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?

Chun Doo-hwan, a

Park Chung-hee,

How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?

After you were lost to us, all our hours declined into evening.

Evening are our streets and our houses.

In this half-light that no longer darkens nor lightens, we eat, and walk, and sleep.

My sister’s soul, like mine, must still be lingering somewhere; but where? Now there were no such things as bodies for us, presumably physical proximity was no longer necessary for the two of us to meet. But without bodies, how would we know each other? Would I still recognise my sister as a shadow?

How can anyone go up against a gun with nothing but an empty fist?’

Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.

When a living person looks at a dead person, mightn’t the person’s soul also be there by its body’s side, looking down at its own face?