Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea

By Dafna Zur

This book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. Starting in the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak directly to a child-reader. This child audience was perceived as unique because of a new concept: the child-heart, the perception that the child's body and mind were transparent and knowable, and that they rested on the threshold of culture. This privileged location enabled writers and illustrators, educators and psychologists, intellectual elite and laypersons to envision the child as a powerful antidote to the present and as an uplifting metaphor of colonial Korea's future.

Reading children's periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, Dafna Zur argues that the figure of the child was particularly favorable to the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as to the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization. She demonstrates the ways in which Korean children's literature builds on a trajectory that begins with the child as an organic part of nature, and ends, in the post-colonial era, with the child as the primary agent of control of nature. Figuring Korean Futures reveals the complex ways in which the figure of the child became a driving force of nostalgia that stood in for future aspirations for the individual, family, class, and nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Oct 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781503603110

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

The Korea Foundation has provided financial assistance for the undertaking of this publication project.

Sections of Chapter 3 appeared previously in ‘They are still eating well, and living well’: The Grimms’ Tales in Early Colonial Korea by Dafna Zur, in Grimms’ Tales around the Globe, edited by Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey. Copyright © 2014 Wayne State University Press, with the permission of Wayne State University Press.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zur, Dafna, author.

Title: Figuring Korean futures : children’s literature in modern Korea / Dafna Zur.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016052903 | ISBN 9781503601680 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503603110 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Children’s periodicals, Korean—History—20th century. | Children’s literature, Korean—History and criticism. | Korean periodicals—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC PN5417.J8 Z87 2017 | DDC 895.709/9282—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052903

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Minion Pro

FIGURING KOREAN FUTURES

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN MODERN KOREA

DAFNA ZUR

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

CONTENTS

Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Child and Modern Korea

1. The Youth Magazine in Early Colonial Korea

2. Figuring the Child-Heart

3. Writing the Language of the Child-Heart

4. The Proletarian Child Strikes Back

5. Playing War in Late Colonial Korea

6. Liberating the Child-Heart

Epilogue: The Turn to Science in Postwar North and South Korea

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

1. First page spread of the inaugural issue of Sonyŏn, 1908

2. Haesang taehansa (The Nautical History of Korea), Sonyŏn, 1908

3. Korea and the Sea of Japan, Sonyŏn, 1908

4. Brave Youth at Sea, Sonyŏn, 1909

5. Leaf Boat, Ŏrini, 1924

6. Remaining Ink, Ŏrini, 1923

7. Cover of Ŏrini no. 8, 1923

8. Conductor, Ŏrini, 1930

9. Tales of a Hero, Pyŏllara, 1931

10. Cover of Sinsonyŏn, April 1932

11. Playing Soldier, Sonyŏn, 1940

12. Marathon Cookies, Sonyŏn, 1938

13. Side by Side, Sonyŏn, 1939

14. The Water Gun, P’odo wa kusŭl, 1946

15. Front matter of Sonyŏn no. 6, 1940

16. March in Place, Sohaksaeng, 1949

17. Omega Bugs, Hagwŏn, 1968

18. The Rising Seabed, Adong munhak, 1965

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project came to me before I knew I was looking for it. On the occasion of the birth of my second son, my parents brought from Israel the yellowing and dog-eared books of my childhood: Frog and Toad, The Little Fish That Got Away, Good Night Moon. Reading them with my wriggly two-year-old in my lap, I discovered a connection between my past child-self and the present moment. And so it seemed fitting to connect the scattered dots—a bilingual childhood, a home in many places, a love of fiction, a delight in the power of a secret language—through a project on the children’s literature of the Korean peninsula.

