Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again 9780739124512, 073912451X, 9780739164396, 0739164392

Table of contents :
Chapter 1 1. Introduction Chapter 2 2. New Woman, Romance, and Railroads: The Paradox of Colonial Modernity Chapter 3 3. Burden of the Past: Confessional Writings in the Space of Decolonization Chapter 4 4. Literature of Instability and Despair: Woman and Masculinity in Postwar Fiction Chapter 5 5. Nation Re-Building and Postwar South Korean Cinema: The Coachman and The Stray Bullet Chapter 6 6. Conclusion

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Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema

Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema Modernity Arrives Again Kelly Y. Jeong

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jeong, Kelly Y., 1970Crisis of gender and the nation in Korean literature and cinema : modernity arrives again / Kelly Y. Jeong. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-7391-2451-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-7391-6439-6 (electronic) 1. Korean literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)—Korea. 3. Nationalism and literature— Korea. 4. Women in literature. 5. Masculinity in literature. 6. Postcolonialism in literature. 7. Korea (South)—In motion pictures. 8. Nationalism in motion pictures. I. Title. PL958.4.J48 2010 895.7'09353—dc22 2010035816 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgments

I have been blessed with many dedicated teachers, mentors and colleagues who have supported and encouraged me during the writing of this book. Without my teachers, John Duncan, Henry Em, Soyoung Kim, and Sam Weber, this book would not have been written. And it has been a true privilege to have a mentor in Shu-mei Shih, who was there for me from the conception of this project. Last but not least, I want to express a deep gratitude to Teshome Gabriel, a wise and gentle teacher who never told me what to read, but taught me how to look at things. May he rest in peace. I’d like to believe that this book adds a tiny little bit to his legacy. My dear friends and colleagues Jinsoo An, Julie Cho, Sunhee Choi, Chris Hanscom, Ted Hughes, Jim Lee, Mike Murashige, Michelle Park, Laura Pulido, Youngju Ryu, and Eric Wat, whose enduring friendship, humor and camaraderie kept me sane more often and longer than they realize. Helen Lee’s and Jinsoo An’s thorough reading and clear insights also helped me refine the first and last chapters. Along the way, several anonymous readers and reviewers suggested new questions and perspectives, for which I am grateful. I regret if I did not address all of the missing pieces in this book. UCLA’s Dissertation Year Fellowship and Korea Foundation’s Research Fellowship provided a crucial help in the beginning stages of the research, and the City University of New York Research Foundation’s PSC–CUNY Faculty Research Grants gave me a much appreciated break from teaching to focus on the book’s writing. Parts of chapter 1 were published as “New Woman, Romance, and Railroads: The Paradox of Colonial Modernity” in ACTA Koreana 10, no. 2 (2007): 39–72 and “Na Hyesôk’s “Kyônghûi”: New Woman as a Spectacle of Femininity,” in Hanguk Munhak Yongu (Study of Korean Literature) 29 (2005): 124–50. Chapter 4 was published as “Nation Re-Building and Postwar South Korean Cinema: Coach Driver and Stray Bullet” in the Journal of Korean Studies 11, no. 1 (2006): 129–62. I have since made some changes to the chapters. I am grateful to the Journal of Korean Studies and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Standford University for permission to reprint the articles here (the journal is currently published at the University of Washington). Finally, I want to thank my family, especially Minh, who stood by me through the moments of despair and inertia and argued, against the mounting evidence, that I will finish this project.

Introduction: Paradox, Trauma, and Multiplicity of Modernity

The nation of Korea had always been under threat since the Japanese colonial period that lasted from 1910 to 1945. In this book I present how modern Korean masculine subject, which I argue is identified with the nation itself, encounters crises and reacts to them, by looking at such crises of masculinity and the nation through a lens of modern Korean literature and cinema. Colonial Korea was a space of interregnum. Indeed, Korea seems always caught in some kind of interregnum from the colonial period to the postcolonial and postwar period. This book is a study of modern Korean literature and cinema, produced in the period that spans from the 1930s to the 1960s, a period that represents some of the most turbulent decades in Korea’s lengthy and multiple modernization trajectory; simultaneously, they are also the most fascinating ones as well, no doubt in some ways due to such historical turmoil. In this socio-political context Korean masculinity is the privileged subject of history and culture, and yet it seems continuously under siege, both from within and without. In each of the four decades comprising the background of the literary and cinematic texts I examine here, the struggles of a nation in crisis, dealing with colonialism, decolonization, Korean War, and economic development, deeply impact the way in which Korea experienced modernity, as well as its changing notions of masculinity and gender relationships. This social context colors every aspect of Korean society and impacts Korean anti-colonialism, nation rebuilding, and postcolonial struggles; even in the 1960s, the story of Korean masculinity is still a defensive narrative.1 The crisis in masculinity also meant a crisis in gender relationships; and it manifested in various ways through the decades, under different historical, socio-cultural circumstances, challenges and threats. In these texts the once hegemonic subject’s responses to various kinds of real or imagined threat manifest as particular symptoms, hostility, and even violence towards women, and sometimes as hatred of the emasculated self. In this way, my examination of wounded masculinity represented in the literary and cinematic texts is also an interrogation of the issues surrounding women and gender in the same texts. We would only get a partial view of a national literature and cinema if we don’t take that nation’s history into account, for literature and cinema are cultural products of particular socio-cultural circumstances inextricably linked to history. The cultural contexts of the decades provide the backdrop to my discussions, as a study of literature and cinema cannot exist in a vacuum, divorced from its historical reality that gives it materiality. For this reason, I have tried to connect my analysis with a given historical and cultural context as much as possible. Each period I examine in the following chapters involves a different set of issues and questions

that are nevertheless connected with each other and fall within the umbrella topic of modernity, gender, and Korean nationhood represented in literature and film. Given Korea’s long tradition of Confucian culture, I argue that Korean culture and society are deeply male identified, as though it were a kind of fraternity, and that there existed an unambiguous hierarchy of gender at the time of Korea’s colonization by Japan.2 But as one might imagine, Korea’s experience in modernity introduced through colonialism, which is both traumatic and exhilarating, profoundly changes and restructures the pre-existing status quo and gender hierarchy. Not surprisingly, therefore, the narrative of masculinity and Korea’s hypersensitivity regarding issues of the nation resulted from such history. In their introduction to Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi write: Feminism and nationalism are antinomic offspring of modernity. Feminism as a project of modernity stands at odds with nationalism, which imagines a fraternal community. On the one hand, nationalism, while emphasizing liberal democratic notions of individual differences, has in fact reconstituted the class hierarchy of ancien regime. On the other hand, it is these very liberal democratic notions that have been used to segregate gender and race in the interests of a unifying ideology of the nation-state.3

The above passage is illustrative in the beginning of my own explorations into the questions of Korean nationalism and gender in the context of modernity, because my book also poses a question about what the authors mention at the end of the passage: namely the “unifying ideology of the nation-state.” The nation-state of modern Korea, with all its seemingly coherent value system and ideologies of genders, cultures, and hierarchies, is also a much contested site fraught with ambiguities and contradictions, even while certain ideologies and value judgments continue their reign over the decades. I explicate Korea’s colonial modernity in particular as a set of paradoxical truths coexisting side by side. What I describe here as the paradox of Korea’s colonial modernity must be addressed first, in order to explore the related issues of masculinity and gender relationships. The paradox of colonial modernity has much to do with the crisis in Korean masculinity, both past and the present. And it is this crisis, whether real or imagined, as well as the cultural responses to those threats that connect the chapters in this book. In my inquiry I trace the origins of the problematics surrounding this issue to the colonial period. Modernity was introduced in Korea, as it was to many former colonies, along with colonization. In addition, Korea’s unique geo-political position in East Asia acts as a partial catalyst for the unique colonial approach in Korea by Japan, and later, greatly contributes to the U.S. and Soviet involvement in the Korean War and its aftermath. Hence, particular to Korean context is the civil war and the national division that followed decolonization, which affects the national psyche to this day. As a result of this history, Korea’s collective experience in modernity is inextricably linked to the traumatic events of the twentieth century, of colonization, war, national division, and the rapid, uneven economic development during a military dictatorship in the postwar era. To open this discourse I begin at a fascinating and foreshadowing moment of the colonial period, the 1930s. In one of the most intriguing junctures in the history of modern Korean

literature, colonial writers and intellectuals who were greatly influenced by Marxism and Socialism formed KAPF (Korean Artista Proletaria Federatio) in 1925. The group was extremely influential and made much contribution towards building up a body of work containing modern criticism, fiction, essays, and plays. Japanese imperial government was naturally watchful of the KAPF members and associates, because their belief in leftist ideals and cultural, literary methodologies were deeply connected to their anti-colonial activism. The situation reaches a boiling point in 1931, when the government makes a mass arrest of KAPF members, and after the second such mass arrest in 1934, KAPF was no longer. In each of these events, the official cause was only incidental and served as an excuse to disband this threatening entity. As a result of the dissolution of KAPF and the colonial regime’s strict censorship, leftist writings all but disappeared.4 But this historical turn of events also leads to a kind of progress because the end of KAPF also signals the beginning of an exciting variety in Korean fiction. After 1935 writers produced, to name a few, realist novels, historical novels, family history novels, and farming community novels, which I haven’t discussed in this book because each category deserves its own extensive discussion.5 The 1930s was the time when the ideological split between the Left and Right intellectuals solidifies, greatly influencing the writings of colonial intellectuals. This decade also witnesses the heightening of the crises of gender politics and nationhood: a socio-cultural sea change that threatens traditional gender hierarchy and destabilizes notions of masculinity even while Japanese colonial modernity provides some breathing room to a select group of women who ironically benefit from the nation’s colonization. Lastly, the decade also sees rapid colonial urbanization and nascent industrialization, leading to the nation’s uneven development and also creating a cleavage between the city and the country, the rich and the poor, modernity and backwardness. These factors set the tone and prepare the way for Korean literature and cinema of the later decades I discuss in consequent chapters. Texts from this period show that the colonial subjects aspire to modernity yet what they experience is colonial modernity, which fundamentally falls short of their expectation and ideal. At the same time it is modernity that gives Japan the power to rule Korea and it is the same logic that supports capitalism, as well as leading to the creation of consumerist society that further degrades and exploits its colonial subjects. During the period spanning from the 1930s to the 1960s modernity arrived and manifested in Korea in varying ways and disguises, and Korean literature and fiction in turn reflects the myriad angles and versions of this reality. That vague entity called modernity metamorphoses from period to period and necessitates a fresh experience of modernity in the rapidly changing Korean context. Therefore, even though Korean culture experiences modernity like a sudden shock to the system, modernity’s arrival is also a slow, ongoing process. In each of the four decades I explore in this book there is a fresh arrival of modernity through disparate routes. And because this multiplicity is, without a doubt, profoundly connected to Korean history of this tumultuous period, with its series of upheavals and ruptures in virtually all aspects of the national life, the nation experiences modernity as trauma each time and its cultural life is greatly affected.

