Human Acts

In 1990, a professor requests an interview with a former prisoner of the state. The unnamed prisoner describes the horrors of his imprisonment after the Gwangju Uprising. Jailed with around a hundred other men, they were jammed body-to-body into five cells and continually monitored. The prisoner was repeatedly tortured with a black Monami Biro pen until his hand began to show bone. Afterward, his torturers asked him questions, but no matter how he responded, they beat him. After being returned to his cell, the prisoners sat with their backs straight and their gazes straight ahead. The prisoner remembers his torturous hunger and thirst. The prisoners were only given water three times a day with their scant meals and forced to share this meager fare between two prisoners. The prisoner was partnered with Kim Jin-su, which he’d been grateful for since Jin-su looked more like a shadow than a human.

The prisoner then wonders how it is that Kim Jin-su is now dead while he is still alive, since their experiences were so similar. He challenges the professor’s motives for writing his dissertation, for pursuing this interview: “But when it came to it, this dissertation you were planning to write, was it really going to benefit anyone other than yourself?” (115).