From that moment, it was nothing but the generosity of scholars and the sustenance of family and friends that made this book possible. Early on, Kevin O’Rourke took me under his wing and attuned my ears to the sounds and textures of Korean poetry. Wŏn Chong-ch’an, whose name has graced multiple books and articles on children’s literature in the last two decades, answered my plea for help by shipping to Canada three enormous boxes of photocopied primary sources without ever having met me. In the early 2000s it was the questions posed in his work, as well as by the scholars Sŏn An-na, Cho Ŭn-suk, Yŏm Hŭi-gyŏng, and Kim Hwa-sŏn, that got me thinking about the possibilities in my materials. At the University of British Columbia, Don Baker, Jane Flick, Bruce Fulton, Steven Lee, Teresa Rogers, and Judith Saltman provided me with a foundation in Korean literature, Korean history, and children’s literature. Sharalyn Orbaugh has been a mentor and role model, her intellect, sincerity, and kindness nothing short of humbling. Most of all, the dedicated and tireless Ross King remains my sharpest critic and keenest advocate, always pushing me to ask bigger and better questions, and believing in my project more than I ever did. He is a model of excellence and integrity in scholarship to which I can only aspire, and I am lucky to consider him a teacher and friend for life. The companionship of my ŏkke tongmu—Nathan Clerici, Asato Ikeda, Spencer Jentzsch, Eunseon Kim, Se-Woong Koo, Si Nae Park, Kari Shepherdson-Scott, JeongHye Son, and Scott Wells—made tolerable the unbearable slowness of research, and joyful the shared discoveries. Since then, the abiding friendship of Stefania Burk, Christina Laffin, and Gordon Reid has made Vancouver not simply a way station but another place that my family can call home. In particular, I have Christina Laffin to thank for helping me meet every single one of my deadlines when I never believed I could.

When I entered the field of Korean literature not only did I gain a professional identity, I fell in with the warmest group of talented scholars and friends: Jinsoo An, Ruth Barraclough, Stephen Epstein, Chris Hanscom, Ted Hughes, Kelly Jeong, Immanuel Kim, Jina Kim, Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Ji-Eun Lee, Jin-kyung Lee, Sunyoung Park, Janet Poole, Jiwon Shin, Vladimir Tikhonov, and so many others. In Korea, Kwŏn Youngmin, Kwŏn Podŭrae, Cheon Jung-hwan, Hwang Hoduk, and Yi Youngjae treated me as a colleague and not as the clueless novice I felt myself to be. One autumn-lake stroll in on a crisp, October morning in Ann Arbor with the brilliant Chris Hanscom and Youngju Ryu was a turning point: their probing questions and confidence in the project gave me the kind of push I needed to get it back on track. That same month, at the 4th Annual Rising Stars Conference organized by David Kang at the University of Southern California, I received feedback from Carter Eckert, Jin-kyung Lee, Namhee Lee, and others that helped me see the project in a different light. Later that summer of 2012, a priceless opportunity given by the SSRC Korean Studies Workshop for Junior Faculty to work with Nicole Constable, Maria Gillombardo, and Nancy Abelmann in the dreamscape of Asilomar reinvigorated my passion for the book’s story. It was the last time I saw Nancy. Her infectious optimism and appetite for life stays with me, and it is her title that graces this book. I write these words on the first anniversary of her passing, and how I wish I could call and tell her that for better or worse, it is done.

The following year, Stanford’s Humanities Center’s Manuscript Review Workshop allowed me to work closely with the inimitable Ted Hughes, Kyu Hyun Kim, Seth Lehrer, Yumi Moon, Caroline Winterer, and Ban Wang. They identified the strengths and weaknesses that were no longer visible to me, and I hope that my revisions approach the kind of possibilities they saw in this project. I consider myself deeply fortunate to have found such a supportive and big-hearted Koreanist community at Stanford: Kyungmi Chun, Yongsuk Lee, Yumi Moon, Dan Schneider, Gi-Wook Shin, Kathy Stephens, and David Straub, are still to my amazement, colleagues and friends. In my department, Steve Carter, Connie Chen, Ron Egan, Haiyan Lee, Indra Levy, Li Liu, Yoshiko Matsumoto, Jim Reichert, Chao Sun, Melinda Takeuchi, Ban Wang, and Zhou Yiqun, welcomed me with open arms. Ban Wang especially has been an inspiration, his quiet wisdom and encouragement pushing the project forward through its critical stages. Further afield, the History Department’s Tom Mullaney, Matt Sommer, and Jun Uchida have provided me with food, laughter, and intellectual stimulation. Haerin Shin showed me the ropes when I first arrived, and Alvan Ikoku, Alexander Key, and Mikael Wolfe walked those ropes alongside me. The Faculty Success Program provided me the necessary accountability to move forward, with Ryan Powell’s voice cheering me on from afar. My students Hajin Jun and Eunyeong Kim helped this book come together in more ways than I can acknowledge. O Yŏngsik, Chang Chŏnghŭi, and Regan Murphy Kao graciously and swiftly answered my panicked, last-minute pleas for source copies. At Stanford University Press, Jenny Gavacs fostered the production of the manuscript and provided reassurance and direction that helped rein in its unruly details, and Jessica Ling, Olivia Bartz, and Kate Wahl saw it to fruition. I am grateful, too, for the invaluable suggestions of two anonymous reviewers.

