From Wonso Pond (2 page)

While the 1949 DPRK version of
In'gan munje
also takes several liberties in the editing of Kang's novel—removing instances of abusive language that Ch'otchae uses toward his mother, for example—there is little to suggest that even Kang's husband had access to an original manuscript to rely on when this first edition of her book was published. Perhaps with the opening of archives in the DPRK, future scholarship will piece together a more authentic version of
In'gan munje
, free from external censorship, but as it stands now our English translation of Kang's novel is based on the most complete version that can be verified.

The perils of translation also entail a kind of censorship, given that literary translation—as it has been practiced in the English-speaking world over the past century—often leans toward an emphasis on smoothness and readability. In principle, my efforts to translate
In'gan munje
have been guided mainly by a desire to capture the full range of voices in Kang's novel and to dignify the historical specificity of her use of language. Editorial demands however, have at times exerted their own particular pressures on her text as it appears in English—though only in what Kang Kyong-ae would have surely recognized as a sincere gesture to make her work more accessible. For readers unfamiliar with the cultures of East Asia, we have also included at the back of the book a brief glossary, which explains many of the Korean and Japanese words and place-names that appear in Kang's novel, though we have tried to keep the use of footnotes to a bare minimum.

 

WHAT SORT OF life experiences in colonial Korea could have led a woman such as Kang Kyong-ae to write novels that often featured the experiences of women and the poor? According to her accounts published in journals in the 1930s, Kang lived in close contact with both the haves and the have-nots in colonial Korea and neighboring Manchuria. Born the daughter of a poor farmer in Hwanghae Province, Kang grew up in the household of her well-off stepfather and was able to attend a Catholic
boarding school in the city of Pyongyang.
⁷
Showing her rebellious colors as a youth, she was expelled from the school for participating in a student strike and would later scandalously run off with a young college student to Seoul, where she attended Tongdok Girls School and befriended many young Korean intellectuals. As Yang Chu-dong, the student she ran off with tells it, it was then that he lent Kang his copy of Karl Marx's
Capital
and introduced her to works of Japanese literary criticism.
⁸
While the details of her early adulthood are somewhat obscure, Kang is known to have dropped out of Tongdok Girls School to spend a year or two in Manchuria, working as a substitute teacher and—according to one North Korean source—hoping to join a group of guerrilla rebels. Newly radicalized, she returned to her home in Hwanghae Province, where she set up a night school and set her heart on becoming a writer.
⁹

“Art is not something you place on a shelf and revere as ‘Oh, blessed art!'” wrote the twenty-three-year-old Kang in 1929—in what is thought to be her first essay published in a national newspaper.
¹⁰
Echoing arguments being made by members of the influential Korean Proletarian Arts Association (KAPF), which sought to bring the voices of the oppressed into a popular form of literature, Kang was criticizing a particular version of aesthetic ideology being reproduced by the established novelist and critic Yom Sang-sop, who was more than a decade her senior. Mercilessly mocking the elitism of the Korean intelligentsia, Kang drew on classical Chinese diction to criticize writers “who wished to distance themselves from the
vulgar world
and rise high up into the clouds, where they might better amuse themselves like
hermits
amid the
steep slopes and secluded valleys
.”
¹¹
In her essay Kang questioned Yom Sang-sop for his suggestion that the accelerated popularization of the literary arts had lowered the artistic value of Korean literature. “Isn't it precisely by means of popularization,” she asked, “that we shall be able to create and promote an art of even greater value, and thus allow the life of the arts to become animated?”
¹²

Published serially in the journal
Hyesong
, Kang's first novel,
Mothers and Daughters
(
omoni wa ttal
, 1931-1932), grew out of this desire to popularize narrative fiction—to create characters and narrators with the perspective of hitherto marginalized people and to make literature something that appealed to a much wider spectrum of Koreans. With its detailed focus on the tribulations of women performing domestic labor,
Mothers and Daughters
also managed to put Kang on the map as a
“new woman writer.” A 1931 advertisement in the magazine
Sin yosong
(“New Woman”) celebrated her as a rising star of the literary scene: “A Great Wonder of the Korean Literary World—A woman writer hidden away in a corner of Hwanghae Province . . . [whose] bold one-thousand-page work has all eyes of the literary world fixed upon it.” The editor of
Hyesong
, introducing the novel to readers, offered a mix of admiration and criticism: “In so many ways the craftsmanship evident in this work is something completely unfamiliar to us. In the way details are invoked with such precision in certain passages this novel indeed bears comparison to that of the great masters. . . I regret to say, however, that the novel does closely resemble American moving pictures in that the pace of the action is rather cheaply constructed.”
¹³
After the publication of a 1933 short story called “Vegetable Patch,” about a young girl who is murdered after siding with the workers on her family's farm, Marxist critic and KAPF member Paek Chol also praised Kang for her craftsmanship but called her writing “ideologically skewed,” labeling her, not a proletarian writer, but rather a “fellow traveler”—a term made famous by Leon Trotsky's 1924 work
Literature and Revolution
.

Just before
Mothers and Daughters
began serialization, Kang married and settled down in Yongchong, Manchuria, just north of the Korean border, where her husband Chang Ha-il taught at a Korean middle school. It was from here that Kang built on her initial success as an author, continuing to write in a variety of forms: autobiographical sketches and travel accounts for women's magazines, tortured narratives of the self for intellectual journals, and carefully crafted portraits of the poor and oppressed for newspapers and literary gazettes.
¹⁴
Kang was most prolific between 1931, when she published her first short story, and 1936, when her first work was translated into Japanese and published in the Seoul edition of the daily
Ōsaka Mainichi
. In 1936 Kang also published her most famous, and most frequently anthologized, short story, “The Underground Village,” a heart-wrenching account of a disabled teenager and his young siblings living in abject poverty.
¹⁵
In the late 1930s Kang worked briefly as a regional bureau chief for the daily
Choson ilbo
, but by 1939, as the Japanese government heightened its wartime mobilization effort and banned the use of the Korean language in secondary schools and many publications, she abandoned fiction writing altogether. She died five years later at the age of thirty-nine in her home province of Hwanghae.

