Human Acts

How is it, she wonders, that a face can so effectively conceal what lies behind it? How is not indelibly marked by such callousness, brutality, murderousness?

I wanted to be free to fly to wherever they were, and to demand of them: why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister, what did you do to her?

the recently unionized factory girls were some of the most vocal and visible agitators for change, the authorities were able to paint the uprising as a Communist plot sparked by North Korean spies, thus legitimizing their brutal crackdown. In the chapter entitled “The Prisoner, 1990,” I paid special attention to diction in the hope that this would highlight the subtle politics of a working-class torture survivor being pressured into revisiting traumatic memories for the sake of a university professor’s academic thesis. And there is also gender politics, with “The Factory Girl, 2002,” featuring a women-only splinter group from the main union, set up to address the fact that female workers were treated more unfairly even than the men.