In the 1930s modernity was intertwined with colonial experience even while it was used as a tool for overcoming colonization. Korea also experiences modernity in a greatly compressed manner. In some cases, most notably during the colonial period, such compression of experience surfaces in literature as an aporia between one’s consciousness that already belongs to colonial modernity, and the realities of life as the colonized. The nation was finally decolonized in 1945 and yet it simultaneously became engulfed in ideological war between the Left supported by the Soviets and the Right buttressed by the U.S. and Allied Forces. When this ideological split which was in fact carried over from the previous decades came to a head, it resulted in the national division in 1948. Modernity in this decade was but an alias for ideology. The next decade begins with the tragedy of the Korean War, which resulted in the calcification of the national division and ideological warfare that were initially conceived as temporary. During this decade modernity in Korea was synonymous with Westernization, and specifically with Americanization. And yet anti-American sentiment coexists in the nation— alongside gratitude for its material and human aid and a desire for American consumer goods and popular culture—due to the strong presence of American military forces in Korea and its contribution to the problem of military prostitution. Lastly in the period spanning the 1950s and the 1960s the meaning of modernity transforms yet again, as the Cold War–era South Korea launches its nation rebuilding programs and over-investment in its military forces. In the postcolonial period, again modernity came in a traumatic context, with the Korean War and the postwar American aid, and the awareness of the stronger foreign power’s presence, as well as the burden that even its generosity could not mask—rather, it increased people’s sense of such burden. Although the content and context of modernity changes throughout the decades, there are certain threads connecting them. The decades are intertwined with each other, and my discussion of the theoretical problematics is carried out in light of such inter-relatedness of the decades from the colonial to the contemporary periods. One such thread is the deep ambivalence towards modernity and its trappings. Modernity, as each chapter set against disparate cultural and historical contexts will show, is always a double-edged sword for Korea; it promises freedom and also some measure of gender and social equality, but it also often leads to profound destabilization of accepted hierarchies and truths, creating confusion and crisis.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES Chapter 1. New Woman, Romance, and Railroads: The Paradox of Colonial Modernity The first chapter examines the contradictions of Korea’s colonial modernity and argues that the nation experienced it as a set of paradoxes. This chapter provides a reading of these paradoxes through an interrogation of the most symptomatic aspects of Korea’s colonial modernity that are reflected in literary texts written by and about colonial intellectuals, which I identify as the New Woman, ideals of romance, hypermasculinity of the colonial subject, and railroads. It will show how colonial literature reveals colonized Korea as an arena in which the old and the new—hierarchies, gender relationships, knowledge, and even ways of being—intermingle and coexist, leading to new conceptions and practices of family and marriage. During this period, the New Woman and her male counterpart, both recognizable cultural personae, are compelled to compete against each other for the limited access to modernity, whether it is through education or travel. Furthermore, New Woman became the human fallout of such competition, both in fiction and reality. For Korea’s anti-colonial nationalism, a very much male-identified thought, gives men a seemingly legitimate excuse to ignore women’s causes, even though they are inextricably intertwined with the causes of national sovereignty. Ultimately, what results is a split loyalty and double-identification among Korea’s colonial intellectuals, who fail to create a viable alternative to the Old that is dead and the New that is yet unborn, and are caught in the interregnum where “morbid symptoms” abound. Chapter 2. Burden of the Past: Confessional Writings in the Space of Decolonization After the decolonization, Korean intellectuals produce fascinating writings, which I call “confessional writings,” that highlight the burden of their shared guilt, shame, and recovery. I explore in this chapter the connection between these issues and conceptions of masculine subjectivity and cultural leadership through a reading of confessional stories and essays by writers such as Yi Kwang-su, Ch’ae Man-sik, Ch’ôe Nam-sôn, and Yôm Sang-sôp, who all wrote about their colonial collaboration.6 The period of the three years after the Liberation, until the establishment of South Korea in 1948 is known as “haebang kong’gan” (space of decolonization). The term connotes a symbolic space and a site of geo-political, ideological, and moral struggles, as much as it denotes the specific time and place. The selected autobiographical writings I examine feature various writerly disguises that bring to light, rather than obscure, the writers’ sense of shame and self-loathing, a prominent narrative thread. Their shame is grounded in a certain prevailing notion of manliness as an essential core of selfidentity for these public intellectuals and cultural leaders, who were at the same time implicated in the unequal power relations with colonial authorities. Ultimately, the writers’ expressed emotions of shame and regret are deeply intertwined with the traditional Confucian notion of self as a complete subject only in its network of hierarchical socio-cultural relationships. The nature of this relationship between the writer and

his readers is one of trust and accountability, and modeled after that of a teacher and pupil. Therefore their shame is both social and private in nature, and stems from one’s sense of failure to fulfill a certain role that he recognizes as his own. At the same time, the writers have no authority over themselves as colonial subjects, and their failure to properly fulfill their cultural role originates, at least in part, from the sheer impossibility of being a colonial subject with autonomy. Chapter 3. Literature of Instability and Despair: Woman and Masculinity in Postwar Fiction Modernism in literature manifested in various ways since Korea’s colonial period, throughout the nation’s tumultuous modern history. In the 1950s, the decade that saw dismantling of social order and cultural norms as a result of the chaos brought on by the Korean War, it manifested as nihilistic, existentialist modernism. The general concept of “existentialism” I use for my discussion refers to the French existentialism, specifically to that of Albert Camus and JeanPaul Sartre. This chapter examines postwar Korean literature from 1955 to 1960, and focuses especially on two representative short stories, “The Uncharted Map” and “The Stray Bullet.” Postwar Korean literature of the late 1950s, born out of a socio-cultural atmosphere of extreme militarization which led to pervasive military culture and ideals of masculinity that seeped into people’s everyday life, as well as ideological battles, and internal fractions, reveals a crisis mentality regarding issues of the fragile nationhood, social chaos, and threats of emasculation that often manifest as misogynistic and existentialist narratives. In the enormous cultural disruption and transformation that followed the Korean War, America comes to wield an overwhelming influence on South Korea, provoking mixed feelings of admiration, envy, and resentment in its people. As Korean women’s prostitution to the American soldiers stationed in the country increasingly became an embarrassing social problem, literature of this period began to vilify woman by over-sexualizing her, and depicting her as a promiscuous and instinctive body that lacks reason, intellect, and voice. Her exposure to modernity and Western culture, which in this context signifies exposure to superior American consumer goods, its popular culture, and most dangerous of all, to dominant foreign masculine subject that American soldiers represent, all lead to profound destabilization of gender hierarchy and social status quo in both fictional and real life. In reaction to this development the “exposed” woman is viewed with suspicion, contempt, and resentment as a figure that threatens Korean masculinity, and by extension Korean patriarchy and its nationhood itself. I see this era’s vilification of woman in literature as male writers’ reaction that in the end illustrates the doubled structure of oppression binding Korean woman, and presents us with a defensive narrative of “hypermasculinity” of the oppressed and displaced. Hence, the obliteration of the female subject’s humanity and voice in postwar literature, through an abject oversexualization of woman as the sexual Other, can be construed as a cultural response to the sense of crisis and challenge to the masculine self. Chapter 4. Nation Rebuilding and Postwar South Korean Cinema:

The Coachman and The Stray Bullet The last chapter provides an analysis of two films, The Stray Bullet and The Coach Driver from the Golden Age of South Korean cinema (1955–1972) against the larger socio-cultural backdrop of postwar South Korea, its “nation rebuilding” project, and its patriarchal tradition. It focuses on the ways in which these canonical films, made at the historical moment so significant for South Korea’s nation rebuilding and postwar industrialization efforts, reveal the popular culture’s response to the crisis of postwar chaos and America’s quasi-colonial presence through reaffirmation of patriarchal values, construction of a modern masculine national subject, and vilification of women who are visually associated with modernity and Westernization. I argue in my reading of The Coach Driver that a successful construction of a new kind of elite, modern, masculine national subjectivity marks a teleological arc for the entire narrative, and that such construction is closely related to the project of nation rebuilding. Meanwhile, both films visually and narratively elide woman’s suffering; and in The Stray Bullet it does so even while it uses woman as a trope for the degraded nation. Furthermore, vilification of women in the films targets those associated with Westernization and the false glamour of modernity—through their sexual, economic, and metaphorical dealings with the “West,” exemplified in this context by American popular culture and the threatening figure of dominant foreign masculine subject, the American soldier. Hence such triangular relationship between Korean man, woman, and American soldier illuminates not only the nature of the relationship between South Korea and America during this era as one of neo-colonial relations, but also reveals the double structure of Korean woman’s oppression. THEORETICAL QUESTIONS One of the most difficult issues one encounters in studying modern Korean literature is the question of cultural coloniality in modern Korean literature. Ever since Im Hwa brought up the issue in his “History of New Korean Literature” (Chosôn sinmunhaksaron sôsôl) in 1935, scholars had to negotiate with and reflect on his position that “history of modern Asian literature is a history of importing and transplanting Western literature.”7 Ever since, it has become a burden of proof for scholars of modern Korean literary history to show that modern Korean literature continues a certain tradition of pre-modern Korean literature. And it was not successfully addressed until 1973, when Kim Hyôn and Kim Yun-sik wrote History of Korean Literature (Han’guk munhaksa), in which the authors persuasively argue that a history of national literature cannot be considered as an independent entity that exists in a cultural vacuum, but rather, it must be seen as a history of mutual acculturation among the nations belonging to a common culture of East Asia.8 And secondly, they argue, the relationship between cultures is never a clear-cut master/slave relationship, but rather one of mutual influence.9 From this point on, the dimension of reclaiming national identity and decolonization of national consciousness has been a foregrounded aspect of this complex issue that goes much beyond a question of literary history, as other scholars have shown in different contexts:

When applied to Third World intellectuals, “cosmopolitanism” implies that these individuals have an expansive knowledge constituted primarily by their understanding of the world (read: the West), but when applied to metropolitan Western intellectuals there is a conspicuous absence of the demand to know the non-West. This “asymmetrical cosmopolitanism” is another manifestation of a Western-dominated worldview.10

