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

Gwangju: The wound from where the soldier struck her is long gone, but 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 southwest 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 center, 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 No. 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, felt shivers down their spine with a sense of validation and recognition they have long sought. The Swedish Academy said it was awarding the prize to Han "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life."

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

One place where the city's pain endures strongest is the May Mothers House, a two-story building near a stream in the city's eastern edge. Originally a support and advocacy group for relatives of people incarcerated for their role during the protests, it was established as a physical center 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 Jang; the son she'd been looking for that day, Chul, was imprisoned and tortured for taking part in the protests.

Its director is 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 aftereffects. (Kim is married to 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, 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 minimized 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 sympathizers 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."

Han, who was born in Gwangju in 1970, moved with her family to Seoul when she was 9, just months before the uprising. Adults around her spoke of the atrocities in their home city in hushed voices. A few years later, she came across a book of photos of the violence that her father had hidden away, one of the ways that information about what happened was secretly circulating in the country.

In the novel's epilogue, she writes that she came to recognize echoes of the tragedy in her hometown in wars, massacres and oppression around the world.

"'Gwangju' had become another name for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down, and brutalized, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair," she writes.

In researching the novel, she has said in interviews, she read through more than 900 firsthand accounts of the uprising. The testimonies of the "May Mothers," she said at a literary festival in Gwangju in 2020, moved her immensely and made her shudder. The final chapter of the book is told from the perspective of a mother who speaks to her deceased son in a lilting Gwangju accent.

"They became etched in me," she said of the witness accounts.

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 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.

Han herself said that she particularly hoped that the novel would reach across time to younger generations in South Korea, to get people who don't remember the country's dark history to wrestle with it.

"If I were to dare to dream, I'd thought I would be so glad if this book could somehow be a gateway leading young people, students to Gwangju," Han said at the literary festival. "I am just the conduit."

Kim Kkot-bi, 34, was born a decade after "oh-il-pal," (five-one-eight) as the uprising is usually called here.

She said for many young people in the city, preoccupied with school, jobs and making their way through life, the episode always felt like a distant occurrence of valiant tales, divorced from their reality. Some are wary of openly talking about being from Gwangju because of persistent conspiracy theories from right-wing circles, trivializing and smearing the protesters, she said.

Since the Nobel announcement, several friends who had previously seemed uninterested said they wanted to read the book; she is organizing a book club with other young people.

"This gives us a reason to be proud to be from Gwangju," she said.