Friendship is the fuel that makes my life possible: the Lowenfels clan since the day I was born; Susana Ruiz and Jenny Woo, thirty years and counting; Nadine Tomaschoff and Hadas Prag, army buddies and keepers of the memories of our Bumly Days; Teresa Lee, the sister I always wanted; and my Concordia Language Village SupHo family, which each summer grants me the writing space I need, but don’t necessarily want, in the Minnesota woods so that we can raise another generation of global citizens. Most of all, and despite the impossibility of words to convey how important they are to me, I want to acknowledge my family: the Zur, Wilderman, and Kim extensions that have been rooting for me from across the globe. My parents in Jerusalem, Lila and Menachem, model lives lived fully and in dedication to what matters most. My brother, Yonah, remains my most precious companion in our split/double childhoods and through the rough waters of parenthood, and is always where I go to remember who I am. My own children, Ilan and Oren, make me grateful to wake up breathing on this earth. Wise beyond their years, they chased me out of the house on tired afternoons to get back to the manuscript. And finally, I am beyond grateful to my greatest love and best friend in this world and the next, Eungsub Kim, who has the magical power to make anything possible.

INTRODUCTION

THE CHILD AND MODERN KOREA

SOMETHING CHANGED at the turn of the twentieth century on the Korean peninsula. This was aside from the remaking of Korea from a sovereign nation into a Japanese protectorate in 1905, and aside from the shifting rural landscape and the reconfiguration of urban spaces by trains and trams, bridges and telephones, street lights and the cinema. It was at this time that childhood was discovered, when the child was identified as important enough to merit a new and dedicated form of print culture: the young reader’s magazine. This new medium enjoyed enthusiastic reception by steadily increasing numbers of readers as well as by Korea’s most dedicated literary luminaries. Its form and content evolved from one decade to the next, showcasing the voices and aspirations of writers, poets, and artists from across the political spectrum passionately committed to writing and illustrating for Korea’s future adults. Children’s literature was born.

Archival materials from the Koryŏ (918–1392) and Chosŏn (1392–1910) dynasties—including paintings, diaries, and official documents—show that children had always been a part of culture. They were integral to social life: children were to be acculturated, raised to take their place in society according to dictates of age, class, and gender, and were expected to cultivate the material inheritance of their families and uphold the spiritual values of their ancestors. At the turn of the century, however, children occupied a new place in the world, their value celebrated not for their connection to the past but for precisely their difference and separation from it. Not only was their disconnection from the past to be relished, but they were recognized as discerning consumers of culture in their own right, deemed worthy of their own media filled with texts and illustrations that would be of interest to them alone. Chosŏn’s men and women of letters, educators and psychologists, artists and doctors, engaged in writing for children with a deliberate hand that had no precedent.

The emergence of young readers’ magazines at the turn of the century was neither arbitrary nor accidental. It occurred at the intersection of tremendous political and social changes that were taking place on the Korean peninsula. Under Japanese colonial rule, Korean subjects engaged with scholarship about children’s bodies and minds, and were introduced to literature for children in Japanese. For the individuals and institutions that took on literature for children, the stakes could not have been higher, because this literature claimed to attend to the most contested spaces: nature and culture, past and future, home and nation. The new audience of young readers offered adult writers something unique and critically important: the possibility of addressing fresh, impressionable beings, and the opportunity to render the world legible to the young in a manner that had not before been attempted.

