Summary
At a labor union group meeting, the teenage narrator hears a woman named Seong-hee describe the moon as "the eye of the night," a description that unsettles the narrator. Years later, she checks her email and smokes a cigarette, alternating between memories and the present day. A decade before, a professor named Yoon contacted the narrator (named Seon-ju) and requested to interview her for his dissertation regarding the Gwangju Uprising. She refused. Now, Yoon asks again to interview her for a book he is writing. Despite Seon-ju's refusal, Yoon sends her a tape recorder and blank tapes along with a written request for her testimony.
Seon-ju reads a portion of Yoon's dissertation where one witness recounts the horrific way that soldiers treated captured protestors. Her team leader, a man named Park Yeong-ho, arrives at the office and interrupts her recording process. She is uncertain she would have gone through with it even if he had not arrived.
Seon-ju recalls being exploited when she was an adolescent working in a factory. Amidst the inhumane conditions, she started attending labor union group meetings at activist Seong-hee's house. While participating in a strike, Seon-ju was severely injured by police. She returned home (near Gwangju) and struggled to find a factory job after being blacklisted. Eventually, she ended up working as a machinist at a dressmaker’s.
In May of 1980, Seon-ju participated in the Gwangju Uprising. Later on, both Yoon and Seong-hee tried to convince Seon-ju to share her traumatic experiences and leverage them publicly to denounce the oppressive government. Seon-ju recalls seeing a photograph of Dong-ho's body that "saved" her by returning her anger and life force. In the present day, Seon-ju decides not to record her testimony. The chapter ends with her making her way to visit Seong-hee in the hospital.
Analysis
The original Korean title of this chapter translates to "The Night's Pupil/Eye." At this point in the novel, the second-person pronoun "you" shifts to refer to a girl who worked at a factory and who narrates this chapter. She fluctuates between her memories and the present day (referred to as "Now"). Professor Yoon's insistent plea for Seon-ju's testimony brings her traumatic memories of the uprising to the surface. These memories are entitled "Up Rising," giving a different connotation to the words. Whereas an uprising is an act of resistance or rebellion, "up rising" could suggest a continuous upward momentum.
Han again connects literacy to humanity when Seon-ju describes how Seong-hee taught hanja (Chinese characters used to write the Korean language) at labor group meetings so that the female workers could decipher the newspaper. Seong-hee insisted that this group of women was "noble" no matter how poorly treated they were by their bosses. Learning to read and write was meant to empower them to stay informed and to represent themselves in writing. In Human Acts, literacy refers not only to reading and writing, but also to understanding. A few years after attending these labor group meetings, Seon-ju reads official government reports regarding a sit-in at the factory. From her studies and experiences, she learned how to "piece together a puzzle" and "read between the lines." In other words, Seon-ju uses critical reasoning to understand the truth about a situation.
In this chapter, Han uses italics to indicate both dialogue and emphasis. This italicized dialogue occurs inside Seon-ju's mind through her memories and her own inner voice. Eventually, she speaks back to Yoon's request that she "face up" to her memories and "bear witness to them." In a single long italicized paragraph, Seon-ju details how the military police inflicted sexual violence upon her as punishment for publicly protesting the oppressive regime. She questions the ethics of anyone (including Yoon and Seong-hee) trying to bring up these past traumatic events.
Seon-ju's way of dealing with her trauma is to "[turn her] back on all that." This is the only way she can live in the present, but it has also cut off her capacity to be who she was before the massacre. Yoon and Seong-hee criticize Seon-ju's decision to keep her trauma private, and this is the main conflict that Seon-ju faces in this chapter: whether or not to testify and drag up her memories of the past. Ultimately, she decides not to do so.
This chapter ends on an ambiguous note, leaving it unclear as to who is addressing whom. As Seon-ju walks toward the hospital to visit Seong-hee, she addresses the "blue tinged darkness undulating" around her. In this chapter, "you" refers to Seon-ju, but in the final paragraphs, this pronoun could be Seon-ju, Dong-ho, Seong-hee, or a mixture of them all. Seong-hee tells Dong-ho that she feels responsible for not insisting he leave the Provincial Office before the massacre. Another voice (possibly still belonging to Seon-ju) says, "There's only one thing for me to say to you, onni. If you'll allow me to. If you'll please allow me....Don't die. Just don't die." Here, the speaker could be Dong-ho addressing Seon-ju or Seon-ju speaking to Seong-hee. The term "onni" is a term for "elder sister." However, it is likely that Seon-ju directs this plea to Seong-hee because "onni" is typically used by females to address older female friends or sisters.
