Human Acts

How is it, she wonders, that a face can so effectively conceal what lies behind it? How is not indelibly marked by such callousness, brutality, murderousness?

I wanted to be free to fly to wherever they were, and to demand of them: why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister, what did you do to her?

Her empathy comes through most strongly in ‘The Boy’s Mother’, written in a brick-thick Gwangju dialect impossible to replicate in English, Korean dialects being mainly marked by grammatical differences rather than individual words.

the country’s ‘miraculous’ industrialisation had meant back-breaking work in hazardous conditions,

In terms of mentality if not geography, Gwangju was sufficiently far from Seoul to seem ‘off the mainland’ – the same kind of mental distance as that from London to Northern Ireland at the time of the Bloody Sunday massacre.

She is a writer who takes things deeply to heart, and was anxious that the translation maintain the moral ambivalence of the original, and avoid sensationalising the sorrow and shame which her home town was made to bear.

the human acts of which we are all capable, the brutal and the tender, the base and the sublime.

And yet, you made no move to go and help Jeong-dae. Left alone, you were frightened and, thinking only about avoiding the snipers’ sharp eyes, shuffled quickly sideways along the wall, your face pressed up

Even this pressure didn’t squeeze any more blood from my wounds, which could only mean that it had all leaked out already.

the nape of my neck