From Wonso Pond

By Kang Kyong-ae and Samuel Perry

“A vibrant account of the travails of Japanese colonialism as experienced by workers and women by the pioneering feminist writer of the Korean left.” —Andre Schmid, author of Korea Between Empires

A classic revolutionary novel of the 1930s and the first complete work written by a woman before the Korean War to be published in English, From Wonso Pond transforms the love triangle between three protagonists into a revealing portrait of the living conditions that led to modern Korea, both North and South.

“A fatherless young girl now poised to become the victim of [the landlord’s] lecherous fangs and paws,” begins one of the original newspaper teasers describing From Wonso Pond and the fate of its heroine, Sonbi. In a plot rich with Dickensian overtones, the novel paints a vivid picture of life in what is now North Korea through the eyes of Sonbi, her childhood neighbor, Ch’otchae, and a restless law student, Sinch’ol, as they journey separately from a small, impoverished village ruled by the lecherous land baron to the port city of Inch’on.

But life is hardly easier there, as Sonbi wears herself out boiling silk threads twelve hours a day while Ch’otchae and Sinch’ol load rice on the docks. All three become involved with underground activists, fighting the oppression of country and city, as well as their Japanese colonial rulers.

“An astonishing achievement . . . From a colonized Korea, Kang sets the stage for the tragic birth of two rival nations. John Dos Passos and George Orwell may have had a Korean sister yet.” —Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781558616530

Book preview

Translator’s Introduction

IN’GAN MUNJE is the second novel written by Kang Kyong-ae (1906- 1944), one of several women writers active during Korea’s colonial period. ¹ Here, translated as From Wonso Pond(the literal translation of the Korean title isHuman Problems), In’gan munje is one of Kang’s most important works, one that provides a good introduction to the colonial history and literature of a nation still divided some sixty-odd years after its liberation from Japan. Given the paucity of women’s works from this period that are available in English translation, Kang’s novel helps in particular to illuminate the intersection of gender and modernity in colonial Korea and, more broadly speaking, in the Japanese Empire. Detailing both historical facts and human feelings, From Wonso Pond not only documents the daily lives of farmers, new women, revolutionaries, and nouveaux riches, but also sheds light on how the violent shock of colonialism was experienced in the hearts and minds of Korean people and how writers attempted to shape that experience into part of the collective imagination.

As were most novels published at the time, From Wonso Pond was serialized daily in a Korean-language newspaper. It ran in the Tonga ilbo from August 1 to December 22, 1934, with each of its 120 episodes illustrated with a black-and-white picture of the main characters or setting. The novel was neither reedited nor reissued in book form during Kang’s lifetime, and for some fifteen years it remained out of print, until the Labor Newspaper (Rodong Sinmunsa), where Kang’s widowed husband worked as an associate editor, published a version of the book in 1949 in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea). Not until decades after the Korean War, which ended only with a ceasefire in 1953, would Kang’s novel be rediscovered in the Republic of Korea (South Korea), where it is now celebrated as an extraordinary achievement of Korean realism.²

Given the tragic events of twentieth-century Korean history—colonization, war, division, and sustained ideological conflict—most of Kang’s original manuscripts have been irretrievably lost, and slightly different versions of In’gan munje exist in libraries today. In the absence of an extant original manuscript, I have, as translator of the novel, relied on the 1934 newspaper serialization to render it into English. The authenticity of this serialized version is nevertheless also in doubt, since little if anything ever appeared in newspapers without the official seal of a government censor.³ Indeed, one year before In’gan munje appeared, Kang lamented police censorship in a short essay: As for my own feelings, I cannot even pick up a pen and write! I have a mouth, but no words to speak!⁴ Like many colonial and especially socialist writers, Kang undoubtedly self-censored her writing, making careful decisions about individual words, scenes, and even plotlines that might have been deemed objectionable, and thus extirpated, by the publication police. ⁵ The flexibility of the novel form certainly allowed writers such as Kang some leeway. She begins her story with a traditional folk tale that amounts to an allegory for revolution, and throughout the novel Kang’s irony mercilessly lampoons the hypocrisy around her—whether bureaucratic, corporate, or patriarchal. But the novel carries little exhortatory language, or ostensibly political commentary—certainly nothing overtly critical of the Japanese colonial regime.