But in order to make legible the past, present, and future—in fact, in order to imagine this new audience in the first place, and to write for it—three changes needed to occur. First, children had to be made visible. New ideas about children’s rights, welfare, education, and psychology, compounded with an exposure to the vibrant children’s culture in Japan, created the demand for a new type of writing for children that spoke to them at eye-level. Second, children needed to become literate. Not only in the sense of acquiring reading skills, although literacy was certainly central to this process. Becoming literate also entailed being initiated into a world of colors, symbols, and images that both reflected and prescribed the child’s experience. Third and finally, texts for children had to be stylized to suit this new audience. Children could not be addressed in the stiff renderings of classical texts that they had memorized for centuries. The texts of the past—written in Chinese, vernacular Korean, or a mix of the two—were deemed unsuitable, their modes of expression formulaic and far removed from colloquial speech, their content unrelated to children’s emotional tenor and real lives. The combination of these three factors—visibility, visual and textual literacy, and style—brought about the creation of literature for children in colonial Korea.

At the outset, this book attempts to answer several broad yet related questions: how is it that children’s literature emerged as a genre in the midst of the loss of national sovereignty and how was it shaped by Korea’s colonial experience? What types of cultural regimes or fields of knowledge made it possible for children’s literature to grow at a time when the future of the sovereign nation was uncertain at best? What kind of polyphonic, contested expressions can be found in this otherwise ideologically dogmatic period, and how does literature for children illuminate our understanding of Korean modernity? What role did national liberation play in the way Korea’s competing ideological projects played out? And finally, if we can understand children’s literature as a mode of translation and interpretation—the translation of the complex world of grown-ups on behalf of the less sophisticated, less knowledgeable, and less experienced child readers—what do these translations tell us about what adults thought children should know, feel, and do about the world into which they were born?

Discovering the Child-Heart

Much of the scholarship on children’s literature tends to be driven by the question of origin: how does children’s literature begin? How does a literary establishment in any given place and time go from the absence of reading materials for young readers to producing materials explicitly targeting such an audience? What are the cultural and social conditions that make the emergence of such a literature possible? How do we define literature for children, and what kind of insights can literature for children provide that are otherwise inaccessible?

One thing that makes such questions possible is the recognition, perhaps intuitive at this point in time, that childhood is a social construct. In other words, childhood—as a period that extends between infancy and adulthood—did not always exist. Once, the course of one’s life moved quickly from the realm of the home to a full incorporation into society with only a symbolic rite of passage to mark the transition. The oft-quoted Centuries of Childhood by Philippe Ariès published in 1960 (the English translation of the original French came out in 1962) has served as a pioneering yet contentious contribution to European scholarship on childhood for its claim to identify the moment when children and childhood came to have modern value. As Ilana Ben-Amos has shown, Ariès’ scholarship, for all its merits, was both Eurocentric and not entirely novel: ethnographic scholarship predating Ariès had already demonstrated that the transition from childhood to adulthood in many regions was rich in cultural and social significance, thereby indicating that this transition was neither seamless nor self-evident.¹ Not to mention that the significance of the child as a cultural symbol can be traced from Confucian ethics in premodern China in the second century BC to Lockean philosophy in seventeenth-century Britain. The recognition of childhood as a social construct has made itself evident across cultures in different times, but its precise moment of origin has been difficult to pin down.

So how is it that despite the awareness of children and the long existence of some semblance of a period distinct from adulthood, children’s literature is a relatively new phenomenon? Recent scholarship on the emergence of children’s literature converges on two conceptual points. The first is visibility—that children’s literature is born when the child moves out of society’s periphery to the center of social networks. The child is then deemed a critically important object of ideological socializing which, linked with a strong educational doctrine, forms the basis of literature for children.² Generally speaking, the transition of the child from the periphery of culture to the center has been facilitated by changes in labor laws and public education, changes that shifted the child’s significance in the home from economically useful to economically useless but sentimentally priceless.³ The broader market and education systems have also been implicated, since social and aesthetic value is determined, as Seth Lerer explains, out of the relationships among those who make, market, and read books.⁴ Scholars have demonstrated that a host of social and economic changes work to transform the child into a social agent, consumer, and moving target for an array of social and market forces, all of which make the emergence of literature for children possible.

