“Gyeongseong Creature,” “Human Acts,” and Who Our Bodies Belong To
Testaments to South Korean and human resilience
When I was in college, I pitched an essay idea on South Korea. My professor prompted, “And why should we care about South Korea? Does it have, like, the third largest economy in the world?”
I said enthusiastically, “Yeah, it has the twelfth largest economy.” Classmates sniggered. I guess to them, twelfth place was unimpressive. But what they didn’t know was that in the last 100 years, Korea had survived colonization, civil war, and dictatorship. For a country that was known as little more than “NOT China or Japan,” surpassing Western European titans like Italy, Spain, and Greece was a miracle.
I happened to consume two pieces of media at the same time that speak to Korea’s resilience: Netflix’s hit series Gyeongseong Creature, and International Booker Prize-winner Han Kang’s novel, Human Acts. (The International Booker Prize, formerly known as the Man Booker International Prize, is comparable to the Nobel Prize in Literature in terms of prestige.)
Gyeongseong Creature takes place in Gyeongseong, now known as Seoul, South Korea’s capital, which is located at the very north of South Korea. Human Acts takes place in Gwangju, at the southern tip of the peninsula. The two cities serve as bookends of South Korea in the same way the two pieces of media served as bookends to my post-work day: I would watch Gyeongseong Creature with my wife over dinner, then read Human Acts in bed before going to sleep.
More astonishingly, the two pieces of media serve as bookends to a period of limbo during South Korea’s history, during which it was unclear whether the country would ever establish a true democracy.
Gyeongseong Creature takes place right before Korea breaks free of Japan’s brutal colonization. Human Acts starts half a century later, after South Korea fended off both the Japanese and the North Koreans — only to find itself under attack again, from the inside. The novel revolves around the Gwangju Uprising, during which protestors, primarily students, were ruthlessly murdered by the military for protesting against the second president who, after overthrowing the first president for being a dictator, became a dictator himself.
After watching the Japanese imprisoning, torturing, and murdering Koreans during the early evening, it was difficult for me to read about Koreans imprisoning, torturing, and murdering each other at night. Both pieces of art force the viewer/reader to interrogate the question: who do our bodies belong to? And what does it mean to be human?
Anatomy = Autonomy
Gyeongseong Creature opens with a pile of dead bodies. The Japanese hurriedly throw them down a chute into an underground chamber to incinerate them, along with all evidence of their human experimentation — a horror that is based on reality. It’s said that everything Japan knows about human anatomy is thanks to vivisection — the dissection of live subjects — of Koreans, Chinese, and other colonized peoples.
Human Acts opens the same way, except that the corpses are kept above ground. There’s no need to hide the evidence: the South Korean soldiers murdering their own citizens feel no shame, because they’re following orders of the dictator.
…the best way for a totalitarian regime to subjugate you is to destroy your body.
In both stories, characters are imprisoned. They are forced to write confessions betraying their comrades. They are tortured into a pulp, fingernails ripped out, hands pierced with wooden stakes. Where Gyeongseong Creature only hints at rape (and the horrific enslavement of comfort women), Human Acts describes it graphically.
Consider this passage from Human Acts about a pile of dead bodies:
Watery discharge and sticky pus, foul saliva, blood, tears and snot, piss and shit that soiled your pants. That was all that was left to me. No, that was what I myself had been reduced to. I was nothing but the sum of those parts. The lump of rotting meat from which they oozed was the only “me” there was…
We were bodies, dead bodies, and in that sense there was nothing to choose between us.
…When they threw a straw sack over the body of the man at the very top, the tower of bodies was transformed into the corpse of some enormous, fantastical beast, its dozens of legs splayed out beneath it.
These bodies used to be students and other protestors. In the passage, they are “lump[s] of rotting meat.” What’s worse, the former-protestors are indistinguishable from each other and rendered into one collective monster. The bodies are dehumanized, individually and as a whole.
Both artworks make it clear: in a world where your body grants you your autonomy — in a world where it’s impossible to have autonomy without control of your body — the best way for a totalitarian regime to subjugate you is to destroy your body.
Monsters and Ghosts
In Gyeongseong Creature, Seong-shim, a Korean woman — and in particular, a dissident of Japanese colonial rule — is transformed into a literal monster, a ravenous, unapologetic killer. She grows in size and power by consuming the spinal fluid of her victims.
In her monster form, Seong-shim is completely unrecognizable. Her eye-less face looks like something from an Aliens movie. Her skin is replaced with black slime that’s reminiscent of Venom, the Spider-Man villain. She has tentacles growing out of her back. She can’t speak, only scream and roar. She jumps like a spider and strikes like a viper.
The Japanese scientist who created her is thrilled and even finds her beautiful. He grooms her to be a weapon that could potentially turn the tide against America and lead Japan to victory in the Second World War.
Unbeknownst to both Seong-shim and the scientist, her daughter and husband have infiltrated the secret laboratory in which she’s kept to find her. But when the daughter and husband first see Seong-shim as a monster, they don’t recognize her at all. She doesn’t recognize them either. She chases them like pieces of meat.
In Human Acts, Koreans are transformed into ghosts — literally and figuratively. The figurative ghost that haunts everyone (including the one literal ghost) is Dong-ho. The novel opens from his point of view, and then we never see him again alive.
Nightmares of the torture they’ve endured seem to bleed into their day.
The next chapters are all told from other characters’ points of view and revolve around Dong-ho as they each deal with the aftermath of his death and the Gwangju Uprising. Many of the chapters are even named with him as the focal point: ‘The Boy’s Friend, 1980’ ‘The Boy’s Mother, 2010.’
