Part of the mandate of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) is to bring writings both known and unknown by any ethnic Korean person, written in either Korean, Japanese or any other language, into the broader English-language world of global lit.

This includes ethnic Korean writers from the 1920s to the 1940s. They mostly spoke, studied and wrote in Korean, but much of their work and higher-learning was done in Japanese. Japanese was the language of the metropole, the language of globalization, and many early works by Korean people were created in Japanese and were published in a Japanese setting. Inversely, many works of literature from Europe or elsewhere were first read by late Joseon readers in the Japanese language.

LTI Korea's mandate also includes bringing into the English-language radical, political works written by ethnically Korean people that gave voice to the underclasses – the non-Japanese people – of the Japanese Empire. Much of this was written and published in Korean, and fed the political movement toward speaking one's own language, and toward not being legally classified as a second-class citizen. This took place across the periphery: in Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan. Manchuria – Japan's largest and most wild colony – was at the heart of this, particularly among ethnic Korean communities that lived in Yanbian, Jilin Province, and elsewhere. Guerrilla forces could better harass and annoy the imperial troops in the vastness of Jilin, rather than in the more-densely populated areas of Pyeongan, Gangwon or Gyeongsang provinces.

Part I

"Into the Light" (1939) by Kim Sa-ryang (1914-1950) (t. 2013 by Jane Kim)/ <빛 속에> 글 김사량

“Into the Light” is the tale of a school teacher coming to terms with his own identity and falling in fatherly love with an estranged underprivileged kid at his school. Indeed, he “comes into the light” in the sense of no longer being ashamed of who he is or what he is. The school teacher achieves inner peace. The kid becomes comfortable with his identity, too, and even the driver, at the end of the story, so angry earlier on in the story, is happy at the end. They have all come into the light.

The name Kim Sa-ryang (김사량) is a pen name. The man Kim Shi-chang (김시창) (1914-1950) graduated from Tokyo National University with a degree in German literature and returned to Seoul in 1943, aged 29. He got a job with the Japanese Imperial Army, ran away from that post, and started writing for the Korean Liberation Army (한국광복군), part of the Chinese Nationalist army (중화민국 국민정부), in Chongqing and elsewhere in mainland China. Like many ethnic Korean people scattered across Northeast Asia in the early 1940s, he returned to the Korean Peninsula in August 1945.

Written in Japanese and first published in Japan in 1939, "Into the Light," until recent times, was banned in South Korea because the author was deemed to be a North Korean sympathizer. His story deals with the institutionalized classification of each and every citizen, a classification system that permeated the Japanese Empire.

You've heard about Apartheid in South Africa. It was based on concepts about the amount of melanin in a person's skin. A similar process was implemented across Imperial Japan, but based on where you were born in the Japanese Empire or where your parents were born, not on the amount of melanin in your skin. In Imperial Japan, if you were born to parents originally from Honshu or Kyushu or thereabouts, or if your first language at home was Japanese, you were classified as being “Japanese.” If you were born to parents who were originally from the Korean Peninsula, or if your first language at home was Korean, you were classified as being “Korean.” If you were born to parents originally from Jilin, Heilongjiang, Liaoning or parts of Inner Mongolia, and spoke any of the various languages that were used there, you were classified as being “Manchurian.” There was also a fourth, and lowest, classification that Imperial Japan used, called “Chinese.” All of this was similar to the apartheid system in South Africa, except that all the people in this case were all from neighboring regions.

In our tale, our main character learns to accept the fact that he's classified as “Korean” and he, the school kid and the driver learn to accept their “Koreanness” and to live with inner peace and contentment.

The characters swim between these two identities, one of the periphery, one of the metropole: one of being “Korean,” or Joseon as they say, and one of being a citizen of the empire, maybe even “Japanese.” There are no physical attributes to these distinctions, so this is all in the characters' minds, on their registration papers, and based on what they've been told since birth. It's based on language and imagined community.

Indeed, children can be more racist than adults. "...As I said this, one of the children who peered into the room through the open door shouted, "Hey, Teacher is a Joseon person!"... and then he shouted, "Hey, Joseon person!" He stuck out his tongue and then fled again as though someone were chasing him... in that moment, the hallway became completely silent." (p. 6)

This man-made racism permeates all aspects of existence in this short story set in Imperial Japan, and our protagonists come into the light and learn to live as Korean in the bigger world.

One of the first works of art to deal with society of the times and with the day-to-day realities faced by many citizens of the Japanese Empire who were not classified as “Japanese,” “Into the Light” was nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa prize upon its publication. Readers were eager to read more.



Part II

"Mother and Child" (1935) by Kang Kyung-ae (1906-1943) (t. 2014 Sora Kim-Russell)/ <모자> 글 강경애

A brief window opens. A brief window closes. “Mother and Child” is a short glimpse into the darker side of war, independence movements, a woman's lot in life and the realities faced by Korean farmers or small-town dwellers in Manchuria in the 1930s. It could be a one-act play, or a single character's monologue; a dying woman's deathbed lament and struggle for existence.

"No matter how hard we try to live, we are doomed.” (p. 11)

It's not a particularly cheery tale, and yet it could be said to capture much of Korean existence in northern Korea and southern Manchuria during the 1930s, particularly the life of Korean women during those times.