But what about Korea, where children’s literature emerged later than its English- or Japanese-language counterparts? The scholarship here begins with Yi Chae-ch’ŏl, who first documented the development of children’s literature in Korea in his Adong munhak kaeron (Introduction to Children’s Literature) (1967) and Han’guk hyŏndae adong munhaksa (History of Modern Korean Children’s Literature) (1978). Yi attempted the very first genealogy and categorization of literature for children in Korea, and contended that it was a product of indigenous traditions of oral literature, local philosophies of enlightenment, and social transformations of the early twentieth century that together released children from age-old bondage to family and tradition.⁵ To this groundbreaking scholarship, Wŏn Chong-ch’an has offered depth and nuance in nineteen monographs and edited volumes, in which he has explored everything from the biographies of individual writers and artists to the circulation of children’s culture in Asia. In these works Wŏn argues that Korean children’s literature originated in the 1920s with the development of children’s activism, youth groups, and a broader market economy able to respond to the demands of a new audience of readers. Wŏn notes that children’s literature in Korea could only emerge when children were taken out of the labor market and placed into schools.⁶ Chang Chŏng-hŭi finds the first instances of children’s literature earlier, in school textbooks of the early 1900s.⁷ But as Ch’oe Myŏng-p’yo argues,⁸ it appears that the youth groups of the early 1920s played the most crucial role in the emergence of children’s literature, both in determining the political identities of young people—what Yael Darr refers to as the shapers of taste—and in creating space for budding young writers.⁹ To different extents, then, the limited introduction of public education and the establishment of youth groups provided the structural support and patronage that made children’s literature possible. In Korea, this coincided with the loss of national sovereignty, which complicated the dissemination of national identity and ideologies of modernity, and pitted multiple interest groups against each other. The demand for children’s literature was created in part out of the anticipation of expanding literacy and in part out of a need to translate the world on behalf of the next generation, who were entering a markedly different world.

If what made Korean children’s literature initially possible was the visibility of the child in society, then the second turning point was the growing interest in, and a belief in the accessibility of, the child’s mind, and the conviction that this mind provided clues into the origins of what it means to be human. In Korea, philosophies of the human mind and theories of child development, both local and global, shaped the belief in the existence of this privileged child’s mind, or as it came to be known, the tongsim, or the child-heart. The idea of the child-heart as a state of purity that could potentially be achieved even in adulthood had existed in East Asia from the times of Mencius and Laozi. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the child-heart again offered models of emulation to the intellectuals of East Asia such as Liang Qichao, who saw in the child-heart an untapped potential that could rejuvenate the nation both literally and symbolically. Under Japanese rule, Western conceptualizations of child development and education also found their way into the Korean colony. These included the works of John Locke (1632–1704), whose formulation of the tabula rasa implied that all people were born as blank slates and which brought Locke to inquire into the origins of the mind; Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who, in his widely influential text Emile explored the tension between the innate goodness of man and the corrupting influence of society; and Jean Piaget (1896–1980), who believed that children were functioning beings in their own right and should therefore not be considered imperfect adults. And perhaps the greatest challenge to the idea of the purity of the child-mind came from Freud, who viewed the child’s mind as a depository of sexual desires, and for whom the key to understanding adult neuroses involved accessing childhood memories and experiences.¹⁰ From Mencius to Liang Qichao, and from Locke to Freud, theories of the child-heart as a window into the origin of humanity shaped the conception of the child in East and West, not just biologically but metaphorically, not just as an adult-in-process but, as Carolyn Steedman puts it, the biological child as a cell with "an individual’s childhood history laid down inside its body, a place inside that was indeed very small, but that carried with it the utter enormity of a history."¹¹ This focus on the symbolic potential of the child-heart helps explain why scholars have long argued that literature for children is a manifestation of adult investment in the child’s interiority. In her highly influential book, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Jacqueline Rose argued that children’s literature is a genre whose interests so closely hinge on adult concerns that it cannot be called children’s literature at all.¹² Karatani Kōjin considered the visibility of the child in culture to be so important as to have enabled the birth of modern fiction. Karatani explained that the moment the child comes to be appreciated as external and objective in the world is the moment of discovery of interiority, and is that which marks literature as modern.¹³

