I fell in love with South Korean author Han Kang’s writing after my good friend gifted me a copy of “The Vegetarian.” Upon reading it, I wanted more of Kang’s beautiful and honest prose and disorienting style, which reveals deep truths of the human condition. 

The second book by Kang that I read was “Human Acts.” It shattered me like only a good book can, and I cried over its pages. I followed with “The White Book,” a book of poetry, reading one or two poems a day as I waited for my coffee to brew. Most recently, I read “Greek Lessons.” The main reason I have been continually drawn to Kang is her head-on dealing with emotions I thought were too difficult to voice. Reading her has been nothing less than cathartic.

When Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature in October 2024, becoming the first Asian woman and second South Korean to be a Nobel laureate, friends wrote to congratulate me as if I was the one who won. The news brought me such joy. I was also touched when Kang refused to have a celebration ceremony while people are dying in wars in Ukraine and Palestine, further establishing that the honesty on the page is an honesty that she embodies off it as well. 

Kang, whose works grapple with South Korea’s often brutal 20th century political history and its aftermath, is a master of storytelling from different points of view, one of the many things that makes her writing so compelling. In her novels “The Vegetarian,” “Human Acts” and “Greek Lessons,” we see intertwined characters, each with different approaches toward the story, inviting the reader to empathy. 

Empathy is perhaps one of the greatest emotions and gifts that literature can impart. It is in search of empathetic reading that I seek to connect two places — South Korea and the Balkans — and connect experiences, even painful ones, in hope that by sharing stories, we work towards healing from them. 

‘The Vegetarian’ and the nightmare that led to freedom 

“The Vegetarian” is not an easy read. I discovered this too late, having already taken it with me as my beach read on vacation. Yet, I could not put it down. The main character, Yeong-hye, stops eating meat after a bloody and violent nightmare. Interestingly, we do not get a perspective of Yeong-hye from herself, only from her husband, her brother-in-law and lastly, her sister, In-hye. 

Yeong-hye’s decision to stop eating meat is not taken lightly, and she is violently treated by her entire family, especially her father, who hits her. It is revealed that he had always been violent toward her, including when she was growing up. This leads Yeong-hye into a spiral of self-harm and isolation. 

I find that this book speaks to patriarchy more broadly and to the struggle of female existence in a patriarchal world, as well as the struggle for autonomy. It is violent and raw, and Yeong-hye’s decision to no longer eat meat connects to her violent childhood and lived experience as a woman. In a way, her stopping to eat meat is her way of severing ties with her father, and ultimately the men in her life. It is an attempt to break free. 

Freedom, however, proves elusive, as she also ends up sacrificing herself, in a way, and is seen to have lost her agency — after all, we never hear the story from her side. This is what patriarchy driven to its limits does; it tires the soul to the loss of self. Yeong-hye tries to break free to the point that she herself breaks. No one supports her or shows any solidarity with her, except for in the end, her sister, in the role of caretaker. This is what the patriarchy feels like to me, too. It drains the potential of what I, or women, or a human being, can be. 

Yeong-hye’s reaction, not eating meat, represents a woman going to the most extreme in trying to set herself free. That rawness and violence is exactly what many of us feel when we have had enough, when we quite simply just want to let out a scream. I have often felt this feeling of not fitting in, or having to forego myself to fit in. 

Growing up, I was often told by strangers and acquaintances alike that I should have been born a boy because I talked too much. This was a subtle way of drawing boundaries on my femininity. Many women in the Balkans and elsewhere have stories from growing up when we were made to feel that we needed to shrink ourselves. 

In our 20s, my friends and I would share stories of harassment, stories falling like dominoes, one after the other, each taking heart from each other’s confessions, making us feel less alone but still unsafe and angry. While this experience is not unique to a woman from the Balkans, it is the context that informs my reading of Kang. 

This context is also acutely felt by women in the region, who have protested against the patriarchal and violent structure of our societies for decades. These structures affect our daily lives in the most intimate ways, and feminist activists, through their persistence, are the most consistent voices of systemic societal critique we have. 

Thus, “The Vegetarian” brought me to a position in which I faced my own struggles with my place in society and my daily decisions and negotiations to reconcile with it. Perhaps it is this tension, combined with the book, that formed the background for my own nightmare, literally. 

