30 Gwangju Abroad
The Humanity in Humiliation:
양심 The Search for Yangsim in National Disasters
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
September 2021
COMMUNITY
By Ashley Sangyou Kim
T
he book Nokdu Bookstore’s May (녹두서점의 오월) combines three family members’ accounts of their roles in the May 18 Democratic Movement (5.18). In the epilogue, researcher Kim Jung-han finishes the book with a section titled “The Humanity in Humiliation”: In Nokdu Bookstore’s May and other 5.18 testimonies, the words humiliation, embarrassment, and shame reappear. These words describe the emotion people feel when they receive inhumane treatment and sense an urge to become inhumane themselves. These three witnesses, who endured in the boundary between the humane and inhumane with every fiber in their bodies, have maintained a human-like shame within themselves. This is the wisdom of normal folks. The senseless violence the three authors witnessed only emphasizes the bravery and empathy in the city’s response. Their shame is testament to the fact that the violence has not numbed their ability to feel remorse and responsibility for the deceased. These survivors knew what comfort and stability complacency could offer, but ultimately rejected the every-man-for-himself mindset that could have quieted their nightmares. Here, Kim acknowledges the undying yangsim (양심) in the three authors who survived 5.18 – even when the military used brutal force in an attempt to destroy it. The closest English translation of yangsim is “conscience,” but it does not have the same everyday ring to it like yangsim. It is the ultimate guard against selfishness, a mentality that relentlessly checks the consequences of one’s actions on others. In the 5.18 demonstrators’ case, yangsim is used in the most profound sense: Can you risk your life for the freedom of future generations? In other situations, the meaning is light-hearted, such as refusing the last cookie after you have had “almost the entire tray.” Thus, the word
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良心
yangsim means both the bare minimum ethical standard and the most ferocious demonstration of selflessness. Depending on one’s action, it can be worn as a cloak of shame or a badge of honor. As the political prisoner in Han Kang’s 5.18 novel Human Acts states: Do you know what that feels like, Professor? How invigorating it is to feel as if your whole being is thoroughly clean and benevolent. A marvelously clean jewel of yangsim entering my forehead and embedding itself there, the splendid spark of light. Yangsim is a double-edged sword. People with the most impenetrable yangsim fought on the streets until the very last battle and met their death. Additionally, what does it mean for the survivors to live after the disaster with yangsim? There comes a moment when the survivor’s own breath appears as proof of incompetence and selfishness – if they had sacrificed a little more, would they still be alive? Perhaps some recall leaving the civilian soldiers in the Provincial Office knowing what would happen to them in a few hours. Perhaps others remember their bent knees in front of the perpetrators. Or the shame could be triggered by the memory of something much more subtle, such as a detained protester’s desperation for the last rotten bean sprout in a starved prison cell. The weight that these witnesses carry for the rest of their lives is at times selfdestructive, but it is also a sign of the responsibility humans feel to each other. This responsibility gestures toward a possibility for a safe and thriving community in which people take their neighbors’ safety as their own. It is a feeling that triumphs over one’s own survival instincts – in fact, it is most pronounced when survival instincts are on high alert. Without the capability to share this yangsim at all levels of society, death on a mass scale is always possible. Understanding yangsim – its origins, ramifications, and altogether common absence – is the beginning of the
2021-08-26 �� 10:36:56