I, too, argue that Korean children’s literature—in which I include poetry, prose, illustrations, and miscellaneous textual forms published in children’s magazines or newspaper columns aimed at young readers—was developed alongside the concept of the child-heart, or tongsim. A combination of the character tong for child and sim for heart/mind, the child-heart was the concept through which Korean writers justified the need for a new kind of writing. Korean scholars have acknowledged the centrality of this concept for colonial writers, yet it has for too long been taken for granted, its mechanics obscured. It is my intention to flesh out this term and trace its political and social contours. As I will show, the term child and heart cannot be taken at face value. Tong alluded to the non-adult body, and sim rendered the child intellectually and affectively different, and entirely knowable. Perhaps the most important characteristic that marked the child as distinct from the adult—the most striking feature of the tongsim—was the perception of the child’s existence on the threshold of culture: the child was closer to the flora and fauna than to acculturated adults. The child’s inherent innocence and purity demanded simultaneous protection and careful engineering. It is the tongsim that required a translation of the world, but that also embraced contradictory impulses of nature and culture, those very same elements under threat by the colonial regime.

Why is this of consequence? I return to the questions raised earlier: what can an interest in children’s literature, viewed through the concept of tongsim, contribute to our understanding of the development of modern Korean literature? First, because children’s literature has been long considered a minor genre—on the fringe, of little consequence, hardly worthy of archival preservation—it enjoyed a certain degree of freedom in hosting polyphonic, contradictory voices that quietly challenged the mainstream. More importantly, in the words of Chris Jenks, the child, as conceptualized within both the spectrum of everyday attitudes and the professional discourses of the social sciences, is employed, consciously though often unconsciously, as a device to propound versions of sociality and social cohesion.¹⁴ There is something about the conceptualization of the child revealed by children’s literature that can reveal versions of sociality and social cohesion that may otherwise be obscured. Yet thus far, the term tongsim has been accepted at face value: by chalking up the entire production of children’s literature to artistic manifestations of the child-heart, scholarship has ignored its constructed and profoundly artificial structure, without illuminating how exactly this child propounded, to use Jenks’ term, versions of sociality and social cohesion. The indiscriminate use of the term has obscured a clearer vision of what the child meant to different interest groups in different periods. I argue that the tongsim concept and its manifestations prompted the production of a rich and diverse body of texts and images that inscribed, both literally and figuratively, pasts, presents, and futures on the bodies and souls of the young. It is the emergence of the child-heart, the stakes claimed by writers, and the insights that their texts provide that will be the concern of this book.

Who were the stakeholders, the determiners of literary taste, in this period, and what did they hope to achieve? How did the idea of the child-heart emerge, and what forces did it contend with? The responses to these questions change across different periods of Korea’s colonial and postcolonial history. There were hints of the importance of the child-heart before it emerged in the late nineteenth century. The looming threat of colonialism politicized progressive intellectuals, bringing youth to the attention of the likes of Ch’oe Nam-sŏn (1890–1957) and Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950). Themselves barely out of their teens on the eve of colonization in 1910, they saw Korea’s youth as an antidote to the disaster unfolding before them, and decided that nothing short of a complete overhaul of Korea’s structures of thinking and feeling was needed to survive the struggle of the fittest taking place on the global stage. Let us feast upon our ancestors’ nutritious blood and flesh! cried Yi Kwang-su in his 1918 essay, On the Centrality of Children. He continues, You are our center, our hope, and our joy!¹⁵ Ch’oe and Yi, having recently returned to Korea from studying abroad in Japan, rallied their young peers to embrace their role in the new world order through scintillating magazines, and paid special tribute to the role of emotion as the critical foundation of Korean modernity.

The title of his famous essay may have been On the Centrality of Children, but the target of Yi Kwang-su’s essay was not children but youth. Children did not become visible until another young intellectual, Pang Chŏng-hwan (1899–1931), shifted the spotlight. Pang left the most significant mark on the history of the child and children’s literature in Korea. He brought the term ŏrini, or child, back into circulation; founded the national holiday Children’s Day, still celebrated in Korea each year on May 5; and published and edited the magazine Ŏrini from 1923 until his untimely death in 1931. It was this magazine, alongside Pang’s tireless advocacy of children’s rights in the mainstream media of the time, that delighted young readers and gave them a much-desired respite from the heavy-handed didactic materials that had been the mainstay of texts for young people. Pang gave textual and visual contours to the child-heart in a manner that would have a lasting impact on children’s culture in colonial and postcolonial North and South Korea.