Shu-mei Shih points out here a phenomenon she calls “asymmetrical cosmopolitanism,” which illustrates the relationship between the non-West and the West in the one-directional desire of the non-West to know the other. I would like to add to this formulation that when the West showed desire to know the other, it had been most often in the context of accumulating knowledge in order to subjugate and control the non-West. In contrast, the non-West’s desire to know the West is usually founded on its wish to emulate and overcome the other’s influence in various arenas of its life. My scholarly background led me to deploy western European theories but at the same time, I tried to remain conscientious of the cultural power differential involved in using Western theories to discuss Korean literature and cinema. Therefore I paid close attention to the distortions and mutations that take place when cultural and literary theories are circulated from one context to another. What makes it especially complex yet interesting is the fact that many of the theorists I cite in this book are themselves from former colonies who have a dual perspective as both cultural insiders and ethnic, racial outsiders in the West. This is true of some of the theorists who provide a point of departure for my arguments and explorations—such as Albert Memmi who writes about the complexity of the relationship between the Colonizer and the Colonized, Partha Chatterjee whose work examines the deep connection between colonialism and nationalism in former colonies, Chungmoo Choi who writes about gender and Korean nationalism, Shu-mei Shih whose work explores the modernist literature in semicolonial China, and Kim Soyoung who studies Korean cinema vis á vis the West and its cinematic traditions and influences, to speak of only a handful. Lasting theories and practices are particular and local, while also being general and universal. The theoretical with which I engage in the following four chapters on the issues of the nation, gender, intellectualism, colonialism, postcolonial conditions, fall into this category of observations that pass the test of locality and time. In this vein, I use specifically Western concepts such as Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation and Gramsci’s theorization of the interregnum, as they are applicable beyond their specific geographical and cultural contexts. Meanwhile, I have yet to resolve the uncertainties of using Western theories to discuss Korean literary and cinematic texts. Some difficult questions are foregrounded in my mind, such as, how does one find a way to examine and write about Korean texts on its own terms in order to let it stand shoulder to shoulder with other national literatures? Or how does one discuss Korean cinema on its own terms, without having to explain its aesthetics and mores as something quaint or charmingly Eastern? In the end, the theoretical problematics I set out here represent a feminist questioning of the nation that assumes a certain givenness of fraternity and the different kinds of masculinities that occupy constellations in that fraternal imagined community—hence I chose to focus on masculinities, so that I may ultimately highlight the issues surrounding gender and the question

of woman. The theoretical problematics for this book are essentially a feminist questioning of the nation of Korea that assumes a certain givenness of fraternity and the different kinds of masculinities that occupy constellations in that fraternal imagined community. Modern Korea’s crisis of nationhood is a result of the over-determined nature of its trauma, stemming from the fact that the nation experienced colonization and modernity as a simultaneous reality. This book reflects, in conscious and unconscious ways, my status as both an insider and outsider, culturally, nationally, and ethnically; a position I find dubious and suspect, yet advantageous for the varied perspectives it offers. As many scholars in the field are not doubt aware, currently there is a relative paucity of Korean studies scholarship that incorporates both the primary and secondary sources written in both Korean and English. This is my attempt to add to a growing Western scholarship on Korean literature and culture and enter a dialogue with the scholars and cultural critics wherever they are located. Colonial Korea was a space of interregnum pregnant with possibilities for the future yet what was dead and unburied still lingered on, adding to the chaos of the era. In fact, Korea as reflected in literature and film from the 1930s to the 1960s seems always caught in some kind of interregnum. In this site, modernity arrives again and again, in bits and pieces, with several false starts, and it is still an incomplete project as we rethink the new ways of what it means to be modern and to belong to a nation in the twenty-first century. NOTES 1. Benedict Anderson , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991, 1983), 139. As Anderson points out, nationalism in the former colonies was, and in many ways, still is a response to an external threat. But contrary to his predictions, such nationalism is not the “last wave” of nationalisms in Korea for example, for while expressions of this nationalism may go through changes, it is essentially a part of the national identity. 2. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. 3. Chungmoo Choi and Elaine H. Kim, eds. Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 7. 4. For a discussion on censorship practices during the colonial era, see for example, Kyeong-Hee Choi, “Impaired Body as Colonial Trop: Kang Kyong’ae’s ‘Underground Village,’” Public Culture 13 (Fall 2001): 431–58. 5. Yi Chae-sôn, History of Korean Modern Literature (Han’guk hyôndae sosôlsa, Seoul: Hongsôngsa, 1979), 313–400. 6. To my knowledge no such writings by women intellectuals or writers have been discovered. 7. Im Hwa, “History of New Korean Literature” (Chosôn sinmunhaksaron sôsôl), Chosôn Chung’ang, October 9–November 13, 1935. 8. Kim Hyôn and Kim Yun-sik, History of Korean Literature (Han’guk munhaksa, Seoul: Minûmsa, 1973).

9. Kugômunhak’hôe, ed ., Study of Ch’ae Man-sik’s Writings (Ch’ae Man-sik munhak yôn’gu, Seoul: Han’guk Munhwasa, 1997), 25. 10. Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 97.

Chapter One

New Woman, Romance, and Railroads: The Paradox of Colonial Modernity

THEORIZING COLONIAL KOREA: NEW OPPORTUNITIES AND OLD HIERARCHIES Modernity arrived in Korea (Chosôn) with Japan’s colonization of the nation in 1910. Whether its colonial master introduced modernity to Korea is one of the most controversial points of historical, and inevitably, political, debate in the Korean academy. In most of the innumerable writings on Korea’s colonial experience, the writer’s position on Korea’s introduction to modernity has been a sort of barometer by which readers can assess whether this writer or historian belongs to the political left, right, or somewhere in between. Often, it has been wrongly taken as a measure of one’s patriotism; and this is to say that the issues surrounding Korea’s colonial modernity, its origins, and its outcomes raise people’s voices and emotions. Modernity, which in the context of this discussion reads Westernization filtered through Japan, was arriving slowly prior to Japan’s “annexation” of Korea.1 But this was a series of small arrivals of modernity, symptom by symptom, one aspect after another. Korea began its experience of modernity in earnest during the nation’s experience of colonization by neighboring Japan, the only Asian nation to modernize/Westernize itself successfully at the time. However, as other scholars have convincingly argued, perhaps the very emotionally charged question of whether Japan introduced modernity into Korea through colonization is, though significant in a way, not the most relevant question to ask in exploring Korea’s experience during this period. The focus of such a question is always on Japan as the active agent behind Korean history, and relegates Koreans as passive recipients of the new entity called modernity. Shin and Robinson write in the introduction to Colonial Modernity in Korea that “such thinking deflects primary historical agency from Korean society to outside forces. [Thus they] propose to consider Japanese domination within the broader lens of cultural hegemony” and, colonial hegemony must be seen as “a historical process continually negotiated, contested, defended, renewed, re-created, and altered, by challenges from within and without.”2 In this light, a more relevant question about Korea’s experience in colonial modernity is not “how did it happen to Korea” but rather, how Korea experienced it and participated in its

indigenous development. Many scholars have made an effort to restore a balance that had been missing in the traditional Korean nationalist narratives of history, culture, and indeed nationhood, which are similar to the traditional works of the European Enlightenment project in at least one crucial aspect: the authors see modernity as universal and invest it with a universal value. They see it as something to which all nations and all cultures aspire. And yet ironically, such a monolithic perspective ultimately paints Koreans as passive bystanders of their own history. I will begin this chapter with a discussion of Korea’s colonial modernity as a paradox, a situation in which two opposing sets of truths exist side by side. The issues surrounding the emblems of this paradoxical colonial modernity reveal that modernity introduced through the Japanese colonial experience left a collective trauma in the national psyche and pride, which was deeply connected to the nation’s neo-Confucian tradition and to the ideals of Korean masculinity. And literary texts of the era, whether fiction, firsthand narrative, or confession, show the way in which crises of gender, hierarchy, and traditional way of thinking brought on by the nation’s loss of sovereignty show most tellingly through the New Woman’s fall from grace, and at other times, through the colonial male intellectuals’ experiences of emasculation and self-alienation. The inevitable trauma people experience whenever a new system replaces an old one became doubled and overdetermined for colonial Koreans because the nation confronted not just modernity, but modernity that was ushered in by colonialism. When Korea came into contact with this new system and was compelled to be ruled by it, colonial oppression became a part of the pattern of everyday life. The loss of national sovereignty, especially to Japan, which the Sino-centric Korean elite traditionally regarded with contempt and condescension (as Japan was deemed outside of the Sino-centric sphere of cultural refinement and influence, and thus inferior to Korea), led to a profound destabilization of established beliefs, relationships, and hierarchies. Colonization not only changed the system under which people lived, but indeed their very consciousness. Literature of this period reflects how the preexisting communal life and the relationships between community members gradually disappeared subsequent to colonization, as Korean historians have suggested, through people’s disconnection from Korean past/history and their disconnection from their land.3 Despite this, modernity arrived much like a breath of fresh air. Yet ultimately, even the liberating aspects of colonial modernity led to a deeper confusion among intellectuals who saw the disparity between their knowledge of modernity as an ideal and their humiliating reality as colonized subjects. In this chapter I focus on the contradictions of Korea’s colonial modernity and argue that the nation experienced it as a set of paradoxes. To this end, I will provide a reading of this paradox through an interrogation of the most symptomatic aspects of Korea’s colonial modernity—the New Woman,4 ideals of romance, hypermasculinity of the colonial subject, and railroads. The following discussion examines texts written by and about colonial intellectuals. Since the vast majority of Korean population at the time was illiterate, my choice of colonial intellectuals as key figures of interest stems from the fact that this group was unrivaled in

production. They have left more records of their thoughts, feelings and imagination in writing. Moreover, colonial intellectuals were the first to encounter modernity in its various guises, and also the first group of people to respond to and make it their own in a sensitive and self-aware manner. I will show how the literature of this era then reveals colonial Korea as an arena in which the old and the new—hierarchies, gender relationships, knowledge, and even ways of being— intermingle and coexist, leading to new conceptions and practices of family and marriage. The New Woman and her male counterpart become recognizable cultural personae during this time. The narratives I examine here show that they are compelled to compete against each other for the limited access to modernity especially through education and travel, the two major modes of gaining exposure to the changing world and its values. Furthermore, I will show how the New Woman became the human fallout of such competition, staged in both fiction and reality. For Korea’s anti-colonial nationalism, a very much male-identified thought, gives men a seemingly legitimate excuse to ignore women’s causes, even though they are inextricably intertwined with the causes of national sovereignty. Ultimately, what results is a split loyalty and double-identification among Korea’s colonial intellectuals, who fail to create a viable alternative to the Old that is dead and the New that is yet unborn, and are caught in the interregnum where “morbid symptoms” abound. Colonial Korea’s ideal of modernity and modern life were closely associated with Japan, and specifically, with the formative years the nation’s intellectuals spent in Japan as students. Many, if not most, colonial intellectuals had what could only be described as an ambivalent attitude towards Japan: a complex mixture of powerful emotional and intellectual pulls of love and envy, attraction and resentment.5 In many ways, Korea’s relationship to Japan during this period cannot be described as a simple confrontation between Self and Other but, rather, a more complicated web of fluctuating relationships between Self and Other. The relationship between Self and Other has the look of what Nandy characterizes as “modern oppression”: Ultimately, modern oppression, as opposed to the traditional oppression, is not an encounter between the self and the enemy, the rulers and the ruled, or the gods and the demons. It is a battle between the dehumanized self and objectified enemy, the technologized bureaucrat and his reified victim, pseudo-rulers and their fearsome other selves projected on to their “subjects.”6

