Opal, Wilma. It’s been decades since these hurricanes devastated the place that I once considered home, yet I can still rattle off their names with ease. Ask me about my lineage, though, and I have to sift through the few Korean family records in my possession to know what to call my own kin.

By the time I learned to read Hangeul as an adult, I discovered that, for all my life, I had mispronounced my own father’s Korean name, mistaking the syllable “seok” for “sook.” This was how little I knew of his past in South Korea, a life that he explained in a few terse words: “We left from Seoul.”

My father never told me that his hometown was Gwangju, nor did he ever tell me about what happened there in 1980. Only when I read Human Acts, a historical novel by Han Kang, did I begin to understand the toll of the 1980 Gwangju uprising and the emotional burden of my parents’ generation.

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To grasp the events that engulfed South Korea in May of 1980, forget the glittering, futuristic Seoul cityscape of today, the dewy-faced boy bands, the Samsung smartphones. Picture instead Cold War concrete, GDP per capita around $1,500, and a populace weary of living under military dictatorship.

This was how little I knew of his past in South Korea, a life that he explained in a few terse words: “We left from Seoul.”

Several months prior, in December of 1979, a power-hungry Korean general, Chun Doo-hwan, stomped into power. He arrested his rivals—in the military, in politics—and ordinary civilians, mere students, who dared to protest in the streets for fair, democratic elections. Chun’s soldiers snuffed out all political activity, laying down the country’s next military dictatorship. In May, his soldiers drained South Korea’s legislature, pointing their bayonets at lawmakers as they filed out of the National Assembly. The soldiers chained shut the gates of universities. Outraged, thousands more students took to the streets in Seoul.

In Gwangju, a southern city loyal to Chun’s opposition, a storm of state-led violence descended when a few hundred student protesters found themselves facing off against soldiers wielding cudgels and bayonets. The crackdown came in sudden, indiscriminate gusts: Troops targeted anyone on the streets, young or old, protesters or not, clubbing civilians over their heads and bashing their skulls into pavement.

Over several days, the soldiers’ use of force escalated. They slashed people’s bodies, shot off their limbs, slaughtered innocents. Seeing the military’s assault against their children, their friends, their neighbors, and unable to stand aside, Gwangju citizens flooded the streets. In turn, troops fired waves of bullets into the crowds, felling dozens more bodies. The storm raged for days. The protesters’ numbers surged into the tens of thousands. They armed themselves, banded together, and drove the military out of Gwangju.

The following days of tenuous stillness marked the eye of the storm. The military blocked off the roads into Gwangju, severed long-distance phone lines and censored Korean press. In a moment of respite from the violence, cut off from the rest of the country, Gwangju’s armed citizens came together as a self-governed collective. They tended to their injured and their dead, rows upon rows of shrouded bodies that overflowed the morgue and crowded municipal buildings.

Rumblings portended the military’s plans to retake Gwangju, until one morning, before dawn, the storm resumed its destruction with a roar: Tanks rolled in. Troops massacred civilians. Surviving protesters were taken prisoner and tortured. Altogether, ten days of military atrocities in Gwangju left some 200 dead, by official government count, although activists and historians argue that the real figure is ten times higher.

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When I think of my family tree, all I can picture is the wreckage after a hurricane has blown through: a partially uprooted trunk, with whole limbs torn off at unnatural angles. Jagged emptiness left where names, places, and details should be. So many forces—colonization, war, poverty, illness—took their toll on my grandparents’ generation. In my parents’ lifetime, the unsightly gaps in the branches stem from the losses that can come with immigration—of homeland, of language, of extended family, and of a history that my father must have hoped to erase.

Banishing the horrors of the Gwangju uprising from his consciousness must have felt like a form of protection, however flimsy. Perhaps, in never speaking of this history to his American-born children, my father believed, falsely, that he was shielding our generation, too.

Han, who was born and raised in Gwangju like my father, writes that she was nine years old at the time of the uprising. She and her family had just moved to the outskirts of Seoul, so she never witnessed the massacre firsthand. Later, though, she picked up on the hushed murmurs of adult conversations, then snuck a peek at photos documenting the dead that had been passed to her father. For decades, she labored to bring the buried truths of the uprising to consciousness, first to herself, then to her nation in publishing Human Acts. Han tells her story through seven characters, all barred in some way from speaking their truths: two fallen schoolboys, silenced by death; a mourning mother, denied witnesses to her grief; an editor, hampered by censorship post-uprising; two surviving protesters who later face politically motivated torture; and the author herself.

