Author Han Kang won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature, becoming the first Asian woman to do so and the second Nobel laureate from South Korea. A woman being the first Korean author to win the prize is a breath of fresh air, especially as the poet Ko Un, long considered the most likely South Korean to win the prize, was exposed as a serial sexual harasser in 2018 by South Korea’s own Me Too movement.
Han’s win is also a triumph of South Korea’s fierce and resilient democracy. South Korea’s first Nobel laureate was Kim Dae-jung, an activist-turned-president who won the peace prize in 2000 for his efforts to restore democracy in the country and improve relations with North Korea. Han’s win echoes Kim’s path. Although Han initially gained international fame through her 2007 novel The Vegetarian, which won the 2016 International Booker Prize, her profile reached new heights with subsequent novels that delved into South Korea’s tortuous modern history: Human Acts was about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, where hundreds of protesters were murdered by the dictatorship, and We Do Not Part was about the Jeju Massacre of the late 1940s by then-President Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first autocrat.
Author Han Kang won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature, becoming the first Asian woman to do so and the second Nobel laureate from South Korea. A woman being the first Korean author to win the prize is a breath of fresh air, especially as the poet Ko Un, long considered the most likely South Korean to win the prize, was exposed as a serial sexual harasser in 2018 by South Korea’s own Me Too movement.
Han’s win is also a triumph of South Korea’s fierce and resilient democracy. South Korea’s first Nobel laureate was Kim Dae-jung, an activist-turned-president who won the peace prize in 2000 for his efforts to restore democracy in the country and improve relations with North Korea. Han’s win echoes Kim’s path. Although Han initially gained international fame through her 2007 novel The Vegetarian, which won the 2016 International Booker Prize, her profile reached new heights with subsequent novels that delved into South Korea’s tortuous modern history: Human Acts was about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, where hundreds of protesters were murdered by the dictatorship, and We Do Not Part was about the Jeju Massacre of the late 1940s by then-President Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first autocrat.
Han’s Nobel Prize is a nod of recognition for the South Korean people’s struggle for freedom and democracy against the dictatorship that ruled the country for nearly five decades and still casts a shadow on Korean politics to this day.
Both Kim and Han are from South Joella province, the region that suffered the most under South Korea’s military dictators. Both gained renown through their connection to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising—Kim as a leader of the democracy movement that called attention to the massacre, and Han as the author of Human Acts, which examines the massacre from various perspectives, including an amateur mortician cleaning the bodies of the dead, a censored author, a survivor with post-traumatic stress disorder, and the dead themselves.
Han is part of a transformative generation of both political heroism and artistic talent. Han enrolled in Yonsei University in 1989, just two years after the death of Yonsei student activist Lee Han-yeol—the event that led to the fall of the Chun Doo-hwan dictatorship and South Korea’s transition to democracy. One year ahead of Han at Yonsei was Bong Joon-ho, a student activist who would go on to become an Oscar-winning director with movies such as Parasite and Snowpiercer, both sharp criticisms of capitalism. One year after Han at Seoul National University across town was Hwang Dong-hyuk, who would later win an Emmy Award as the director of Squid Game, a global hit TV series that also highlighted inequality in South Korea.
Though working in different mediums, Han, Bong, and Hwang were all forged in the crucible of South Korea’s tumultuous 1980s and ’90s. In those two decades, the country saw a brutal massacre and an authoritarian government that reveled in witch-hunting communists and the use of torture. Then the dictatorship fell, leading to electoral democracy, the Olympics, and a flowering of youth culture that sowed the seeds for the global popularity of K-pop and Korean dramas. But greater wealth and freedom soon gave way to hyper-competitive capitalism, inequality, and new uncertainties, causing some to pine for the simpler days of the past.
The works of South Korea’s democracy generation are resonating globally because, in the rhymes of history, today’s world resembles the South Korea that Han, Bong, and Hwang saw in their formative years. War and mass murder rage on, with their horrors felt more intimately than ever. Liberal democracy is barely holding on, with the masses willingly submitting to clownish authoritarianism. The world might be wealthier than before, but the small improvement in material conditions is cold comfort to those who lose out in the economic rat race. By looking back on their experiences, Han, Bong, and Hwang created works of art that ask painfully relevant questions for today’s world.
Han’s relentless focus on the violation of bodily integrity is what sets her apart from her predecessors and peers. Other giants of South Korean literature also dealt with the country’s tumultuous modern history, with authors like Jo Jeong-rae and Park Kyong-ni producing epic novels that vividly recount the decades of colonialism, war, and dictatorship. But Han distinguishes herself by drawing the connection of those decades to the effect on one’s body—something extremely personal.
The protagonist for The Vegetarian, for example, is an ordinary woman named Young-hye who suddenly finds meat disgusting, repelled by the implied violence in the food. In the face of subtle and overt violence committed by her husband’s family who cannot understand her decision, she slowly transforms herself into a tree. The Vegetarian gained popularity in South Korea with the rise of toxic misogyny among young men that fueled South Korean politics’ rightward turn—a trend that is now emerging in many parts of the world.
Han’s subsequent works widen the circle of violence from patriarchy to state violence, but her focus on bodily integrity remains the same. Human Acts opens with a stark image of massacred bodies piled on like meat at a butcher shop and one of the protagonists desperately trying to hold back the intestines from spilling out of them. The image is brutal, but not gratuitous—it is an image that must be confronted as reality, just like the horrific images of destruction in Ukraine or dead children in Gaza.
Softly but meticulously, Han’s works examine how social structures—as intimate as an oppressive family, or as distant as the dictatorship government across the sea—can cause such raw and exquisite pain. In doing so, Han asks the thorny but necessary questions for today. What must be done about all this pain? How can the world remain so cold and unmoved in the sight of such suffering? Having seen such suffering, how do we live with ourselves while maintaining human dignity, without drowning in self-hate and survivors’ guilt? Through masterful presentation of these questions, Han elevated the challenges that South Korea’s democracy generation has confronted for decades to issues for the whole world.
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