It's a short story of struggle, a short story of pain. Author Kang Kyung-ae is a woman who writes of the feminist struggle and the struggles of the working or lower classes. It represents the sufferings and struggles of the Korean nationalist or independence movement. Having begun in the 1910s, by the 1930s Korea still suffered under the yolk of colonialism.

Her short story is about a mother's suffering and a mother's drive to make sure her child lives. The story focuses on a mother's identity and place in society when there's no longer a husband in the picture.

Kang's short story is about estranged family members and the suffering of an extended family. From the back story, to the weather, to the brief dialogue, our hero in this tale, only referred to as Seungho's mother, suffers, suffers and suffers more, bearing the slings and arrows of a cursed life. It is a cold and depressing vignette.

Author Kang lived in Yanbian, a center of the Korean community in Jilin Province in the 1930s as it is today. The northern parts of the Korean Peninsula, and Jilin Province especially, have viciously harsh winters, with dry snow, temperatures below freezing for months on end, and whipping wind that flies in off the Siberian plains. Add to that poverty, homelessness, no shelter in a storm, and caring for a child: this is what Kang writes.

The concept of a woman suffering for the betterment of society permeates these brief 11 pages. Seungho's mother has little Seungho strapped to her back as she ping pongs back and forth across the village trying to find shelter from the storm. With a husband who's deceased, she has no place in society, adding to her suffering.

Finally, author Kang touches on the sufferings of the lower classes. Short stories like this can launch Communist revolutions. They can launch feminist revolutions. They can bring people into the streets, marching for a better world.

Published in Korean in the pages of a Seoul newspaper in 1935, Kang's story brought the suffering of far-away rural Manchuria directly into the urban lives of Seoul's reading public. She brought the cold winds of ethnic Korean poverty into the living rooms of the colonial capital. She shone a light on the realities faced by women then, as they are still faced by women now. She brought life to a world that we rarely see, that we, perhaps, cannot see, telling us how it is from the other side.



Part III

It was in the late 1910s that Korean literature, in the modern sense, really bloomed. You can see this in Yi Kwang-su's "Heartlessness" ("무정"/ "無情" 글 이광수) published in the pages of the Daily Newspaper (매일신보) in 1917. "Heartlessness" is considered the first modern novel written by an ethnic Korean person, as the author experiments with language, Naturalism and Romanticism. However, it wasn't until the 1930s that literature written by ethnic Korean people truly flourished for the first time, and only about half of it was written in the Korean language.

There was a shift in Japanese colonial policies concerning colonial Korea after 1919. The March First Movement, a declaration of independence made by 33 individuals gathered at the Taehwa-gwan restaurant (태화관, 泰和館) on Saturday, March 1, 1919, caused Tokyo to realize that its colonial peoples weren't going to take such oppression sitting down.

In the 1920s, creating and producing art and literature in the Korean language became easier, with fewer restrictions from the imperial overlords. However, literature in 1920s Joseon was much more a tool for national identity, closely tied to concepts of national independence. Though there were authors like Kim Dong-in (김동인) (1900-1951) and Hyeon Jin-geon (현진건) (1900-1943), who well-described the day-to-day lives of people in those days in short stories like "Our Toes Look Alike" ("발가락이 닮았다" (1932) 글 김동인) and "Poor Man's Wife" ("빈처" (1921) 글 현진건), one of the major trends in literature in the 1920s was Communism and Proletarian Literature, led by the Joseon Proletariat Artists' Alliance (조선 프롤레타리아 예술가 동맹, "카프," KAPF), founded in 1925.

Against this trend of using literature as a tool for Nationalism and Communism, even though it was understood as an underlying cause of the Korean independence movement, a new wave appeared in literature, led by the Circle of Nine (구인회 문학 단체). Represented by Yi Sang (이상, 李箱) (1910-1937), Park Tae-won (박태원, 朴泰遠) (1909-1986) poet Jeong Ji-you, and Kim Yu-jeong, the group was first organized to reject the literary trend of using literature only as a tool and to respect literature as art itself.

Please note that Park Tae-won (박태원) was the grandfather of film director Bong Jun-ho (봉준호, 奉俊昊) (b. 1969), maker of "Memories of Murder" (2003), "The Host" (2006) and "Snowpiercer" (2013).

As a result, these new authors respected writers' own personalities and writing styles, and a variety of new writing styles dealing with a wider variety of materials began to appear in the 1930s. Surrealist Yi Sang brought urbanized Seoul into his stories and poems. Park Tae-won, inspired and influenced by the Western literature he studied in Japan, presented a "flow of thoughts" technique in his story "A Day of Novelist Gubo." Kim Yu-jeong brought then rural Korea and the people's life into his stories and recreated it into great comedy. Though the Circle of Nine literary club only lasted for a few years, and there were quite some changes made in its members, it's remembered as one of the most notable literary groups in Korean literature. It was in the 1930s that more novels were written and published, as well, such as Yeom Sangsup's "Three Generations" and Chae Man-shik's "The Muddy Stream."

"Into the Light" can be read in English here (24 pages). https://issuu.com/ltilibrary/docs/into_the_light/3
"Mother and Child" can be read in English here (11 pages). https://issuu.com/ltilibrary/docs/motherandchild

By Gregory C. Eaves
Korea.net Staff Writer
Photos: LTI Korea
gceaves@korea.kr