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 Kŭnuhoe, 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 Kŭnuhoe 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.
Despite censorship and publication laws that banned many books from the colony, such diverse texts as Engel’s The Origins of the Family, August Bebel’s Women and Socialism, Alexandra Kolontai’s Red Love, and the feminist writings of the Japanese socialist Yamakawa Kikue were all available in colonial Korea. Kang Kyong-ae would have been familiar with many of these works, whether in English, Japanese, or Korean translation. In a passionate 1930 letter to the editor published in the “Women’s Column” of the Choson ilbo, however, Kang offered more practical advice to women in the colony wanting to reform the family and to make a contribution to Korean society at large. Referring to the success of an anti-British campaign initiated by the wife of Mohandas Gandhi, she encouraged women to make use of their economic power as producers and consumers by buying only Korean-made goods, limiting their husbands’ consumption of alcohol and cigarettes, and abandoning their own use of cosmetics and perfume. Embracing what she viewed as the supportive role that all women could play in the home as wives and mothers, Kang also exhorted all literate women to read the newspaper every day, and to teach at least twenty other women to read.23 While the opportunities for women to venture outside the domestic realm and join the workforce as telephone operators, waitresses, shopkeepers, and secretaries were increasing, the vast majority of Korean women—more than 98 percent—were still illiterate. The challenges that socialists identified in the reconstruction of gender boundaries might be summed up in the words of the prolific writer Yi Ki-yong. In an essay addressed to members of the Kŭnuhoe, encouraging women to become writers, Yi embraced as part of the proletarian struggle women’s efforts “to fight against the feudal ideology of ‘honoring men over women’ [namjon yobi] and to liberate women from the prison of the household, from illiteracy, and from a contemporary social system that enslaved women to men.”24
IN THE 1920s the Japanese authorities had tolerated a kind of cultural nationalism in the Korean colony, but by the time In’gan munje was published the colonial police had begun cracking down severely on members of the socialist opposition, including those involved in the broader proletarian cultural movement. With its attention to issues of class and political enlightenment, Kang’s revolutionary epic In’gan munje in fact marks the end of a decade of proletarian culture in the Korean colony. For inciting a student demonstration in Seoul, Kunŭhoe cofounder Ho Chong-suk had been sentenced to a year in the infamous Sodaemun Prison—where Kang’s character Sinch’ol is jailed in In’gan munje—and many members of KAPF had already served, or soon would serve, long prison sentences. Not an official member of KAPF herself, Kang Kyong-ae had participated in the literary movement from a distance, though once she moved to Manchuria she seems to have kept in close contact with Korean communists in exile. Along with the government crackdown on socialist institutions, however, print culture in general settled into a more entrenched gender conservatism, most evident in a cult of domesticity that fetishized women’s roles as mothers, housewives, and consumers.25 Portraying working-class women who venture outside these identities—as housemaids, factory girls, and underground activists—is one of Kang Kyong-ae’s major strengths as a novelist responding to her particular moment in history. If her novel draws on common tropes of victimization and desire that might be seen as feeding conservative anxieties about women’s new roles in society, In’gan munje also shapes gender as a place where the contradictions of colonial capitalism are poignantly portrayed and dignifies its women characters as agents of self-, and social, transformation.26
Although few literary critics commented on In’gan munje as it was being serialized, many male critics and journalists in the mid-1930s were often equally scornful of commercial culture and women’s literature, both of which were considered frivolous or overly emotional. And yet by all accounts, popular fiction written by and for women was becoming a major source of newspaper revenue.27 Increasing literacy rates were accompanied by the unprecedented expansion of the marketplace for print culture. T
he daily Choson ilbo nearly tripled in sales from 1930 to 1937, while the leading daily Tonga ilbo, which constituted more than 40 percent of all newspapers read by Koreans throughout the Japanese empire, more than doubled its circulation.28 The growing literacy rates and a burgeoning market created a new demand for fiction, and the 1930s became, in the words of Korean poet and essayist Kim Ki-rim, “the Olympic age of the newspaper novel.”29 Media companies were shrewdly making use of the serialized form to attract and retain subscribers, who might get hooked on a particular story line and continue to purchase their newspaper, but they were also using the popular stories to sell advertising space—huge ads for Japanese medicine, leather shoes, chocolate, cosmetics, and candy often appeared next to episodes of serialized works such as In’gan munje. Aware of the context in which her novel would be published, Kang produced a masterfully hybrid form of the serialized novel, dutifully creating a desire on the part of the reader to consume the coming episode while at the same time reinserting into the noise of the marketplace important ideas, elsewhere discounted, about the relations between labor, class, and gender.