Decades after his death, Dong-ho haunts his mother, who sees him in every passing boy with a bowl haircut. He haunts his former comrade when she goes to see a play about the Gwangju Uprising and a young actor in white clothing makes his way up the aisle under a spotlight. (In Korean culture, ghosts wear white. It’s also the color of mourning, as white chrysanthemums and white dresses are both seen at funerals.)
The characters in the novel are haunted by their torturers, too, even long after they’re freed. Many of the characters have trouble sleeping. Nightmares of the torture they’ve endured seem to bleed into their day. Around them, some of their fellow protesters succumb to the darkness and commit suicide.
Similarly, Gyeongseong Creature illustrates how not even the Japanese are safe from each other’s machinations — the true monster of the story. Meanwhile, the real monster kills indiscriminately between the Japanese and Koreans — until she remembers who she is.
Autonomy Over Anatomy
In both stories, as much as the characters are beaten, raped, and deformed, they fight for autonomy. In Gyeongseong Creature, Seong-shim overcomes her base animalistic nature when her daughter calls her name. The mother in the monster recognizes her daughter, and something awakens. Her attacks are no longer aimless; instead, she targets the Japanese doctors and soldiers she once followed blindly as masters.
In Human Acts, Dong-ho died only because he chose, again and again, to stay behind at the Provincial Office (where the Gwangju Uprising took place) while soldiers marched into Gwangju City. Throughout the day that he eventually died, Dong-ho was urged by his mother, brother, and friends to leave the Provincial Office and go home to safety. Despite having his body and life ultimately stripped away from him, all of that was only possible because Dong-ho chose to stay behind and fight — to exercise his autonomy.
Throughout both works, the message is clear: while autonomy can be taken away by seizing control of the body, it can be regained the same way.
Dong-ho’s death inspires other characters to take charge of their own lives. In the chapter ‘The Factory Girl, 2002,’ Dong-ho’s friend and fellow protestor Seon-ju wanted “to die” until she saw a photo of Dong-ho, dead on the ground, at a memorial for the Gwangju Uprising:
That summer, you were dead. While the blood was still hemorrhaging out of my body, the rot was running furiously through yours, packed into the earth.
What I saw in the photograph saved me. You saved me, Dong-ho, you made my blood seethe back to life. The force of my suffering surged through me in a fury that seemed it would burst my heart.
Up until that point, Seon-ju had been struggling to live with the trauma of her friends dying, with the trauma of being imprisoned and repeatedly raped by soldiers for her own participation in the Uprising. Throughout the rest of the chapter, we see how the trauma manifests itself in her aversion to physical touch, especially with men. She isolates herself and leads a quiet life, telling no one what happened to her after the Uprising.
Despite being haunted by memories of the past, Seon-ju, like every other character in Human Acts, ends her chapter with a decision (written from the second person point of view, so that “you” refers to Seon-ju herself):
As you walk along the straight white line that follows the center of the road, you raise your head to the falling rain.
Don’t die.
Just don’t die.
Through his death — through his decision to sacrifice his own body — Dong-ho gave life to other characters. Similarly for Gyeongseong Creature (major spoiler alert), Seong-shim sacrifices her body to save her daughter.
The Gift of a Body = The Gift of Life
Both stories made me contemplate the gift of life, and what it means to have a body. As the introduction by translator Deborah Smith says, Korea tends to think that the “soul and body [are] intertwined.” It’s why we cook meals and pour soju for our ancestors during the holidays.
Our bodies are records of how we’ve lived our lives, even well into death. In Human Acts, when Dong-ho’s friend sees a corpse with sutures and bandages, he says:
…there was something infinitely noble about how his body still bore the traces of hands that had touched it, a tangible record of having been cared for, been valued…
We don’t have to wait until death for this record to be useful. As part of the backstory in Gyeongseong Creature, Seong-shim wears a necklace with a clove-shaped wooden charm, carved by her daughter. It is this necklace that makes her identifiable, even after the rest of her body has transformed beyond recognition. This necklace is what makes the daughter call out to her mother, sparking Seong-shim’s awakening and reclamation of her autonomy.
Throughout both works, the message is clear: while autonomy can be taken away by seizing control of the body, it can be regained the same way. In the chapter ‘The Prisoner, 1990,’ weary protestors start to sing, even in the midst of imprisonment:
By the time I realized the singer was young Yeong-chae, other voices had joined in for the chorus. Almost in spite of myself, my own voice was drawn out of my throat. We who had had our heads bowed as though we were already dead, who had been sitting there as nothing but loose agglomerates of sweat and blood, were for some reason permitted to continue our quiet song unchecked. The soldiers didn’t scream at us, didn’t drive their rifle butts into our heads, didn’t shove us up against the wall and shoot us as they’d threatened to do. We were left to bring the song to its close, the silence between each bar a perilous window of calm within the cool air of the summary court, laced with the grasshoppers’ chirping.
Universal Human Resilience
Given everything that’s happened, it is a miracle that South Korea exists. Even more of a miracle is the fact that, despite ongoing challenges, South Korea not only survives but thrives.
But while these works are rooted in South Korea, it’s clear that they are testaments not just to the resilience of Korean people, but to the resilience of humankind. It just so happens that the two works are grounded in South Korean history, but the characters, while impacted by specific political events, are deeply human. They convey universal truths of how our bodies are intertwined with our autonomy — and how we can reclaim both.