KANG'S SHORT LIFETIME coincided almost exactly with the forty-year period of Korea's colonization, during which Japanese capitalism took a heavy toll on the lives of most Koreans. An increasingly rich and powerful Japanese Empire had made Korea a protectorate in 1905, shortly after defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese war, and then officially annexed Korea in 1910, only a quarter century before
In'gan munje
was first published. The rapid process of modernization that Korea experienced over the following decades is often cited as a reason for the nation's uneven, or “distorted,” development. The Korean peninsula was originally seen by the Japanese as an agricultural “rice basket,” a source of cheap labor and natural resources, and a market for Japanese goods. Although the rate of economic growth in Korea often exceeded that in Japan proper, colonial development was decidedly planned and orchestrated for the advantage of Japanese capital, not the Korean people.
¹⁶
By the time
In'gan munje
was published, more than two million Koreans were living in Japan proper, and several hundred thousand in Manchuria. Colonization had accelerated a pattern of migration caused by internal economic pressures that continued to separate families and break up communities, displacing people from ancestral lands into cities and villages throughout Korea, Japan, and Manchuria.

From the beginning of Japan's occupation of Korea, the South Manchurian Railway, the premiere instrument of Japanese expansion and mobility, ran from the port city of Pusan in the southeast, through Seoul and Pyongyang in the northeast, and on to the cosmopolitan cities of Manchuria, making many of Korea's cities important centers of trade and government. Over the course of some twenty years, from 1910 to 1930, Korea's largest urban center, the colonial capital, Seoul, doubled to a population of more than half a million, including a large group of Japanese, and grew into a bustling city of department stores, cafés, movie theaters, and an imperial university. A colonial policy shift in the 1930s, which led to an emphasis on building up industry, led to the creation of massive factories such as the Tongyang Spinning Mill in the port city of Inch'on, which employed close to two thousand workers and most likely served as the model for the factory where Kang's characters Sonbi and Kannan work in the second half of
From Wonso Pond
.

Despite the population shifts caused by efficiencies in rice production, taxation policies, and dangerous fluctuations in the marketplace, the population in Korea still remained a primarily rural one throughout
the colonial period, with 80 percent of Korean men involved in agricultural labor in 1930.
¹⁷
Once urban centers began to grow, however, the differentiation between country and city became more prominent in the mass media, and writers in the 1930s began to look nostalgically at the countryside as the locus of an authentic, romanticized past, which Korea was thought to be in danger of losing with the onset of its rapid modernization. In the realm of literature and the arts, a mature craftsmanship gradually took shape in the hands of young writers and artists, who, like Kang Kyong-ae, were drawing on the techniques of realism, modernism, popular fiction, drama, and film to create imaginative experiences in response to Korea's unique confrontation with colonial modernity.
¹⁸

After the 1919 failure of the Korean independence movement (the March First Movement), political opposition to Japan's colonization expressed itself as part of a cultural nationalism, which the Japanese government tolerated for more than a decade. Historians have normally divided this opposition into that of the nationalists and that of the socialists, neither of which is normally seen as having made much room for women to politicize their own agendas. Confucianism had for centuries served as the ideological foundation of patriarchy in East Asia, limiting women's participation in the public sphere in China, Japan, and Korea. Even educated Korean society, however, seemed to remain particularly entrenched in a Confucian patriarchy well into the twentieth century, in part because of the experience of colonization.
¹⁹
Christian missionaries seeking converts and Enlightenment-oriented Korean intellectuals set on building a strong nation had begun to promote women's literacy at the end of the nineteenth century, but the first public school for Korean girls was not established until 1908, only two years before Korea's annexation by Japan, where, by contrast, almost all girls were enrolling in elementary school.
²⁰
Under the subsequent humiliation of Japanese colonization, the need to reconfigure traditional gender relations tended to get short shrift from male intellectuals in Korea, many of whom supported the general idea of women's equality, but only insofar as it worked explicitly in the interests of national liberation and did not require much change in their own behavior.
²¹
Kang Kyongae was part of a new generation of educated young women who not only were becoming well versed in modern politics, economics, and the arts, but also were gaining strength in numbers by the late 1920s as they
began to contribute, as active journalists and creative writers, to public discourse on women's role in society. Although the economics of publishing were such that no women—or even men for that matter—could support themselves writing novels alone, other notable women writers of fiction at the time included Pak Hwa-song, Paek Sin-ae, Song Kyewol, and Ch'oe Chong-hŭi.

All these women were affiliated in one way or another with institutions connected to socialist theory and activism, which, alongside the Christian Church and nationalist organizations, played an important role in asserting women's equality and enfranchising a new generation of women writers and teachers. Before her own career as a writer blossomed, Kang Kyong-ae had been a member of the KÅ­nuhoe, an association of women activists of varying political and ideological persuasions, who had come together in 1927 with the goal of “abolishing all social and legal discrimination against women” and with a special emphasis on promoting the education of poor women through lecture tours and night schools. Founding member of the KÅ­nuhoe and an editor of the magazine
Sin yosong
(“New Woman”), Ho Chong-suk (1908-1991) drew on a language of women's liberation that was indebted to the work of Frederic Engels, and like many Korean socialists, she was convinced that women's emancipation could come only as part of a socialist revolution that would reform the family system.
²²
Leftist women such as Kang would not have called themselves feminists, but their politics were certainly molded by a combination of class-, nation- and gender-consciousness.