As mentioned earlier, along with the experiences of such modern oppression and instability, colonization also opened up a space for new possibilities, fueled by the introduction of modernity. Although it was formulated to explicate a different context, Gramsci’s notion of interregnum is helpful in making sense of such space of possibility. According to Gramsci, this is a moment of rupture in history, a moment of ambiguity and possibility when the old is dead yet the new cannot be born.7 Korea’s experience of colonial modernity is filled with historical moments loaded with ambiguity and possibilities of both failure and success, moments that are only possible during an interregnum. These moments are created between the death of the old (the nation) and the birth of the yet-to-be-actualized new (decolonization). What I put forward here is that colonial modernity and its trauma comes to Korea as a series of paradoxes. A working definition of paradox I will use in the following discussion is “a statement that seems

to be self-contradictory or absurd but that provokes us into seeing how in one sense it could be true.”8 I deploy the concept of paradox rather than contradiction, because paradox denotes the complex relationship between the two sides of the same coin, while contradiction denotes two separate issues that reveal themselves to be simple opposites of each other. One important aspect of paradox is the simultaneity of two sets of truths. Simultaneity is a significant concept because it is connected to the colonial intellectuals’ dilemma and divided loyalty to their colonized nation on the one hand and, on the other, to colonial modernity. Simultaneity is also a keyword in considering the unequal access to modernity that colonized people have. As my examples from colonial literature will show, modernity and its trappings reach only a select group of people, and such lack of simultaneity and coevality of experience reveals Korea’s internal class contradiction. THE KOREAN NEW WOMAN: AN ANACHRONISM Let me first focus on the paradox of colonial Korean women’s status. This paradox lies in the fact that while women enjoy a wider range of activities that would have been denied them prior to colonization, their narrative also shows how the contradictions of Korea’s reality as a colonized yet capitalist, urban space further relegates its women to the periphery of the nation. In the canonical modern Korean novel by Yôm Sang-sôp, Three Generations (Sam-dae), two women characters, Hong Kyông-ae and Kim P’il-sun, benefit from an opportunity to receive modern education, yet they are still marginalized, and their education does not lift them out of their lives’ harsh circumstances.9 In a significant narrative detail, both of their fathers are depicted as anti-colonial nationalists who dedicate their lives to the national cause; and yet, now they are powerless to protect and provide for their own family. The author, one of colonial Korea’s great realist writers, details this anti-colonial hero’s pitiful demise and his fear for his family’s uncertain future. Below are Kyông-ae’s father’s dying words: I’m leaving behind my brothers, my comrades—our society. I’m leaving this child of mine. I’ve thought about what my legacy will be after sixty years of living, and all I really have is this child. I know that, in fact, I’m throwing her naked into the street by leaving her behind this way, and while I have no doubt that you will each do your best for the sake of society, please take good care of this child. I know I could never thank you from the grave, Mr. Jo, and I know it is shameless to ask this of you, but I would be eternally grateful if you could, when I die, take care of my wife and child.10

This passage describing the dismal end of a nationalist hero reveals the anxieties of a colonized masculine subject who was once a father, husband, intellectual, and a hero, now reduced to a mere shadow of the man he used to be. As one frequently sees in colonial Korean fiction, Three Generations paints poverty as the ultimate emasculating force in a nascent capitalist society. In reading texts like this, one must be mindful of Harootunian’s warning against the dangers of writing an ideologically uncomplicated postcolonial history, one that trades in anti-colonial nationalism “uncontaminated by either the contagion of the colonial epoch or capitalist penetration.”11 Capitalization of colonial Korea enables many young women, both educated

and uneducated, to go outside of domestic boundaries and experience public life as consumers and workers. Moreover, as Three Generations and other works suggest, the nation’s colonization apparently improves women’s status in Korea, because the new system enables a greater number of people to experience a modernized/Western-style education, and the increase in the number of beneficiaries was especially pronounced among women. As more women received education outside of their homes their womanhood is aligned with the image of the New Woman, in contrast to the “Old Womanhood” (kuyôsông).12 Better opportunity for women’s education also meant an increased mobility for them. Through their exposure to new thoughts from the West via Japan, the newly emerging class of educated, modernized women enjoyed a greater participation in the public sphere, especially through the newly emerging mass print media, even though it remained a male-dominated and male-oriented arena. More significant, however, is the fact that these women experienced increasing personal freedom. As a recent study of colonial Korean literature indicates, women benefited the most from the access to machines and other manufactured goods of modernity in their everyday lives.13 The birth of the New Woman in the West is well documented. The first “new women” were British, whom the Japanese New Women emulated. The British New Women’s proto-feminist thoughts and writings greatly influenced Japanese women intellectuals, who forged their own identity as New Women from about 1886 to the 1920s. Although women’s education outside of their domestic space begins in the 1890s in Korea, it is not until the 1920s and 1930s that a critical mass of educated New Women is formed.14 The Korean New Woman as a cultural identity and a recognizable player appears in the early 1920s in colonial Korea’s cultural landscape as female students return from their studies abroad, particularly from Japan. From this period on until the late 1940s, the New Woman is a presence in cultural discourses as a public persona, and she also participates in these discourses as a cultural producer.15 Tragically, the Korean New Woman’s relatively high educational level and modernized consciousness essentially make her an anachronism, given her return to a socio-cultural environment that was unprepared for her. Both colonial literature and historical events show that the old concepts based on Korea’s long Confucian tradition, of hierarchies and notions of gender roles, inevitably collide with the ideals these women pursued at the time. Beginning in the 1920s, the romance and marriage of the New Woman becomes a social problem, because her romantic partners, men of equal or higher education, were almost always married men, themselves victims of the Early Marriage custom (chohonje) which had been practiced since the Chosôn dynasty. Until and even during the colonial era, many families still practiced various forms of “Early Marriage,” a tradition that refers to the custom of parents choosing spouses for their prepubescent children or, in some cases, even before they are born. The young husband and wife would live together in the same house with the parents of either spouse, from as early as nine or ten years of age. This widely practiced institution of marriage illustrates very well the importance of the family and clan over the individual’s wishes and free will in traditional Korean society. Not surprisingly, many intellectuals around the time of Korea’s colonization

voiced their opinion against this practice. Perhaps the most famous voice among them is Korea’s first modern novelist, Yi Kwang-su, who was also its victim, like many others who condemned this tradition. The abolition of the Early Marriage tradition was one of Yi’s passionate arguments addressed to the public. He pointed out the evils of this practice that did not allow individual rights and desires in making one of life’s greatest decisions, calling the traditional Korea, in its preoccupation with patrilineage, a culture “ruled by genitalia and preoccupied with reproduction.”16 The already visible lives of the New Women became sensational and notorious, through their much-discussed romantic entanglements with married men, who were typically public figures and intellectuals.17 In the romantic triangle formed between the New Man, his traditional wife and the New Woman, one woman or the other, often both, got sacrificed.18 In most cases, New Women were roundly and publicly condemned for being selfish; they were depicted in the growing mass media as selling themselves for marriage to the suitor with the highest bid in terms of financial, political, and cultural resources, using their privileged social standing and education to pursue personal fame and wealth, rather than for the greater good of the people of Korea.19 As Na Hye-sôk’s life story shows in the following pages, pioneering New Women were seen as unnatural and even monstrous when their lives did not conform to the traditional molds of mother and wife; many of them had painful personal lives marked by divorce, scandal, exile, and ostracization. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of their lives is the quality of spectatorship in their relationship with the public. In numerous instances, major events of their lives, both joyous and tragic, played out very openly for public consumption. Aside from their firsthand accounts, the lives of New Women have been recorded in magazines and in famous novels and short stories by their contemporaries, such as Yôm Sang-sôp and Kim Tong-in, and their romantic saga has a quality of art imitating life and life imitating art.20 In the renowned colonial Korean writer Ch’ae Man-sik (1902–1950)’s novel Muddy Water (T’angnyu), which was first serialized in the Chosôn Daily Newspaper (Chosôn ilbo) in 1937 and later published in book form in 1939, the main character Ch’o-bong receives modern education at a women’s school and marries a seemingly promising young banker.21 Yet the story of her life after marriage is chronicled as a litany of tragedies, beginning with her rape and widowhood, and ending with her murder of the rapist. In this novel, it is her parents who consider her marriage as a financial investment opportunity, and it is in fact her status as a female student that catches the eye of her future husband Ko T’ae-su, an adulterous embezzler. From the beginning there is a fatal flaw in Ch’o-bong’s character, which inexorably leads to her downfall: although she lives in the modern world and is herself a product of a modern educational system, the traditional familial and gender hierarchies hold her life sway. This contradiction is the cause of Ch’o-bong’s misery because the old values that she holds dear systematically destroy her. Most ironically, the fact that she puts her trust in the men in her life, as traditional women have been taught to do, first in her father, then in her ne’er-do-well husband, then in her former employer Pak Che-ho, directly contributes to her terrible predicament. The omniscient author/narrator creates a tragic, yet ultimately unsympathetic

character in Ch’o-bong, who is in turn described as a “doll” and a “robot.”22 Even after all the trials in her life and her murder of her rapist, the novel ends with a depiction of the way in which she blindly puts her trust in yet another man to come and rescue her from her misery. In real life, New Women were just as dependent on their male family members to provide for them as were the fictional characters like Ch’o-bong, and it hardly made a difference that they studied abroad and were culturally and intellectually sophisticated, and perhaps even decades ahead of their time and place. A fitting example in this vein is Na Hye-sôk (1896– 1949), a well-known historical New Woman figure. In many ways Na was representative of the 1920s’ women writers who narrativized their own stories in confessions, diaries, and letters.23 Born into a wealthy family whose patriarch had the unusual foresight to educate his daughters along with his sons, she graduated from a private art school in Japan to become the first woman painter of modern Korea. She was among the first Korean women to experience many things, and “the first” was an adjective that followed her for her entire life, garnering her honor and fame, as well as causing pain and a greater sense of failure.24 Throughout her life, she struggled towards autonomy, yet even at the height of her fame as a New Woman, a painter and a writer, she could not achieve it. Her continuous struggle against the restrictions of her time and place was in fact heroic. She was talented, yet it is important to remember that her exceptional lifestyle as a painter, writer, a world-traveler, and a glamorous sophisticate was only made possible initially by her father’s wealth which had made her education abroad possible, and later by her brother’s and husband’s support. Her incredibly privileged life blinded her to the fact that a woman’s financial independence is crucial to achieving autonomy, and her naïveté was partly responsible for her fall from grace.25 The atmosphere of 1910s Tokyo, where Na studied at an art academy, was greatly influenced by all things Western. Young Korean male students, who outnumbered women, enjoyed their freedom away from home, and all that was associated with it—their strict parents, their old-fashioned wives whom they had married often as children in arranged marriages, and everything old and feudal that was connected with their parents, family, and Korea. As for young women students, the freedom in Japan as students was perhaps even more heady and liberating, given the restrictions placed on them back in Korea. In this atmosphere, Swiss feminist Ellen Kay’s advocacy of liberal love and marriage, which was introduced to Japan in 1911 and quickly became very popular, gained faithful followers among these students, for whom even the practice of romantic courtship and love (chayu yônae) required great courage and pioneering spirit. As Yi Sang-gyông puts it (86–89), for those young Korean students who had “separated themselves from the feudal past and began breathing the air of modernity,” Ellen Kay’s writings were indeed “gospel,” for she gave them an alternative, modern ideal to the pre-modern values and judgments attached to marriage and family. However, Korea of the 1920s and 1930s was not ready for liberated women and their romance, however highly praised by the New Women and Western thinkers like Ellen Kay. Although an increasing number of New Women pursued romance, the society that still considered chastity as women’s foremost virtue mercilessly stigmatized them for doing so. Romance and courtship were socially sanctioned only after a couple became engaged. As far

