The Kwangju massacre was the most shocking and inhumane act of indiscriminate brutality the South Korean government has ever committed on its civilians, proving to the people that the path to democracy would be a costly endeavor. There have been a number of academic works on the Kwangju Uprising that retrace the sociopolitical, economic, and historical conditions that have led to such inhumanity,Footnote ²⁵ that recount the internal activities of the participants and factional division within the group of protestors,Footnote ²⁶ and that trace the cultural, historical, and intellectual development of the minjung movement in response to the oppressive dictatorial regime in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ²⁷ Unfortunately, scholarship on the Kwangju Uprising for the English-speaking audience is still insufficient, and translated works of fiction written on this subject are even harder to come by.

Ch'oe Yun's “The Gray Snowman” in Modern Korean Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) and There a Petal Silently Falls (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) are two translated works that reveal the traumatic effects the Kwangju Uprising has had on her characters. However, Ch'oe Yun's characters are not political activists in the front line of battle for democratization but are innocent bystanders who are crushed in the line of fire. Hwang Sok-Yong's (Hwang Sŏk-yŏng) The Old Garden, on the other hand, unearths the underground world of political activists, which makes the narrative that much more intriguing and dramatic.

The Old Garden follows the lives of three broken individuals simultaneously: Hyun Woo (Hyŏn-u), Yoon Hee (Yun-hŭi), and their daughter Eun Gyul (Ŭn-gyŏl)—a product and victim of her parents' involvement in the Kwangju Uprising. The story begins with the release of political prisoner Hyun Woo after serving eighteen years of a life sentence. Hyun Woo decides to visit his hideout in Kalmae, where he and Yoon Hee spent time together before his arrest in 1982. He finds Yoon Hee's letters and diary and learns what happened to her during his time in prison. The most important realization for Hyun Woo is learning about his daughter, who was kept secret from him. The novel ends with Hyun Woo meeting his daughter as a symbol of reunification with Yoon Hee and a promise of a hopeful tomorrow.

The narrative is not chronological but scattered as anecdotal pieces of a puzzle, switching back and forth from Hyun Woo's flashbacks to Yoon Hee's letters. We learn of Hyun Woo's political activities, evading the authorities, arrest, and tortuous time in prison. Meanwhile, we learn of Yoon Hee's childhood, early political participation, growing wariness of revolution, studying abroad in East Germany, and submission to cervical cancer. Finally, we learn of Eun Gyul's attempt to live a normal teenager's life in a society that has forgotten about the atrocities of the massacre. Through the fragmentation of the three characters' lives, Hwang shows that the people's stories of the Kwangju Uprising resist and disrupt the rationale of the nation's grand historicity, that no one story can ever recapitulate the tumult, pain, and loss.

While the novel has its literary merit, there is one major drawback: flat characterizations. Hyun Woo is portrayed as an ascetic revolutionary, whose mind is only set on overthrowing the military dictatorship. Hwang does not show the development of what could have been a complex and sympathetic character. The other flat characters are the policemen who arrest, interrogate, and torture Hyun Woo in prison. Ideologically for Hwang, the police incorrigibly represent the “bad guys” with no emotions other than anger and hatred. In this sense, the flat characterization of Hyun Woo and the policemen is similar to the way socialist revolutionaries and Japanese, American, and South Korean villains are depicted in some North Korean literature. The revolutionaries of the Kwangju Uprising in both Hwang's novel and North Korean fiction are glamorized and homogenized as a unified group devoid of any factional disputes or differing political ideologies.

The strength of this novel, however, is found in the “human” depictions of Yoon Hee and North Korea. Hwang beautifully delineates a complex woman who develops instincts to survive and adapt to her changing social environment. While reading Yoon Hee's story, one forgets that she, too, was once an active participant in the democratization movement. Yoon Hee's story reminds the readers that these political activists are just as human, just as vulnerable, and just as scared as anyone else during the Kwangju Uprising. While this is reminiscent of Ch'oe Yun's female characters, Hwang goes further to humanize a North Korean student whom Yoon Hee encounters in Berlin. Yoon Hee says, “You don't have horns.… In the South they say North Koreans have horns” (p. 493). Although this encounter is brief, it is a memorable exchange between two individuals who are marginalized from the South Korean political ideology. Hwang knows that true unification begins with change from the South's attitude and stigma against the North. The favorable attitude toward the North in The Old Garden mirrors Hwang's political activities in the 1980s and his visit to the DPRK, which consequently held him in contempt with the South Korean government in the 1990s. However, this has not stopped Hwang from writing politically loaded works. The Old Garden is yet another masterfully written and ideologically driven work that provides a fresh outlook on political activists during one of the most critical moments in Korean contemporary history, proving to be a valuable resource for courses in Korean studies or for anyone who is interested in learning about an insider's perspective on the Kwangju Uprising.