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Sleep paralysis, my brain repeats, groggy, as if that is a better worry. It can be caused by any number of reasons, such as a poor sleep schedule, not actually sleeping, stress, and sleeping on your back.

I am a high-achieving teenager whose ex-best friend is the only person who knows she's bisexual and dealing with the return of family shit; a recent high school graduate hustling for money she so doesn't have to burden her hard-working refugee mother; and someone who has reliably slept on her back since infancy.

"Thank you, internet. Very helpful." I aggressively clear the browser history.

— She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran

The work you did as a teenager, though, was different.

Those were fifteen-hour days with only two days off per month. "Weekends" were nonexistent. The wages were half of what the men got paid for the same work, and there was no overtime pay. You took pills to keep you awake, but exhaustion still battered you like a wave. The swelling of your calves and feet as morning wore into afternoon. The guards who insisted on body-searching the female workers every night before they went home. Those hands, which used to linger when they touched your bra. The shame. Hacking coughs. Nosebleeds. Headaches. Clumps of what looked like black threads in the phlegm you hacked up.

We are noble.

— Human Acts by Han Kang

You're not like me, Seong-hee. You believe in a divine being, and in this thing we call humanity. You never did manage to win me over. I could never believe in the existence of a being who watches over us with consummate love. I couldn't even make it through the Lord's Prayer without the words drying up in my throat. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. I forgive no one, and no one forgives me.

— Human Acts by Han Kang

I prayed every night. I don't mean anything formal; I'd never been a regular at any temple or church. I just asked to be set free from that hell. But they were answered, you see, my prayers were answered. There were around two hundred of us being held captive there, and after three days they released half of us. Including me. At the time we had no idea what was going on, but later I found out that the army had been about to make a strategic retreat to the suburbs and they thought too many prisoners would just get in the way. They'd chosen who was going to be released purely at random. So it was just blind luck.

We were told to keep our heads down when the truck took us back down the hill, too. But, you know, I was quite young at the time, and I suppose curiosity just got the better of me. I was kneeling right at the very edge of the truck, so if I twisted my neck I could get a look outside through the gap in the sideboards.

I... I'd never dreamed that they'd been keeping us in the university.

The building where we'd been kept was the new lecture hall, just behind the sports ground where me and my friends had used to play football at the weekends. Now, with the army occupying the campus, there were no other signs of human life. The truck itself was rattling along, but otherwise the road was silent as the grave. Then I saw them, lying on a patch of grass by the side of the road. They just looked like they were asleep, at first. Two students in jeans and college sweaters, with a yellow banner laid across their chests as if they'd both been holding up an end. The letters had been done in thick Magic Marker, so I could read it even from inside the truck. END MARTIAL LAW.

— Human Acts by Han Kang

Kim Jin-su and I continued to receive a single tray and share its scant meal between us. It took an enormous feat of will to put what we'd experienced a few hours ago in the interrogation room behind us and wield our spoons in stony silence, fighting the temptation to scrap like animals over a grain of rice, a shred of kimchi. There was one man who knocked his meal tray over and screamed, I can't take any more of this! What's going to happen to me if you shovel the whole lot down yourself? As he grappled with his partner, a boy pushed between them and stuttered, D-don't do that. I was taken aback; this was the first time I'd ever seen that quiet, shy-seeming kid open his mouth.

W-we were r-ready to die, you know.

It was then that Kim Jin-su's empty gaze rose to meet mine.

At that moment, I realized what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.

— Human Acts by Han Kang

The censors had scored through four lines in the paragraph following that one. Bearing that in mind, the question which remains to us is this: what is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another? Eun-sook could remember the precise thickness of the line that had been drawn through these sentences. She could recall the translator's fleshy neck, his shabby navy sweater, his sallow complexion; his long, blackened fingernails constantly fumbling with the glass of water. But she still couldn't picture his face.

She closed the book and waited. Turned to face the window, and waited for darkness to fall.

She had no faith in humanity. The look in someone's eyes, the beliefs they espoused, the eloquence with which they did so, were, she knew, no guarantee of anything. She knew that the only life left to her was one hemmed in by the niggling doubts and cold questions.

— Human Acts by Han Kang

Perhaps Seon-ju is right; perhaps the soldiers took away Jeong-dae and buried him somewhere. On the other hand, though, your mother's still convinced that he's being treated at some hospital, that the only reason he hasn't been in touch is that he's still not regained consciousness. She came here with your middle brother yesterday afternoon, to persuade you to come home. When you insisted that you couldn't go home until you'd found Jeong-dae, she said, "Its the ICU you ought to be checking. Let's go around the hospitals together."

She clutched the sleeve of your uniform.

"Don't you know how shocked I was when people said they'd seen you here? Good grief, all these corpses, aren't you scared?"

"The soldiers are the scary ones," you said with a half-smile. "What's frightening about the dead?"

— Human Acts by Han Kang

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 formally placed in the coffins. It was also strange to see the Taegukgi, the national flag, being spread over each coffin and tied tightly in place. Why would you sing the national anthem for people who'd been killed by the soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn't the nation itself that had murdered them.

— Human Acts by Han Kang