On July 27, 1934, several days before In’gan munje began serialization, an editor at the Tonga ilbo introduced Kang’s novel to readers with a short teaser, noting that the inspiration for her novel came from a local legend about a pond called Wonso. He went on to summarize what would appear to be the first half of Kang’s story line.
And, oh, how the man’s carnal desires knew no end! A fatherless young girl soon poised to become victim of his lecherous fangs and paws. The son of a sharecropper for whom this girl is his first love. And then the son of a gentleman, visiting from Seoul over summer break, who develops feelings for . . . this very same girl. What we have here in this tiny village is a love triangle pitting father against son. And while the whole village places its hopes in the benevolence of its legendary Wonso Pond, the twisted world of human passions, sparked by conflicts of the heart, finally overwhelms the human soul as this village meets with a night like death.30
The present-day reader may justifiably find this synopsis of Kang’s work over the top, but its distortions of her overall story line perfectly illustrate the melodramatic reading practices that were being fostered by this new form of popular fiction. What did Kang Kyong-ae herself have to say to her potential readers? In an author’s introduction printed adjacent to the teaser, Kang sang an altogether different tune.
Human society continually witnesses new problems, and it is as human beings struggle to solve these problems that human society charts its development. Human problems can in general be divided into major problems and minor problems, and by capturing in this work the major problems in the world today, I have tried to suggest which human beings are endowed with the strength and requisite qualities to solve these problems and to show which path as human beings they will have to tread. Let me end by asking that you read to the very end of the story and that you offer me your sincere reproof on the errors and contradictions I have allowed to proliferate in the pages that follow.31
The abstraction, the earnestness, the staid humility of Kang’s formal introduction all speak of a public voice almost stripped of the real passions that animate In’gan munje—passions somewhat different from those the newspaper was promising its readers. Kang’s words can be read, perhaps, as those of an intelligent woman distancing herself from the stereotype of a shallowly sentimental or melodramatic women’s literature. But her use of the terms “human beings” and “human problems”—poignantly evoked in the authorial interjection that ends her novel—also reminds us of the colonial censorship that forbade a more radical lexicon of “proletariat” and “revolution.” And it serves to underscore a moment in Korean history when socialist women saw their own specific struggle, as that of women, as inseparable from that of a much broader effort to liberate all people, an effort to fundamentally shift the dynamics of a society newly reorganized around the principle of profit accumulation. The struggle between the structures of colonialism, patriarchy, and the marketplace on the one hand, and the passion and commitment of women resisting them on the other, is part of what makes From Wonso Pond such a fascinating work to read some seventy-five years after its first publication.