as women’s role in society was concerned, educated women were more a liability than hope for the future, because unlike educated men, they could not become relatively well-paid colonial bureaucrats once they returned to Korea. Women’s education and experiences of freedom in fact worked against them, as they gave women an exhilarating taste of what could be possible, but no realistic path to actualize their dreams. In this sense, New Women were an anachronism in the colonial Korean context. When Na Hye-sôk returned to Korea after traveling the world, the disparity between the ideal(ized) West and the sober reality of her life in Korea, where she was just one part of an intricate network of hierarchical social relationships, was no doubt painfully evident. Such disparity and its depressing impressions on one’s mind was discussed by practically every writer of colonial Korea who traveled abroad. Na was an avant-garde artist and intellectual of her time, and the perceived difference between Europe and Korea was especially glaring after her lengthy travels abroad. When she returned to Korea, the repressive social customs and conventions made her long for Europe, and especially Paris. Yi Sang-gyông’s biography notes (346–47) she wrote at this point that nothing is worse than having an ideal and not being able to act upon it. If Na Hye–sôk’s twenty-one months of travel abroad were like a fantasy come true, Korean morality and social-sexual norms ensured that in reality Korean women were bound to more conservative, conventional lives. A pseudo-scientific theory that was used to argue for women’s chastity in Korea posited that after sexual intercourse, a drop of the man’s blood goes into the woman’s bloodstream, thus forever marking her offspring with a genetic imprint of all her previous sexual partners. This propaganda “proved” the necessity for women to remain faithful to one man for life. This pseudo-scientific discourse is but one example that shows the extent to which women in colonial modern Korea were subjected to a double standard in sexual mores, which insisted only on women’s chastity. In light of its oppressive, monolithic “logic,” it is not surprising to discover that this “scientific theory” was also used as an antiSemitic argument against Jewish-Aryan intermarriages. The fact that this nonsensical debate was carried out among Korea’s preeminent progressive intellectuals clearly shows the social climate, in which it was virtually impossible for New Women to live as equals with men.26 The threat to the native masculinity at this time and its trauma is overdetermined. It comes not only from the loss of nationhood through colonization, but also from the perception of what happens to native women and femininity as a result of the modernization that arrived through colonization. The birth of the New Woman, with her modern education and the cultural capital that comes with it, makes her a new object of desire, a figure that seemed to promise novel experiences of romantic love, and possibly, even an intellectual companionship. But at the same time, men and women of this era are in competition for what are clearly limited resources and privileges, such as autonomy, education, and professional leadership positions in colonial modern Korea. From the beginning, the focus of women’s education in colonial Korea was on creating a “wise mother and good wife,” or hyônmo yangch’ô. Education, in other words, was not meant to transform the women into equal beings to men, but only to improve them so that they could

be better helpmates to their husbands and rear their children more wisely. It is also revealing that the ideology and indeed the very language behind hyônmo yangch’ô come from the Japanese imperial agenda of nation-building. When the idea is transplanted to the Korean context, it becomes an ideological buttress for the recovery of the nation. In both contexts, the agenda of women’s equal rights were sacrificed to the nationalist agenda.27 As noted earlier, this politicocultural situation is very much like what Gramsci describes as an interregnum; these New Women, who were writers and artists, suffered because they did not have a recognizable pre-existing identity. Yet their seemingly new identity was not completely free of the remnants of the old world and its values. In short, the New Woman was still caught in the conventions of her times. The 1920s and 1930s were also a crucial period in which Korean femininity came under close scrutiny and came to be re-defined as a result. For the pioneering New Women of the era, their fall from grace stems from the pressure of the socio-cultural expectations for great achievements put on their shoulders, and the discrepancy between those ideals and reality. The life of Na Hye-sôk well illustrates these points. Initially, her life was one of incredible privilege and triumph, and people applauded her while she was everything to everyone—good wife, good mother, icon of modern femininity and fashion, and a celebrity artist. She gave many interviews to women’s magazines, and at first the articles praise her diligence and energy for immaculately carrying out the duties of an exemplary housewife and mother while also devoting herself to painting. But Na could not sustain her superhuman effort. To her own detriment, she makes a grave mistake of publicly confessing an extramarital affair and thus oversteps her bounds in the eyes of the public and peers who once adored her. Predictably, she is punished not only through her divorce that eventually leads to her financial ruin, but also by the public that completely ostracizes her. Biographies of other New Women, such as Kim Myông-sun and Kim Ilyôp, show that most men did not take them seriously as colleagues in cultural production and interpretation in colonial modern Korea; rather, they were more often than not seen as exotic creatures of suitable education and exposure to modernity. For male intellectuals, these women came to represent an exciting, titillating spectacle of new femininity. This is clear especially in the emphasis that girls’ schools put on fostering future “wise mothers and good wives” as the ultimate goal of their education. Although women’s education now took place outside of their home, the goal was virtually unchanged from the pre-modern times in some ways. In this cultural context, the Western notion and practice of romance between two individuals free of familial intervention was simply an ideal for Koreans, and as unconnected to everyday life as many other customs of the modern West. Many theorists of colonialism have already established that the power differential in the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, otherwise figured as the “metropolitan Self and the colonized Other,” often gets played out in terms of gender hierarchy between man and woman, and that this relationship in turn is often articulated through sexual metaphors.28 And in this way, Korea’s New Woman was caught in “multivalent colonial relationships” in which her affiliation with the West was seen as a betrayal and even a kind of metaphorical

whoring.29 That the New Woman’s association with the West and Japan was perceived as a kind of whoring is interesting, especially since in virtually all of the literature from this era, the issue of money has a looming presence in women’s lives. Money is associated with not only the finer things in life, but more poignantly, dignity. It is a matter of course in colonial literature that characters suffer indignity because of their poverty. Although poverty affects everyone in these narratives, for women in particular, their poverty and the lack of upward socio-economic mobility makes them sexually vulnerable. One finds numerous examples. For instance, the female characters P’il-sun and Kyông-ae in Yôm Sang-sôp’s Three Generations are thrown into a vulnerable position due to their poverty; they are sexually and morally compromised despite their desire to live an honorable life. What is also interesting is the novel’s ending, which hints at a romantic future for the main character Tôk-kki and P’il-sun. It suggests that the son’s generation will replicate the mistakes of the father’s generation, namely the romantic entanglements between Tôk-kki’s father Sang-hun and Kyông-ae that began as an innocent philanthropic relationship but eventually turned into an affair that compromised them both, and had she not been a courageous and resourceful character, would have ruined her life. In this vein, one can read Ch’ae Man-sik’s Muddy Water, which chronicles the tragic life of Ch’o-bong, as a cautionary tale of a young woman who repeatedly—and mistakenly—puts her trust in the men in her life, including her father who pushes her into a marriage that he sees as financially profitable for himself. Black comedy and irony characterize the storytelling of Muddy Water, however, and it pokes savage fun at the main character’s naïveté that ultimately corners her into making one bad choice after another: she passively allows herself to be seduced by the manipulative Pak Che-ho and becomes his mistress, and later still, remains passive even while Pak “hands her over” to the despicable Chang Hyông-bo, who earlier raped her and arranged for her husband’s murder. It is significant to note that throughout, the author shows that Ch’o-bong’s decisions are based on her pursuit of economic welfare, of herself and her family. These examples show that a woman’s interactions with men are never completely free of an element of economic transaction, given their unequal positions in modern Korean life and the limited choices women faced. They reveal how circumstances conspire to compel women to be supplicants vis á vis men, whether they are depending on the men for money or marriage, which often go hand in hand. This is also apparent in the historical New Woman Na Hye-sôk’s life. Although she depended on the men in her life for money, education, marriage, and protection of her honor, she failed to recognize the nature of her relationships with men in her life as profoundly dependent and unequal. In the end, this misrecognition eventually turned her into a tragic outcast from the society that once idolized her. Here then, lies the paradox of women in colonial modern Korea: while women gained unprecedented access to higher education and participation in the public sphere, their status simultaneously suffered a great blow as a result of colonization. In part, this paradox is about class difference. While colonial modernity allowed a select group of women greater freedom and opportunities for education, the lack of access to such new means of self-emancipation,

albeit only a partial emancipation, created a double(d) structure of oppression for other women. Initially, those women with a very limited access to colonial modernity shared in common, more than anything else, inherited poverty and a low class position that were carried over from the traditional Yi dynasty system of social hierarchy. However, surprising new studies show that during the early era of women’s education in Korea, lower class women often got more education.30 For many decades, scholars assumed that those women who were born into the aristocratic families or into families with financial means, which often overlapped, always gained a greater access to colonial modernity in terms of Western-style education, and their experience of colonial modernity was vastly different from that of women from lower socio-economic classes. But new studies of the period reveal that contrary to this assumption, more women from lower classes (i.e., those belonging to classes other than the aristocratic yangban class) got higher education beginning in the late 1910s on, until the once crucial distinction between aristocrats and commoners became blurred, and those with higher education became what some called aristocrats via education (hakk’yo kwijok).31 Colonial modernity in Korea, as it is with an introduction of any new way of life, redefined the center and periphery according to the degree people had access to it through various means. Colonial modernity, in short, was a process of creating the new “others” of the colonized society, for the Other is absolutely necessary for the Self to exist. I want to ask at this point with Tani Barlow, “who is the subaltern?” In her own writing on China’s modernity and gender, Barlow alludes to Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and defines the subaltern as those who are removed from the chains of upward mobility.32 Her redefinition of the subaltern is suggestive for our context of studying colonial Korean literature, as well. Female student/intellectuals or Modern Girl/New Woman had some access, albeit a limited one, to the chain of upward mobility. In this light, it is clear that within the rank of the colonized, there are divisions and hierarchies along the lines of not just one’s gender, but also one’s access to higher education, which just as effectively marginalized some women as did their gender difference. In the interregnum or kwadogi that is colonial Korea, new “others” and a new periphery were created. The society reconstructed the old hierarchical relationships of power based on people’s access to modernity, primarily through one’s access to new education associated with Japan (or the West filtered through Japan) which is clearly distinguished from the old, Sinocentric education. At the same time, all women across class boundaries were restrained further by Japanese colonial rule in Korea. The Japanese Governor-General used and reenforced the traditional neo-Confucian patriarchy already in place in Korea for the purposes of bureaucratic and economic control and surveillance of the colonial subjects. A good example of this is the so-called hojuje, literally, the “Household-Master System,” which was a modern systematization of Confucian patriarchy introduced and enforced by the Japanese GovernorGeneral, that lingered on in Korea, decades after decolonization.33 Literature of this era also shows that colonial modernity created a new socio-cultural environment in Korea through the introduction of Western discourses of gender via intellectuals who were educated in Japan or had other routes of access to foreign books and magazines. The

