hello bookish family welcome or welcome back to coffee over apples um I'm going to try to do

this book Justice when I talk about it my second five-star read of 2024 is human acts by Kan Kang

I take back everything that I said in my recent videos about being unsure if I remembering the

feelings that Han kang gave me correctly when I read the vegetarian years ago I need to reread

the vegetarian Han Kang like I'm getting emotional just thinking about the fact that I need to get

this out of my system and tell you what this book is about it is a historical fiction that is very

uniquely done and I just wouldn't I'd be beside myself if I gave this anything less than five

stars that it deserves I read this as a buddy read with my friend Sila and this has been on my shelf

for a long time I don't think there's a way that I can tell you what this is about without spoilers

there is a particular sentence in here um that I wanted to read to just kind of give a little bit

of insight to statements that were made by their own leaders at this time to justify these actions

and it says in Autumn of 1979 when the Democratic Uprising in the southern cities of Busan and masan

were being suppressed president Park he's Chief bodyguard chai Cho said to him the Cambodian

governments killed another 2 million of theirs there's nothing stopping us from doing the same

um and this was why there was an uprising this is why there was violence and while the government

sought to write the narrative post Massacre as something that wasn't that serious ious these

people would not allow their fam's history to be silenced there was a paragraph in here which I

think speaks to how these characters and how these people maintained their um sense of personhood and

their relationship with their country even though it was their military that was doing this to them

it says the one stage in the process that you couldn't quite get your head around was the

singing of the national anthem which took place at a brief informal memorial service for the bereaved

families after their dead had been formerly placed in the coffins it was also strange to see the Tei

the national flag being spread over each coffin and tied tightly in place why would you sing the

national anthem for people who had been killed by soldiers why cover the coffin with a Uki as though

it wasn't the nation itself that had murdered them and so this comes in the beginning before we find

each of these people acting in Courage and acting in a sense of self uh preservation in the positive

connotation to maintain that just because their government has committed these atrocities against

them that that does not need to be the end all be all for their Nation the cycles of violence

that are present here are so prominent we have prisoners of War we have sa we have very egregious

Big R I'll post it here we have um harm to young people it just we have torture it's just so sad I

sobbed into my coffee one morning as I was reading this because I was it was my morning read every

day for like a week um before I go to work because I needed to give this my full attention and when

I got to some points where I was just sobbing into my coffee cup because it was so sad it's

about breaking points it's about people choosing to resist because they feel like there might be

nothing left to give that life has already taken everything from them and so why not risk it

all man this is going to be a hard one this takes place I think over the course of a couple days um

specifically about the guangju uprising which happened in 1979 1980 the author Hong Kong was

a child when they lived in guangju and they were able to get out of that area because

their family moved I think just prior to when the the whole situation happened but there was a uh