No matter how you experienced the uprising, whether directly or indirectly, its ghosts find a way to haunt you.

To this day, I don’t know how my father experienced the Gwangju uprising. From what I can gather from our family registry, he and his immediate relatives survived, but the story told in these records remains unclear. My father would have been twenty-six years old in 1980, a contemporary of the student protesters. Did he join his peers out on the streets and witness unspeakable atrocities? Did he hunker down in desperate safety with his family as a storm of destruction swirled outside? Was he in another Korean city, blocked by censors from hearing the news of his ravaged hometown? Or perhaps, by 1980, had he immigrated to the United States with my mother’s side of the family, as I had long assumed?

No matter how you experienced the uprising, whether directly or indirectly, its ghosts find a way to haunt you.

I never knew to ask, and so, decades later, these questions still remain unanswered.

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The natural, human impulse when faced with bodily horrors—which Han depicts in graphic detail—is to look away. “It’s best you forget then,” Han’s characters are told after the uprising. “And you’ve succeeded, haven’t you? Succeeded in putting it all behind you, in pushing away anyone who, with their insistence on raking up the past, threatened to cause you even the slightest pain.”

Repression never frees Han’s survivors from their haunting. In one analysis, Jiayang Fang writes: “In Han’s books, those who distance themselves from their histories are fated to live lives worth barely more than death. The characters who embrace their own horrors at least have the hope of freedom. Unspooling the story of such memories is painful, but there is also relief in the diagnosis of the injury.”

In his complete silence, my father never showed me how he mourned his losses, if at all, or tended to any severed branches of our family tree. Instead, I got his lightning flashes of temper, the shocking sting of his palm, the familial wounds that wept silently, the festering neglect that rotted into abuse.

As an adult, for my own safety, I cut myself off from my family. My estrangement followed the pattern of broken boughs in our generations past, yet another snap, yet another void. But in my case, even as I felt myself flourish in newfound independence, I could not ignore the aching hollow within. Healing, for me, would require reopening still-tender wounds to try and fill in some of the unknowns in my family history. Something told me that finding a way to understand my father, his flaws and his virtues, his capabilities and his impairments, would be my path to forgiveness.

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Some losses are so traumatic, they must pass from one generation to another to process, the literary critic David Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han posit in their research on Asian American mental health and its reflections in art. In one of their examples, Japanese American filmmaker Rea Tajiri finds that the visions from her mysterious, recurring nightmares are rooted in her mother’s repressed memories of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. “If the losses of the first generation are not resolved and mourned . . . the melancholia that ensues from this condition can be transferred to the second generation,” Han and Eng write.

Filipinx American essayist Jen Soriano writes of her own repeating visions of her unresolved family history: “I dream sometimes of the day that the war came to the Philippines . . . I have not been on battlegrounds, stepped over bodies, used them as shields, aimed at flesh to tear it apart. And yet, war lives within me.” Soriano’s experience echoes that of Polish American memoirist Eva Hoffman, who writes of the traumas inherited by the children of Holocaust survivors, “The paradoxes of indirect knowledge haunt many of us who came after . . . but we did not see them, suffer through them, experience their impact directly.”

For Han Kang, the true way forward was to seek out the ghosts, to invite them to speak, and to listen. While researching Human Acts, Han also found herself plagued by nightmares, the kind where she was stabbed by bayonet, or found herself under pressure to rescue political prisoners. By grappling with the Gwangju uprising and its psychic weight, Han opened herself up as a vessel for her ghosts. With her words, she brought the ghosts to consciousness and offered them relief.

The past found a way to call to me, not through dreams or spirits, but through the only languages that I, a journalist, could understand: opportunity, records, words committed to the page, patterns. After college, a prestigious journalism fellowship brought me to Korea. While applying for a residency visa, I requested old family records, and there I found Gwangju.

Again and again, Gwangju resurfaced over the years; in my family records, then in books I read: journalistic histories like The Two Koreas and Korea Witness, as well as Han’s fiction, in which the pain felt visceral, impossible to ignore. Slowly, I began to piece it together: family history, national history, facts, feelings.

My father never found a way to address his ghosts, but I am here, finding my own way to hear them.