Almost a decade now has passed since the “Complete Works of Kang Kyong-ae” was published in South Korea, where Kang has become cherished as an important writer of the colonial period among students and scholars of literature, history, and feminism. For some thirty-odd years after the Korean War, the Republic of Korea banned all books by writers who “fled north” (wolbuk) to the DPRK, an example of the Cold War anticommunism that for decades prevented even writers such as Kang, who died before liberation, from entering either popular consciousness or the literary canon. With the now frequent republication of her work and a renewed interest in the colonial period, Kang’s reputation as a writer has grown over the past twenty years in Korea, as well as abroad. Ten years ago, in an area of northeastern China, where she lived for more than a decade and where more than a million people of Korean heritage still live today, a stone memorial was erected in the foothills of Mount Piyan to commemorate Kang’s “literary spirit and achievement” as one of Korea’s representative women writers. The English translation of In’gan munje adds to a growing library of Kang’s works now available internationally in English, Russian, Chinese, German, and Japanese. The proletarian cultural movement to which Kang made such a significant contribution has also become a lively topic of academic discussion in recent years, throughout East Asia and around the globe, as scholars have begun to reexamine—and reconnect—the international contours of a cultural movement that saw literature as indispensable to revolution.32 One might say that Kang’s novel remains an eloquent testament to that belief today—that fiction can and must have a role in social change.
Samuel Perry Providence, R.I. February 2009
Notes
1 Following Korean practice, I use the author’s family name first, followed by her given name. The “a” of “Kang” should be pronounced as “Ah.”
2 For an account of the internal divisions following Korea’s liberation that developed into the Korea War, see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).
3 For more information on the relationship between censorship and the development of Korean literature, see Kyeong-Hee Choi, Beneath the Vermilion Ink: Japanese Colonial Censorship and the Making of Modern Korean Literature(Cornell University Press, forthcoming).
4 Kang Kyong-ae, “Iyok ŭi talbam,” Sin tonga (December 1933), reprinted in Kang Kyong-ae chonjip, ed. Yi Sang-gyong (Seoul: Somyong Ch’ulpan, 2002), 743-745.
5 The draconian Japanese Peace and Preservation Law, for example, in 1928 made criticism of the imperial system and of private property newly punishable by death.
6 Chōsen shuppan keisatsu geppō, Kuksa P’yonch’an Wiwonhoe (National Institute of Korean History), Kwachon, South Korea, 1996, microfilm.
7 Hwanghae Province is now part of the DPRK.
8 Yang Chu-dong, “Ch’ongsach’o—munhak sonyo K ŭi ch’uok,” in Insaeng chapgi (Seoul: T’amgudang, 1963).
9 Yi, Kang Kyong-ae chonjip, 846.
10 Kang Kyong-ae, “Yom Sang-sop ssi ŭi nonsol ‘Myongil ŭi kil’ ŭl ilgo,” Choson ilbo October 3-5, 1929; also in Yi, Kang Kyong-ae chonjip, 705-9.
11 Yi, Kang Kyong-ae chonjip, 705; emphasis mine.
12 Ibid., 708.
13 Editor’s note prefacing omoni wa ttal, Hyesong1 (August 1931); Yi, Kang Kyongae chonjip, 13. When the journal Hyesong was discontinued, Kang’s novel continued its serialization in the journal Cheilson (“Front Line”).
14 Yongchon is now also known as the city of Longjing, located in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture within Jilin Province, People’s Republic of China.
15 An English translation of “The Underground Village” (“Chihach’on”) is available in Suh Ji-Moon, The Rainy Spell and Other Korean Stories (Armonk, N.Y.: M.
E. Sharpe 1998).
16 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 148.
17 For more information on colonial development in Korea, see Kyeong-Hee Choi, Michael Edson Robinson, and Gi-Wook Shin, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
18 For a discussion of Korean modernism, see Janet Poole, “Late Colonial Modernism and the Desire for Renewal,” in Korea under Japanese Colonialism,ed. Andre Schmid (forthcoming).
19 For a comparative account of East Asian women and patriarchy, see Anne Walthall, “From Private to Public Patriarch: Women, Labor, and the State in East Asia, 1600-1919,” in A Companion to Gender History, ed. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004).
20 Chon Chong-hwang, “1920-1930 yondae sosol tokja ŭi hyongsong kwa munhwa kwajong,” Yoksa munje yon’gu 7 (2001); cited in Samuel Perry, “Korean as Proletarian: Ethnicity and Identity in Chang Hyok-chu’s “Hell of the Starving,” Positions: East Asian Critique14, no. 2 (2006).
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