There were, of course, many others. Korea’s proletarian writers presented their own political and social agendas in the pages of their dedicated children’s magazines, with their own vested interests in shaping the affective world of the young. To these leftist writers, children were particularly valuable for the kind of privileged access to truth they inherently possessed. Following the disbandment of leftist organizations in the mid-1930s, writers of leftist sympathies contributed to children’s magazines that were published even in the most oppressive period of the late 1930s and early 1940s. For even as war swept over Asia and Japan militarized the peninsula, children became ever more implicated in the imperialist culture of late colonial Korea. Whether on the left or right of the political spectrum, writers continued to contend with the view of the child-heart as natural and outside culture. Even upon liberation in 1945, the idea of the child-heart—now imbued with a national consciousness—was a fruitful and productive way of accessing the interiority of the child. All along, the national child-heart was tenaciously embraced and mobilized, even while it was interpreted in widely diverse ways.

The child-heart underwent an important qualitative change with the defeat of the Japanese, the division of North and South Korea, and the ensuing Korean War. While children’s writers appealed to the authority of science throughout the colonial period as the best method through which to understand the physical world, they also at times viewed science with suspicion as somehow interfering with the child-heart. But this changed with the dropping of the atomic bombs, the utter devastation of the Korean War, and the new world order into which North and South Korea came into being. Until the 1950s, the child-heart’s qualities had been maintained and fortified through the coupling of child and nature. But in the atomic age, the child-heart experienced a shift. Tongsim was still important, but rather than promoting the idea of a natural child on the threshold of culture, children’s magazines from the postwar period indicate that the child was to be the main agent of the transformation of nature. The fictional children of postwar children’s literature recognized nature’s inherent flaws and set out to master the universe through acts that ranged from raising the bottom of the ocean floor to exploring and colonizing other planets. The child-heart that had been defined by its privileged communication with nature, and that granted children a pristine goodness and deep wisdom, was now put to a new purpose. To continue to maintain a privileged view of the world, the child’s final mission was to become nature’s master.

To better understand the emergence of children’s literature in Korea, it is necessary to review the unique landscape of Korean literature in the early twentieth century, and to appreciate the place of literature in the cultural life of Korea on the eve of Japanese annexation. For no sooner did discourse on nationhood begin to emerge than Koreans witnessed their sovereignty snatched away and their lives changed in a process that has since been termed colonial modernity. Since the concept was illuminated in the mid-1990s by Korean historians and by the volume of the same name edited by Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, scholarship has had to contend with its implications, namely: how to understand the diffusion of colonial power and the emergence of modernity in a colonial context.¹⁶ Colonial modernity, as articulated by Shin and Robinson, is a complex and dense ecology of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity, whose interconnected and interactive nature allows for a more comprehensive understanding of history. But it also illuminates how cultural production often works in complex ways that do not conform to a binary understanding of oppression and resistance.

Indeed, recent scholarship in the English language on Korean colonial fiction has provided new ways of understanding the scope and limitations of culture as it operated under colonial rule. Janet Poole, for example, points to the way that certain writers focused on unruly detail, drew on the idea of double exposure, and clung to antiques, in ways that disrupted the forward-moving temporality established by the colonial regime and provided a private space outside the clutches of the colonial state.¹⁷ Christopher Hanscom, on the other hand, argues that the crisis of representation—in which the very communicability of language was cast into doubt—served as a means for writers to explore not only what it meant to be a colonial subject but also a modern one assailed by the unknowability of the self and the overwhelming and chaotic power of capital.¹⁸ Sunyoung Park has demonstrated that even a writer like Kim Nam-ch’ŏn (1911–1953), denounced for having abandoned his leftist ideology in favor of a chauvinistic pan-Asianism, found a way to defy the belligerent masculinity of wartime Japan and instead turned to the everyday as a way of exercising materialist critique.¹⁹ Aimee Kwon has proposed to view colonial modernity through the concept of what she calls