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Six When Autumn Leaves Fall (1961) Song Wŏn-hŭi A writer recognized for her deep-rooted consciousness of the political and historical development of Korea, Song Wŏn-hŭi (b. 1927) was born in Seoul, the eldest of four children. Her parents’ trying lives during the colonial period exerted an enduring influence over her life and career. Song’s father, a descendant of an upper-class Confucian scholarly family, became an anti-Japanese freedom fighter, having suffered the decline of the family fortune and the brutal deaths of his elder brothers at the hands of the Japanese police. To avoid police surveillance, Song’s family fled to China in 1938, when Song was a fifth grader. There her father’s involvement in the Korean independence movement continued up until Korea’s liberation in 1945. This early exposure to her father’s activism planted in Song the seeds of a strong nationalism and a keen political awareness. During her family’s seven-year sojourn in China, Song built the foundations of her future literary development, absorbing a wide range of world literature from the library of a fellow expatriate. The young Song found equal inspiration in the life story of her mother, whose educational aspirations and happiness as the daughter of a Chinese medicinal-herb doctor were cut short by the deaths of her parents and the ensuing family breakup. The suffering of Song’s mother in her formative years helped awaken Song to women’s hardship within Korea’s patriarchal society, something that would later serve as a motif in her work. With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Song entered Tongguk University as an English literature major. Despite the war, Song took full advantage of her studies as a refuge in Pusan by participating in a creative writing club, 100 performing in drama presentations, and taking in the ideas of such French existentialist writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir . Although her family’s financial difficulties prevented her from graduating , Song made her literary debut in 1956 with two short stories, “Hwasa” (Floral snake) and “Singminji” (The colony). The same year, she married an engineer who promised to support her writing career. A number of Song’s stories from the 1960s and 1970s focus on Korea’s colonial legacy and the scars of the Korean War, as evident in her “Nagyŏpki” (When autumn leaves fall; 1961), “Pundan” (Korean division; 1967), and “Hyŏlhŭn” (Bloodstains; 1968). By then Song was the mother of three young children and had endured trying times as the daughter-in-law of a conservative extended family. In 1971 Song published her first collection of short stories , titled Floral Snake, reusing the title of her first short story. A second short story anthology, Pit’ŭlkŏrinŭn chunggan (The tottering middle), followed in 1977. Song’s award-winning first novel, Taeji ŭi kkum (Dreams of the great earth; 1984) again takes up Korea’s turbulent modern history, including the demise of the Chosŏn dynasty, uprisings against Japanese police brutality, liberation and national division, the trauma of the Korean War, and the changing status of women throughout these upheavals. Although framed within a three-generational private family history, the novel elevates the suffering of individual characters to national dimensions through the author’s quest for the spiritual significance of Korea’s landmark eras. Song’s novel Mongmarŭn ttang (Thirsty earth; 1986), the sequel to Dreams of the Great Earth and another award winner , further elaborates upon the aftermath of the Korean War and the tragedies of families separated by the civil war. In the 1990s, when Korea officially reestablished diplomatic relationships with China and the former Soviet Union, Song made a number of field trips to these regions in search of historic sites related to the Korean diaspora and independence movement during the colonial period. One of the fruits of Song’s travels was the publication of An Chung-gŭn: Kŭ nal ch’um ŭl ch’urira (An Chung-gŭn: I’ll dance on that day; 1995, two volumes), the winner of the thirty-second Han’guk Literature Award. The novel is a fictional biography of a Korean patriot, An Chung-gŭn (1879–1910), who in 1909 assassinated the Japanese statesman Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), the prime plotter of the Korean Protectorate Treaty of 1905, in Harbin, Manchuria. Another product was Song’s fifth collection of short stories, T’aroksu wa...

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