new discourses of gender influenced the way in which the public—in particular the intellectuals, the group most sensitive to foreign socio-cultural trends—thought about men’s and women’s roles in society. Modern times brought about new ways of choosing one’s marriage partner and new ways of expressing one’s desire that had lifelong consequences; instead of being matched by one’s parents, people began to choose their own husbands and wives. Privileged men had greater access to colonial modernity through education and capital. As a result they gained freedom and courage to make their own families, transgressing the traditional boundaries of obligation to one’s parents and ancestors. They even earned public sympathy to the degree that they were not publicly condemned for this transgression. Meanwhile, the old-fashioned wives of these men, many of whom were famous intellectuals, became unwitting victims of the situation as it was not their choice to either marry or divorce their husbands. Again, this illustrates that the paradoxes of colonial modernity are closely connected with the way in which the colonial male elite experiences and articulates the new situation. Colonial modernity created new “others” in these traditional women (kuyôsông), who had limited access to colonial modernity, and to all the mobility, greater personal freedom, and improved status such access implied. For those who were disenfranchised even before the official colonization—the poor and the uneducated women—the new system only functioned as a catalyst that deepened the class cleavages and antagonisms. “HOMONATIONAL MISOGYNY”: HYPERMASCULINITY OF THE COLONIZED SUBJECT Just as Japan was able to propel itself as a leader among Asian nations by relegating other nations to the position of the “Other,” so did the educated men of colonial Korea relegate women during this interregnum period to the position of the marginalized Other, thus maintaining their hegemony. The men’s hegemonic position in every sphere, and particularly in social and cultural spheres, was the result of their dialectical relationship with the Others, the lesser subjects of colonial modern Korea such as women and the vast majority of the uneducated populace. In discourses of competition for access to modernity men over-protest their plight, and their arguments often slide into misogynistic readings of their contemporary culture, as the earlier “drop of blood” example shows. Such a crisis of native masculinity under colonialism and its defensive posturing of “hyper-masculinity” are familiar socio-cultural and literary phenomena in semicolonial China and colonial India, as well.34 In their analysis of Korean nationalism, Choi and Kim characterize the phenomenon as “homonational misogyny,” a phrase that captures the monolithic, gender-biased nature of a particularly virulent strain of Korean nationalism. And yet, the relationship between male colonial intellectuals and New Women of colonial modern Korea is not one that renders itself to a simple summary. Much like colonial Korean intellectuals’ relationship to modernity and to Japan, the nation most strongly associated with colonial modernism and thus filled their imagination, this relationship between

male and female intellectuals and cultural producers was one of powerful attraction and romanticism on the one hand, and resentment and bitterness on the other. And it is significant to note that one finds an example of the kind of multivalent relationship between the “New Man” and New Woman as early as in Yi Kwang-su’s famous novel, Heartless (Mujông), widely recognized as the first modern Korean novel.35 In a poignant passage, the novel’s main characters Yông-ch’ae, Pyông-uk, Sôn-hyông, and Hyông-sik run into each other on a train bound for Tokyo. Believing Yông-ch’ae to be dead, Hyông-sik gets engaged to marry a rich man’s daughter and is now on his way to study in America. Meanwhile, she has been transformed, inside and out, by the New Woman Pyông-uk whom she met on her way to commit suicide. But when Yông-ch’ae finally encounters Hyôngsik after much hardship, it is the New Woman Pyông-uk—who changed her own name, from a feminine Pyông-ok to a more gender-neutral Pyông-uk—who takes control of the situation and speaks for the devastated Yông-ch’ae, while boldly gazing at Hyông-sik. Hyông-sik is mortified and stricken with guilt for giving up his search for Yông-ch’ae so quickly, yet he is also keenly aware of Pyông-uk’s teasing tone and mocking attitude towards him; she “gave him such a hard time” that “indeed, cold sweat ran down his back.”36 The passage depicts the way in which the prototypical New Woman Pyông-uk is on equal footing with the colonial intellectual Hyông-sik. Interestingly enough, the fact that she is at ease in front of him puts him at unease. Meanwhile, Yông-ch’ae remains silent, unable to articulate her own desire, hopes and past histories, i.e., her own narrative. However, the vague animosity the male colonial intellectual and New Woman in this passage initially harbor for each other seems to dissolve in the novel’s fantastic ending, in which everyone reconciles with each other and this group of young people unite in solidarity, through organizing an ad hoc relief concert at a train station to help the abjectly poor and powerless compatriots affected by the flood. In the end, the four young people are united in camaraderie and become filled with hope for the future; they revel in their sense of being the chosen ones, comrades in Enlightenment, and vow to fight against the Old and the Stagnant, and to serve their nation through educating the masses in modern ways of being. In this way, Yi Kwang-su’s novel ends with a tremendous note of triumph and hope for the nation’s future (368). Oh, oh, our land gets more beautiful by the day. Our arms, once weak and frail, get stronger by the day, and our consciousness, once dim, is becoming enlightened. Finally, we will shine, like others. . . . Let us end “Heartless,” that eulogizes the past with a happy laughter and shouts of cheers.

The novel’s last passage, for all its awkward sententiousness, is nevertheless moving because of its sentimental nationalism. It is as though the very intangible quality of the anti-colonial nationalism expressed in this text enhances its heartfelt character. And yet the exuberant ending of the novel Heartless cannot disguise the deep-seated suspicion and even hostility between the male and female intellectuals captured in the earlier passage. It reveals the trouble with Korea’s anti-colonial nationalism, namely that it expresses itself along gender and class biases. Although the burden of leading the lost nation out of backwardness and feudal stagnation into the light of the Enlightenment falls on everyone’s

shoulders, it is clearly the men who must be pioneers and forge ahead. Chatterjee’s discourse on nationalism is illustrative on this very point: If nationalism expresses itself in a frenzy of irrational passion, it does so because it selects to represent itself in the image of the Enlightenment and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it could ever actualize itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself.37

As this passage explicates, as much as men denied women’s full partnership in their anticolonial nationalist endeavors, they also desperately needed them, as their Other. Thus Korea’s anti-colonial nationalism, which is very much male-identified as a thought, gave male intellectuals an excuse to ignore women’s causes and willfully fail to recognize that they were indeed tied to the causes of the nation. As Wells analyzes in his essay on the Korean colonial women’s movement, men did not want to see gender issues as national issues. As a result, the issue of women’s liberation always had to come after the “universal” issue of Korea’s national sovereignty, and very few intellectuals and public figures saw the connection between the two causes.38 [The] normal male reluctance to surrender traditional prerogatives over women was exacerbated by the perception— or reality—that under the colonial system women, unlike men, stood to gain from social change.39

Therefore, the male intellectuals and nationalists continued to push the agenda of traditional Confucian gender hierarchy and relationships, thus lending destructive and oppressive patriarchal practices legitimacy and validity in the name of recovering Korea’s national sovereignty. For example, Wells points out that in the March 1923 general meeting of the leftwing coalition called the Chosôn ch’ôngnyôndang (Korean Youth Party), only eight out of 150 delegates were women. They proposed eight items for reform, out of which only half were approved; as Wells points out, “all the rejected items concern problems that concerned women primarily or required males to change their habits and attitudes,” such as “resistance to male violence, reform of women’s social system, support for women’s economic independence, abolition of customs disadvantageous to women,” while “the approved items all involved aspects of reform that were believed to have national implications” (206). By the 1930s, the New Woman as such had already become a fashionable lifestyle and identity, and had lost much of the previous decade’s revolutionary association. And the “revolution” in colonial modern Korea reached beyond the political arena. In 1910s, for example, the very fact that someone advocated and practiced Western-style romance and courtship (yônae) was perceived as revolutionary. But soon people got used to the brave zeitgeist embodied in such new ways for colonial modern Koreans to relate to each other. By the 1930s romance became trivialized, and came to belong in the realm of the private. It had lost its initial revolutionary significance once it became widely popular and thus familiar, and even worse, it came to denote sordid adultery, stereotypically associated in the public imagination with New Women and male intellectuals or wealthy men. This is significant, especially in light of the contemporary writers’ observations of life in colonial Korea, specifically in Seoul (kyôngsông), which evoke the kind of sophisticated, cosmopolitan ennui

that registers only after people grow tired of modernity’s breath-taking novelty. As I mentioned earlier, the New Woman and Modern Girl, another women’s identity newly coined in the 1920s to the 1930s period, were as much vilified for various real and imagined moral failings as they attracted curiosity and desire.40 This ambivalence between fascination and repulsion surfaces in literature, for instance, in which some of the representative male modernist writers of the era whom one literary critic calls the flàneurs of Seoul, describe the Modern Girl and New Woman as corrupt, soulless dolls.41 The modernist poet Kim Ki-rim, for example, writes about attractive Modern Girls who stand before a show window of the glamorous, new department stores, letting its phantasmagoria rob their soul.42 Kim Ki-rim also describes the Modern Girl figure as “ghost[s] in daylight,” a “mechanical people,” who can no longer communicate with others for having sold their souls to the devil of modernity.43 When viewed in this historical context, Three Generations’ fictional Modern Girl Kyông-ae throws an interesting light on the Modern Girl phenomenon in 1930s Korea. Like Ch’ae Mansik’s female student character Ch’o-bong, life begins to unravel for Kyông-ae with her father’s demise. Her father was an anti-colonial nationalist hero fighting for Korea’s independence, but dies in poverty and leaves his family destitute. And though Tôk-kki’s father Sang-hun, a married, much older man, initially begins his relationship with Kyông-ae out of sympathy and respect for her heroic father, their relationship soon turns into an illicit love affair. After she gives birth to his illegitimate child he leaves her to begin a new affair with yet another young female student. After this shattering experience of disillusionment, Kyông-ae goes to work at a bar to support her family and becomes a so-called “café girl” (kk’ap’e yôgûp) who is considered barely a step above prostitutes.44 The novel begins with Tôk-kki’s dramatic meeting with Kyông-ae at her bar, when his friend Pyông-hwa, a “Marx Boy,” takes him along to show off to his friend the woman he likes. This accidental meeting is all the more painful and poignant for the fact that Kyông-ae and Tôk-kki used to be childhood playmates. As in the lives of historical New Woman and Modern Girl figures, the tragedy of the fictional character Kyông-ae has to do with her wasted potential; the novel repeatedly highlights her quick wit, intelligence, and generous nature. The fateful arc of this character’s fall from a promising young teacher to an ostracized fallen woman emblematizes a certain prevalent relationship between women and the nascent colonial capitalism in Korea. It is a relationship that the text suggests is doomed to repetition. For instance, although Tôk-kki bristles at his mother’s comparison of him to his philandering father Sang-hun, he also senses that in his attempt to help a promising young woman like P’il-sun, he may follow the pattern of his father’s relationship with Kyông-ae, and that his relationship with P’il-sun cannot avoid the taint of money. Three Generations reflects that it is the combination of her allure and the lack of viable alternatives for the Modern Girl that so often traps her and seals her fate, rather than her mindless pursuit of modern glamour and wealth, as the modernist writer Kim Ki-rim suggests. The new socio-cultural situation naturally leads the institution of the family to shift and restructure during the colonial era, with often tragic consequences and human cost. The stories of this era depict family members living separate lives, the parents’ generation emotionally

disconnected from their children’s. In Kyeong-Hee Choi’s study of a contemporary Korean novel that begins in the colonial era, she points out that although the narrator and her mother live under the same roof, they in fact “occupy different time-lines.”45 That is to say, while the narrator has already entered the modern and colonial space through her Western-style education, her mother still resides very much in the pre-colonial space. I borrow this concept of contemporaries living in disparate times, for the same can be said of the characters in the novels I study here. For example, Yôm’s protagonist Tôk-kki lives with his father and grandfather in the same house, yet each man occupies disparate time-lines. The antiquity of the grandfather’s time is marked in large part by his desire for a respectable family name which he carries to such an extreme that he buys a manufactured family tree that “certifies” his family as aristocrats, despite the fact that the “value” of such aristocratic family lineage is only nominal and symbolic. It is significant that the author describes the character’s desire for social status as “oip,” a word that denotes men’s extramarital sexual relations, typically with prostitutes. The desire for social status in this context is analogous to sexual desire, as it is just as primal and irrational for this character who represents the past, stubbornly lingering in the house. He “has lived all his life as a slave to concepts such as family, name, money, family tree, and clannish instinct.”46 He tells his grandson Tôk-kki that Tôk-kki’s fate is intertwined with the key to the family’s safe. Tôk-kki even remembers how his grandfather jokingly used to threaten to lock him in the safe when he was a child. Now, after his grandfather’s death, he must shoulder the burden of protecting the family’s ancestral shrine and the keys left by his late grandfather, and it is a poignant moment when Tôk-kki realizes that his grandfather indeed ultimately locked him in the safe. In contrast to his father’s and his son’s generations, Tôk-kki’s father Sang-hun’s generation is in a way the “lost generation” identified with their failed anti-colonial nationalist endeavors. It is also the same generation that later finds itself deeply implicated in the rampant moral decay in colonial Korea. Tôk-kki observes his father in the following way: At any rate, [Tôk-kki] thought, it was as if his father was standing in the middle of a log bridge linking the feudal age and today. . . . Therefore he saw that his father was in a state of agony, whether looking at his social position, his family, or the content of his ideology.47

