Han Kang’s Human Acts: The Fountain That Starts Again

A fountain begins to run again. In another novel, the movement of water might offer an easy sign of renewal. In an excerpt from Han Kang’s *Human Acts*, a woman telephones an official office to protest it. Her question is painfully plain: how can there already be water coming from the fountain? The ordinary city has resumed one of its gestures, and for her that gesture has become unbearable.

The scene is quoted from page 69 of the Korean edition in YES24’s editorial introduction. It places a small public object beside a much larger failure of recognition. The novel centres on the violence of May 1980 in Gwangju and the lives left in its wake. The fountain does not need to cause harm to make the harm newly present. Its apparently innocent operation suggests that one version of time has started moving while another remains where it was.

The telephone call is important because grief has to pass through the machinery of an ordinary request. A number is obtained. Someone waits. An office is asked for. The voice enters a system designed to deal with matters that can be passed along, answered and closed. The question she brings cannot be accommodated so neatly. There is no setting on the fountain that can establish when a city has grieved enough.

In that small mismatch, the passage finds something a grand speech might miss. Public life has procedures for repairing objects and restoring services. The people who live near those objects are asked, often without being asked aloud, to accept restoration as progress. Yet a working fountain cannot certify that an absence has been acknowledged. A city can recover its visible routines while some of its inhabitants remain unable to enter them.

The woman’s voice grows clearer as she speaks. That detail gives the scene its force. The call does not offer a completed recovery or an eloquent statement prepared in advance. It allows an objection to become audible in the act of being made. There is dignity in a sentence that refuses to fit the expected scale of the conversation. A seemingly minor complaint can carry the weight of what has been made too large to discuss.

For a reader encountering Korean history through literature, this is a useful place to slow down. The historical setting matters, and it should not be dissolved into a vague claim that suffering is universal. At the same time, the scene offers an intimate way to approach a public history: through the sound of a voice, the wait on a telephone, the changed meaning of water. Those particulars keep the people within the history from becoming merely an example.

*Human Acts* is often approached as a demanding book. This selected passage suggests one reason for that demand. It asks the reader to notice when something normally described as healing might feel like being hurried past. The fountain is not a solution waiting to be interpreted. It is a point of friction between the city that can continue and the person who still needs it to stop. Han Kang leaves that friction audible.

On: Human Acts / 소년이 온다 — Han Kang. A close reading of the authorized passage from page 69 reproduced on YES24.

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