After reading the book, I had a nightmare about the end of the world. I awoke in a cold sweat, before realizing that I was still beachside somewhere in Albania. I contemplated what the dream meant and how I felt, concluding that perhaps I dreamt of the end of the world as I saw it and experienced it, and that I too needed to live life on my own terms before it too, as it must, ends, or breaks.

‘Human Acts’ and its humanity

“Human Acts” marks another end, the end to humanity and human life. The book is situated amid state violence during the Gwangju Uprising in May 1980. Students in Gwangju protested against the establishment of a military dictatorship by General Chun Doo-hwan, who took control of the state on May 17, 1980 after a coup d’etat in which he arrested opposition leaders and closed all universities. A citizen militia resisted, and held control of Gwangju for six days, before being violently crushed by tanks. Information, including the number of people killed during the uprising, is still contested. Estimates about the number of people killed range from 166 to 2,000, due to the then-government’s repression of media and investigations on the uprising. 

The book starts with Dong-ho, a middle school student searching for his friend, or his friend’s corpse. He ends up volunteering, helping the families of victims identify their bodies. In fact, the whole book consists of people searching for something or someone: Dong-ho in search of his friend, the ghost of his friend in search of him, the search of those who survive for forgiveness, forgetfulness. What makes the book remarkable is that it gives voice to all types of pain related to tragic events: the voice of the dead, of those who remain to mourn them, of those who remain to regretfully remember them. 

It also shows the complexities of mourning in a setting where mourning is forbidden and pain is negated. One of the book scenes has stayed with me: a playwright whose play has been heavily censored chooses to put it on nonetheless. To escape censorship’s constraints, the characters of the play are completely silent. No words are exchanged, but emotions, mainly those of utter loss, come through.  

The book left me feeling as if I too am mourning a loss, and I found myself crying or gasping for air after every chapter. Reading about the horrific violence inflicted upon people, particularly students, by their government, I couldn’t help but think of the student movements in Kosovo that started in 1981 and grew into resistance against increased Yugoslav oppression throughout the 80s. 

The 1981 student protests started as a protest of poor living conditions in the dorms, but quickly became more political. Protesters started chanting for “Kosova Republikë” — for Kosovo to be given republic status within the Yugoslav state system — as the Yugoslav police became increasingly more violent. Nine students were killed in April 1981, and many others were injured and imprisoned in the days and years that followed. My parents were students in Prishtina at the time, and I grew up with stories of this violence, as well as the students’ resilience. 

I have always wondered about how such resilience persists. Kang, too, seems to explore the resilience and courage of those who stay and fight even when death seems inevitable. Perhaps my childhood fascination with and admiration of student movements is why I became a scholar of activism and movements. Yet scholarly work, particularly for a political scientist like myself, rests far from delving into the spirit that embodies movements and violence. Kang’s writing exposes the resilience and fragility that always underpins it, uncovering the humanity we find in each other even in the face of great atrocities. 

Lastly, this book was cathartic for me because it also placed me in Gaza today. I could not detach the images of the book from those I see on my phone on a daily basis. The Gwangju Uprising was kept under a shroud of secrecy, and it is only because of some brave journalists that the story got out and was published in the international press. 

In the region, Gaza has brought back traumas and memories of genocide, massacres and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo. The dehumanization of victims that occurred then follows the same logic now, of making victims less than human, of making their suffering feel invisible even though we can all see it. It feels and seems invisible because it is allowed to happen. We have seen how such practices continue to cause violence long after the atrocious events themselves, in the form of denial of the suffering, pain and injustice.

We in the region and the whole world saw these events on TV, becoming distant witnesses with a responsibility to raise our voice and to remember, a responsibility we still evidently struggle to uphold. Now, we are witnesses through another medium, our phones, seeing mass suffering and over 43,000 deaths in Gaza, many of them children like Dong-ho and younger. 

This time, we do not follow the stories of foreign journalists, who are not allowed to enter Gaza, but of individuals reporting through their own phones to us, as well as local journalists, making the whole exchange much more personal. I wonder about the storytelling it will require to reflect on the emotional scars of a digital witness to a genocide. Based on my tears, I can say that I am not OK. Many of us are not OK. However, at times like this, I am in awe of the ability of literature, at its best, to fill the void that so little else can. 

Feature Image: Atdhe Mulla / K2.0.

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