Reading Korean historical trauma in China: A qualitative content analysis of Douban reviews of Han Kang’s Human Acts and We Do Not Part – Psychiatry AI: Real-Time AI Scoping Review

AI Summary

Chinese readers' responses emphasise literary form, memory ethics, evaluative reading practices, and embodied affect, not mere approval or disapproval.
Reception varies by work: We Do Not Part prompts translation, edition and difficulty concerns; Human Acts elicits sadness, memory, witnessing, and state violence reflections.
Co-occurrence patterns link translation evaluation with comprehension difficulty, memory-oriented ethics with literary witnessing, and despair language with embodied response.

TL;DR (AI Generated)

Using 1,704 public Douban reviews, this study examines how Chinese readers respond to Korean historical trauma represented in Han Kang's Human Acts and We Do Not Part.

One researcher verified all 1,304 reviews, a different researcher independently audited 261 reviews under a prespecified blinded audit, and the third adjudicated 534 audit disagreement code-cells.

Reviews of We Do Not Part discuss translation, editions, and reading difficulty more often, whereas reviews of Human Acts more often mention sadness, memory and witnessing, state violence, and broader ethical or political concerns.

Basic summary

PLoS One. 2026 Nov 13;21(11):e0361034. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0361034. eCollection 2026.

ABSTRACT

Using 1,704 public Douban reviews, this study examines how Chinese readers respond to Korean historical trauma represented in Han Kang’s Human Acts and We Do Not Part. We developed a 39-code binary coding frame from a 200-review development subset and froze it before formal corpus-wide coding. Two researchers independently coded a separate 400-review validation set, and a third adjudicated 893 disagreement code-cells to create the Human Reference. DeepSeek-V4-Pro then provided preliminary codes for the remaining 1,304 reviews. One researcher verified all 1,304 reviews, a different researcher independently audited 261 reviews under a prespecified blinded audit, and the third adjudicated 534 audit disagreement code-cells. The final 1,704 × 39 matrix shows that readers most often discuss literary form and aesthetics, ethical and memory-oriented reflection, overall evaluation and reading behavior, and affective or embodied response. Reviews of We Do Not Part discuss translation, editions, and reading difficulty more often, whereas reviews of Human Acts more often mention sadness, memory and witnessing, state violence, and broader ethical or political concerns. The strongest co-occurrence relationships included translation evaluation with translation-induced reading/comprehension difficulty, memory-oriented ethical reflection with literary witnessing, and language of heaviness or despair with embodied response. These pairwise results show that mediation-related, mnemonic, and affective responses each co-occur with closely related reception patterns within individual reviews. The findings show that Chinese reception of Korean historical-trauma fiction cannot be reduced to overall approval or disapproval. It also varies by work and by the ways readers connect literary form, translation, memory ethics, and affect in their responses.

PMID:43024628 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0361034

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