Although Tôk-kki is disappointed by his father’s immoral behavior and womanizing, he still feels the pathos of his father who initially tried to do some good in the world and for his country, and whose life was not always about hypocrisy and debauchery. Lastly, the main character Tôk-kki’s generation signifies the moral center and the future of Korea that sympathizes with the limited moral and political choices of his father’s and grandfather’s generations, yet vows never to repeat their mistakes. The novel ends, however, darkly foreshadowing that Tôk-kki will repeat his father’s mistakes despite himself by becoming P’il-sun’s benefactor. Equally significant in the context of this discussion is that Tôk-kki and his wife (whose early marriage was arranged by their parents) also live different time-lines, even though they are of

the same generation. Tôk-kki’s old-fashioned wife still lives in the traditional world of women’s mental and physical space, unaware of much else other than the minute concerns of everyday domestic life such as cooking, child-rearing, and getting along with her parents-inlaw. In stark contrast to her life, her husband is very much a man of his times, keenly aware of his position in colonial Korea and within his own extended family. Clearly, the distinction lies not only in which time-line a character lives (pre- or colonial), but also in their consciousness of living in their era. In his typically unsentimental manner, Yôm reveals the moral contradiction in the essentially decent protagonist Tôk-kki, and points out that it is precisely his wife’s old-fashioned, unquestioning docility and obedience that he likes about her, and that it is a good enough reason for him to overcome his lack of affection towards her and his dissatisfaction with her ignorance about worldly matters. Tôk-kki is well aware that they are two sides of the same coin. In the same vein, as his depiction in Muddy Water as an “extinct human species” indicates, Ch’o-bong’s father fails to adjust to his times and find a foothold in the new era. It is as if he is still living in the twilight years of the late Chosôn dynasty—and his half-hearted attempts to take advantage of the new system through gambling and by marrying off his daughter only lead to further disaster. His younger daughter Kye-bong, one of the novel’s few positive characters, sees right through her parents’ plan to get Ch’o-bong married off to Ko T’ae-su because of Ko’s promise to set up a shop for the family, and she openly resents her parents for “selling” Ch’o-bong as if she were a domestic animal. Ch’o-bong’s father, who lives in the past, is starkly juxtaposed against the degenerate characters like Pak Che-ho and Chang Hyông-bo, who thrive in the new environment and the new era of colonial capitalism, ruthless profiteering, backstabbing, and manipulation. In a significant detail, the character Kye-bong points out that although people like Chang Hyông-bo are morally reprehensible, in fact he has done nothing wrong in the eyes of the law. Furthermore, the modern legal system actually protects him as a citizen.48 The literary critic Kim Yun-sik posits that in step with the colony’s capitalistic development, the colonial government introduces laws that protect, if not encourage, accumulation and transfer of wealth, as evidenced by Kye-bong’s speech about the legal system.49 In addition, Kim argues that if a novel does not discuss money or accumulation and transfer of wealth, it cannot be called a “modern” fiction; thus, he emphasizes the connection between colonial capitalistic development and modern Korean fiction. The passage in which Kye-bong laments the new legal system narrativizes the moral disintegration of colonial modern Korea through a sort of synecdoche; where its denizens are only legally bound to the standards of humanity whereas in the past, they were morally bound to human decency that went beyond the written law. The changing new world order marginalizes those who are either unable or unwilling to compromise themselves in the unconscionable manner demanded of them. Some of these characters, such as the novel’s protagonist Ch’o-bong and her father, are still mired in the moral codes of the past, and thus unable to resist the violent flow of muddy water, or t’angnyu. Colonial literature reflects that under the new, harsher circumstances of colonial modern

Korea, traditional and pre-existing notions of family disintegrate. The economic exploitation of the colony and its rapid yet uneven development affected everyone’s lives in a profound way. The unemployment rate was high, especially affecting young men, who were the traditional wage-earners for their families. Many among them were educated men who could not find work, living with the pressure to provide for their families, and the guilt, rage, and self-doubt of not being able to do so. This “lumpen proletariat” population is ubiquitous in stories and novels by Ch’ae Man-sik, Yi Sang, Yôm Sang-sôp, and many other writers of the era. Ch’ae Man-sik’s short story “Idiot Uncle” (Ch’isuk), for instance, is narrated from the perspective of a “lumpen” intellectual’s ignorant nephew, who mocks his uncle that ends up in jail after getting such fine, high education.50 Even after his release from jail, the “idiot uncle” fails to make money despite his learnedness, and indeed, fails to do anything. This short story showcases Ch’ae’s major narrative technique of irony that knowingly pokes fun at not only the ignorant Japanophile nephew who worships money, but also at the ineffectiveness and inertia of the Korean lumpen population that the “idiot uncle” of the story represents. Yi Sang’s short story “Wings” (Nalgae) takes the ineffectiveness and loss of agency to a narrative—and ontological—extreme. Its first-person narrator almost becomes an infant as he sleeps all day in a coffin/womb-like room and passes his few waking hours playing with the cosmetic bottles belonging to his prostitute wife. He fails to make sense of the world, his immediate surroundings, and even his relationship to his wife. And yet in his lucid moments he suspects his wife has a murderous intent towards him. The lumpen of colonial Korea has turned into an infant in this story, worse for his flashes of momentary lucidity that throw a harsh light on the degrading circumstances of his life and their implied meanings. The people with less education who belonged in the same lower socio-economic class did not fare any better. For instance, Kim Yu-jông as well as the leftist KAPF (Korean Artista Proletaria Federatio, 1925–1935)51 writers often depict initially decent characters who learn to let go of their moral and ethical inhibitions in the face of relentless, desperate poverty.52 What is truly shocking in Kim Yu-jông’s short stories, in which characters are forced into prostitution, gambling, madness, violence, and separation, is not the break-up of the community, family, and marriage; rather, the shock comes from the way in which the stories are told, without moral qualms or hesitation, as though they are the most quotidian, commonplace happenings. In these stories, poverty shatters families and communities, as it compels the characters to sever their human relationships and replace them with mercenary and financial transactions, leaving them scattered and lost without communal, familial, and emotional roots. Due to the censorship implemented by the Governor-General, colonialism is never directly blamed for the destruction of families and communities, but the narratives’ historical context indicates how the Japanese colonization and its many evil effects scatter families and destroy communities. As these texts by representative writers such as Yi Sang, Kim Yu-jông, and Ch’ae Man-sik illustrate, colonial Korean literature presents numerous depictions of families in which the perceived masculinity of the colonized men, whether they are elite intellectuals or daylaborers, is greatly undermined by the forces of poverty. These stories reveal colonial

oppression at the root of their abject condition. More specifically, the aspect of colonialism that undermines its subjects, and colonized men in particular, is the irrationality and immorality of the system. Japanese colonialism was based on the travestied logic of the Enlightenment ideal and it was irrational in a profound way, for the violence of the colonialism did not allow its subjects to overcome their poverty and oppression through honest labor. Thus, as one critic points out, the “system” (colonialism) is a totalizing violence that “wears the garb of modernity, manifesting through the media of the law, blood-line, the nation, and one’s parents.”53 Thus “modernity” as such associated with, and supporting, the Japanese colonial rule in Korea reveals itself as a patternized violence, rather than as a set of humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment project. This world, as Yi Sang expresses in his nonsensical prose and poetry writing, and as Kim Yu-jông and Ch’ae Man-sik express through sarcasm, irony and black humor, was a world turned upside down, where no honest, innocent, or naïve person could survive with one’s morals and dignity intact.54 RAILROADS AS AN EMBLEM OF COLONIAL MODERNITY IN KOREA Widespread poverty and misery was only one, albeit predominant, facet of colonial Korea. Another facet of the times was the tremendous economic and cultural changes brought on by colonial modernity, and the technology of modernity that was best symbolized by the newly built railroads. A colonial economy is by definition exploitative. In colonial modern Korea, the railroads become an emblematic tool of colonial exploitation. They penetrated into, and linked, every sizable city, profoundly changing the way in which its people experienced time, distance and commerce, although in many ways they still lived very much the same way they used to live a century before. The railroads of colonial Korea whose two major lines were mostly completed by 1904 became, as one literary critic succinctly puts it, “the arteries of colonial economy.”55 The railroads of the era divided, shifted, and relocated its population in a way never seen until then, further exacerbating the disruption and instability of the institution of family in the colony. For instance, many working class people and even the working poor rode the rails for the first time, seeking employment outside of their home towns and often, in far-flung places like Japan, Manchuria, and Kando. In this way colonial literature reveals another paradox of colonial modernity in Korea, this time embodied in the railroads, which are a powerful symbol of modernity in colonial Korea. In many novels written during the era, the railroads play such a central narrative role that they almost become an independent character in themselves. From Yi Kwang-su’s Heartless to Yôm Sang-Sôp’s Before the Cheers56 and Ch’ae Mansik’s Muddy Water, the railroads provide a dramatic device that allows characters to arrive and leave home (for Japan or even America) and for lovers and friends to fatefully, dramatically encounter or miss each other. Since relatively few Korean readers at this time had experienced riding in the trains, it was an exciting narrative technique to provide not only a convenient yet dynamic background for stories, but also to give it an aura of the exotic and even mystery. The entity behind the railroads’ aura, so pregnant with meanings, was modernity

