From Wonso Pond

Translator’s Introduction

vii Translator’s Introduction in’gan munje is the second novel written by Kang Kyŏng-ae (1906– 1944), one of several women writers active during Korea’s colonial period .1 Here, translated as From Wŏnso 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 Wŏnso 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 Wŏnso 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 viii 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 WŏnsoPond,justasCh’ŏtchaeisimaginingSinch’ŏlbeingarrestedbythe 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 referencetotheCommunistParty ,whichfeweducatedreaderswouldhave 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 ix uprising on the streets of Inch’ŏn, managed to find itself...