From Wonso Pond Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  More praise for From Wonso Pond

  “At once a folktale and a page-turner that acquires the dignity of tragedy. Samuel Perry has given us a new masterpiece, whose closing question is as urgent for us today as it was in 1934.”

  —Norma Field, author of In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End

  “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: 1895-1919

  “How refreshing it is to have a good old-fashioned story, told without narrative

  tricks or artifice. Kang Kyong-ae’s From Wonso Pond is a powerful novel that charts

  the struggles of her impassioned characters as they learn to live, work, and love.

  The questions Kang poses and the issues she tackles are as universal as they are

  enduring. This essential work should be required reading for anyone interested in

  Korean history and literature.”

  —Sung J. Woo, author of Everything Asian: A Novel

  “This novel’s canonical status will remain unchallenged for years to come. It is a rare blessing that the English-language version was produced by Samuel Perry, whose first-rate linguistic talent, literary sensitivity, and scholarly rigor are distinctively channeled through his passion for social change and aesthetic excellence.”

  —Kyeong-Hee Choi, associate professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago

  “From Wonso Pond is a powerful literary indictment of sexual and economic exploitation of the poverty-ridden farming population in 1930s colonial Korea.”

  —Yung-Hee Kim, professor of Korean Literature at the University of Hawaii at Manoa

  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 is“Human 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 word
s 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 pr
olific 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.