How much of Kang’s language was actually excised by censors from her original manuscript or changed by editors when it first appeared in the Tonga ilbo we will most likely never know. In episode 107 of From Wonso Pond, just as Ch’otchae is imagining Sinch’ol being arrested by the police, the word censored appears in the newspaper edition, marking a deletion of unknown length. In two places in her text the letters XX appear—a common mark of censorship at the time—most likely in reference to the Communist Party, which few educated readers would have failed to grasp. This overtly visible mark of censorship, however, which had been used for some time in both Japan and Korea—sometimes preemptively by the authors themselves—was itself increasingly excised from publications. In any case, the colonial censorship bureau, staffed by both Japanese and Koreans, was still not as effective as officials might have hoped by the mid-1930s. Part of episode 106, which describes an uprising on the streets of Inch’on, managed to find itself printed in the morning edition of the newspaper, though it seems to have been, after further scrutiny, deleted from the evening edition. This particular passage was carefully translated into Japanese and documented by the censoring authorities in a 1935 report of the Korean Publication Police—one of dozens of passages from Korean-language magazines and newspapers that were duly recorded each month by bureaucrats.⁶

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.¹¹In 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 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. The 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).

21 Kenneth Wells, The Price of Legitimacy: Women and the Kŭnuhoe Movement, 1927-1931, in Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Kyeong-Hee Choi, Michael Edson Robinson, and Gi-Wook Shin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 191-220.

22 Ho Chong-suk would later become a high official in the DPRK .

23 Kang Kyong-ae, Choson yosongdŭl ŭi palbŭl kil, Choson ilbo, November 28- 29, 1930; Yi, Kang Kyong-ae chonjip, 712.

24 Yi Ki-yong, Puin ŭi munhakchok chiwi, Kŭnu1 (1929): 63-66.

25 One of the earliest extant films from Korea, now available with English subtitles, is the 1936 Sweet Dream (Mimong), which dramatizes the figure of the Korean new woman in the context of this cult of domesticity. See the DVD set The Past Unearthed: The Second Encounter Collection of Chosun Films in the 1930s(Seoul: Taewon Entertainment, 2008).

26 Part of my language here is highly indebted to that of Barbara Foley in her book Radical Representations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

27 Sinmun sosol kangjwa, 1-8 Choson ilbo, September 6-13, 1935.

28 Han Won-yong, Han’guk kŭndae sinmun yonjae sosol yongu(Seoul: Ihwa Munhwasa, 1996), 452.

29 Kim Kirim, Sinmun sosol ‘olimp’ik’ sidae, Samcholli, January 1933.

30 Tonga ilbo, July 31, 1934.

31 Ibid.

32 See Positions: East Asian Critique14, no. 2 (2006) for a collection of scholarly essays on the proletarian cultural movement in East Asia, including one that focuses on the work of Kang Kyong-ae. In particular, see Ruth Barraclough, Tales of Seduction: Factory Girls in Korean Proletarian Literature.

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What a fine view of Yongyon village that is, once you’ve climbed up this hill. The big house pointing up over there—the one with the western-style shingles—that belongs to Chong Tokho, who also owns the farmland in front of it. The tin-roofed building over to this side is the township office, the one right next to it is the police station, and those dark spots forming a circle around them are farmhouses.

And that blue pond down there? That’s Wonso Pond, the very lifeline of the village. It’s the reason the village was settled here in the first place, and the reason the fields were later cleared. Everyone, even the dogs and wild animals, depends on it for fresh drinking water.

Now there won’t be anybody around, of course, who knows just how and when the pond actually got there. But the farmers in the village have a legend to tell about it. To the villagers this is their one source of pride, and it’s become an article of faith for them.

If you listen to their story, this is what they’ll say:

Long, long ago, before the pond was ever formed, a rich official lived here, or so the story goes, with countless numbers of slaves and fields and well-fed livestock. Such a miser was this man that when he failed each year to eat all the grain he harvested, he preferred to see it rot in his storehouse rather than offer it to the farmers suffering around him. Begrudging even a spoonful of rice that the occasional beggar wandered by in search of, he made sure his front gate was locked up tight before letting anyone in the household begin cooking.

After several years of poor harvests, when the local people began to die of hunger,