itself; the railroads emblematized this modernity in the stories of the era, with their efficiency, power, and technological ability to collapse time and distance. The literature of this era shows that more than any of the other trappings of modernity, the Japanese empire’s relentless push to construct the railroads and exploit cheap colonial Korean labor, linking the Korean peninsula and Manchuria, for example, came to represent that which differentiated this era from the previous system of rule and its ideology. While adherence to neo-Confucianism ruled the old system of the Yi dynasty and the Korean way of life, the new system of government distinguished itself through its association with the logic of modernity that provided rationality, support, and justification of the system. Railroads in colonial Korean literature were an emblem of this new system of governing and lifestyle. In Ch’ae Man-sik’s Muddy Water the travel itself seemingly provides the character Ch’obong some sense of relief from the oppressive circumstances of her life, but her life takes yet another tragic turn through her fateful encounter with her former employer Pak Che-ho in the train. In his novel written in 1937, the author deploys a narrative technique that one often sees in modern Korean literature, namely an accidental meeting between characters on the train as a device to advance and complicate the plot. When for the first time in her life Ch’o-bong makes a decision and acts on it, it is to leave her hometown Kunsan for Seoul on a train. But when she encounters Pak Che-ho in the train car, she falls into her old ways and yields the control over her life to Pak, thus inviting another disaster. During this railroad trip to Seoul, Pak seduces Ch’o-bong, who fails to resist him.57 In the context of the narrative, the railroad functions like a double-edged sword that represents the excitement of the new and its dizzying possibilities on the one hand, and on the other, just another chance for men in Ch’o-bong’s life to entrap her and further push her further degradation. When Ch’o-bong leaves Kunsan after Ko T’ae-su’s death to start a new life, she takes off her wedding ring and arranges her hair in a fashion popular among female students. Her physical appearance symbolically indicates her new status as a single woman and a return to her old identity. However, her identity from this point on in the narrative is far from stable, because from the moment she marries Ko T’ae-su, she feels herself split into two people, and the shock of his sudden murder and her rape by Chang Hyông-bo further confuses her about her self-identity and motivations. The division that Ch’o-bong perceives in herself is telling, for it confirms my reading of this character as an individual living in the wrong period. As her sister Kye-bong points out, Ch’o-bong belongs in the world of traditional folktales about filial daughters that “The Tale of Sim Ch’ông” represents, in the world of the golden past that handsomely rewards a daughter’s self-sacrifice for her father.58 In the real world of her own time, Ch’o-bong’s passivity and self-effacing attitude only entraps and propels her further into self-destruction. Her instability and split sense of self are connected to the paradox of colonial modernity in that the split in her identity is a result of the rapid yet uneven modernization of this colonial female subject. Her predicament is comparable to that of Korean colonial cities such as Seoul and Pusan; while externally she appears modern, her consciousness and identity belong to the mythic golden past in the world of “The Tale of Sim Ch’ông.” As a result, the two components

of her being cannot integrate harmoniously. We might return at this point to examine the life of Na Hye-sôk, and note that it also follows a certain narrative trajectory of rise and fall, intertwined with issues surrounding travel and mobility. The biographical details of her life and physical journeys are especially relevant as they show that while her extremely rare privilege of global mobility added to her celebrity, it also contributed to her ruin in the end. Na married Kim U-yông in 1920, who steadily rose to a high colonial diplomatic position. In 1927 while Kim was stationed in Manchuria as a highranking colonial bureaucrat, she accompanied him on his world tour, which was an opportunity the Japanese Governor-General presented to the colonial bureaucrats stationed in remote colonial posts of the empire.59 The couple left Pusan in June of 1927 by train to go to Seoul, Sinûiju, and Harbin (where she got a page-boy haircut, causing a sensation when the news reached Korean newspapers a year later), then boarded on the trans-Siberian line to arrive in Moscow. It was July when they went through eastern Europe and arrived in Paris. The couple traveled all over western Europe and arrived in New York in September of 1928. They then traveled East Coast cities, went to San Francisco, and then to Japan, eventually returning to Pusan in 1929. They had traveled for 21 months.60 It was in Paris that she met Ch’ôe Rin, a renowned nationalist hero and one of the thirty-three signatories of the 1910 Korean Declaration of Independence. Na had a brief affair with him while traveling Europe, and still under the spell of her heady European experience, confessed to it to her husband who eventually divorced her in 1930.61 Her travels to the exotic places that few Korean men, let alone its women, ever saw added to her already established celebrity as the first and the most glamorous modern Korean female artist. In colonial Korea’s cultural atmosphere in which so many desperately desired such tremendously rare mobility and cultural exposure into the West, her extensive travels were considered an achievement in itself. However, this painful period of her life, as per usual for her, was publicly played out for all to see; her husband Kim U-yông demanded divorce and her pleas with both Kim and Ch’ôe Rin fell on deaf ears. The public opinion turned against her, leaving her physically isolated and financially and emotionally ruined. The public opinion was a crucial element in her lifestyle and fame as a cultural figure, a New Woman, because it contributed to her reputation as did her talent as a painter. As Na’s critical biography would point out, her almost shocking naïveté in presuming a ready forgiveness for her indiscretion, not only by her husband and family but also by the public, led to her tragedy. But in the end, it was the great chasm between her idealistic views of romance, marriage, and women’s autonomy, which were so progressive for her time as to seem unrealistic, and what her society was willing to tolerate, that precipitated her demise. She had famously written in an essay that a woman’s chastity is not a mandate but a hobby, and a matter of personal taste. Also, albeit in an indirect fashion, her fall from grace had much to do with her mobility. She had seen too much of the world and attempted to replicate the Western ideals of romance and selfhood in an environment that was far from ready for such transgressions. Estranged from her family and friends, she died a homeless vagrant. The increased mobility, the newly established connection between what were until then far

away places, and the speed with which such mobility and connection became a part of everyday reality was indeed incredible for most of the public. The railroads in colonial Korea —in literature as well as in real life—divided the nation along gender and socio-economic lines, as richer men rode them far more than did the women or the poor. Ironically, while transporting colonial bourgeoisie, railroads also provided a convenient way to transport cheap native laborers en masse to remote parts of the nation, as well as to Japan and further to Manchuria. Before the Cheers, for instance, reflects how the railroads in modern Korea accommodated the colonials who used them to move Korean laborers to remote locations where they worked for virtually slave wages. A poignant passage describes a conversation between two Japanese colonials on a ship to Korea which the protagonist Yi In-hwa overhears. In a public bath an experienced Japanese colonial boasts to another, a relative newcomer to Korea, that he is in the business of luring and shipping off Korean manual laborers (whom he refers to as “yobo,” a derogatory term used by Japanese colonials to designate Koreans, especially the poor and the manual laborers). Once lured outside of the country, they must carry out dangerous jobs in mines in Kando and Manchuria. Furthermore, he claims that Korean workers are so ignorant and desperate for work that they are only too glad at the chance to leave Korea.62 The casual callousness of the conversation shocks and enrages the protagonist, but he is impotent to bring about change despite his empathy for his countrymen. The passage illustrates the paradoxical flip-side of Korea’s colonial modernity itself, embodied in the railroads’ miraculous convenience and speed, which is the deployment of railroads by colonials and the colonial government as a crucial instrument to exploit the colony’s human and other resources. CONCLUSION: PSYCHIC DISAVOWAL OF THE COLONIZED—THE AMBIVALENCE OF COLONIAL INTELLECTUALS The introduction of colonial modernity aroused in colonial intellectuals a great desire to know and somehow possess and become a part of it; many also believed that becoming more modern was the only viable way to overcome Japan’s colonial rule. In the end, the freedom of the new that colonial modernity offered came at a dear cost for the colonized, as Na Hye-sôk’s life exemplifies. Colonial Korean intellectuals had to struggle with the great gap between what they imagined modernity could give them and what they experienced in their daily lives. From the beginning of the colonial period, and especially towards the end of colonial rule, Korea’s colonial intellectuals tried to free themselves and their nation by acquiring more education and exposure to Western culture, which were synonymous with modernity at the time, as they believed it would give them ammunition against the Japanese colonial regime. However, their struggle was not successful, partially due to the fact that the Japanese colonial education was geared toward obliterating Koreans’ national consciousness and re-making them as good colonial subjects. As Japan entered the war in the late 1930s, in particular, the colonial government tried to impress a false consciousness of “naisen ittai” (naesôn ilch’e in Korean) in the minds of Koreans, for the empire greatly needed its colonial subjects’ cooperation in the

war efforts.63 The propagandistic element of Korean colonial education supports Nandy’s claim that imperialism greatly depends upon the “pathology of existing conventionality and common sense.”64 Indeed, the whole phenomenon of “pot’ong hakk’yo” or “Normal School” set up by the colonial regime was based on this idea. What the military-based colonial rulers wanted was not a class of exceptional individuals, but rather, one or two such individuals as native leaders and the rest as faithful followers or “normal” students; commonsensical, healthy, and most importantly, unquestioningly obedient foot-soldiers in all arenas of colonial society. Japanese colonizers wanted Koreans to be non-intellectuals, to be skilled craftsmen and artisans with practical skills for the ever-expanding colonial and global capitalist market. As a result of the psychical violence colonialism perpetrates, the colonized self becomes divided. This is especially obvious among the intellectuals of the era. The colonized separate from their inner selves, so that they may survive and stay human. In many cases, this is done through making their surroundings disappear in various ways. One instance is the famous nationalist poet, Han Yong-un, who became dead to the mundane world by becoming a Buddhist monk. His immersion in the Buddhist way of life was his method of splitting the self, as a way to survive the colonial period. But for many others, the psychical wounds are more apparent, particularly in their divided loyalty and cultural identity, as I illustrated with fictional and historical examples of New Women and others who spent their youth in Japan. Colonial intellectuals achieve the psychic disavowal of their “Koreanness” through modern education; and yet it is simultaneously also what enables them to articulate the injustice of the Korean colonial situation and allows them to express effectively their anti-colonial nationalism. Faced with such a predicament, they ultimately fail to create a viable alternative to the Old and the Dead, Yi Chosôn dynasty, and the New that was yet unborn, independent modern nation of Korea. The unresolved issues from the colonial era remain after decolonization, partly because Korea’s long-awaited decolonization is realized through external forces rather than through Korea’s internal struggle. Meanwhile, colonial intellectuals were caught in the space of interregnum where “morbid symptoms” abounded. NOTES 1. For further historical examination on this issue, see Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 59. 2. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 7. 3. See for example, Yi Kyông, Patterns of Adapting Modernity in Korean Modern Novel (Han’guk kûndaesosôl’ûi kûndaess’ông suyong’yangsik, Seoul: T’aehaksa), 40. Yi cites Anthony Giddens, who claims that the birth and development of capitalism causes the end of traditional, communal way of life, and explains that one important way in which Japanese

colonialism caused this shift in colonial Korea was through a land survey carried out by the orders of the colonial Governor General. 4. Not everyone agreed on the designation of the “New Woman” even during the colonial era. Often, people saw it as an exclusive group, something that one belonged to only after meeting a set of criteria such as education, money, status and even where they received their education. For a longer discussion on the nomenclature, see Mun Okp’yo, et al., The New Woman: Images of Modern Woman in Korea and Japan (Sinyôsông: hang’guk’kwa ilbon’ŭi kŭndae yôsôngsang, Seoul: Ch’ong’nyonsa), 2000. 5. The critic Kim Yun-sik terms this ambivalent mix of feelings such as romanticization, nostalgia, envy, resentment, and anger that the male intellectuals had towards Japan, “hyônhaet’an complex.” Hyônhaet’an is the body of water between the Korean peninsula and Japan. Kim Yun-sik, Study of Im Hwa (Im Hwa Yôn’gu, Seoul: Munhak Sasangsa, 1993), 13. 6. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (London: Oxford University Press, 1983), xvi. 7. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 276. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, eds. 8. Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi, eds ., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 219. 9. Yôm Sang-sôp (1897–1963). Three Generations (Samdae, Seoul: Munhaksasangsa, 1986, 1931). 10. Yôm, Three Generations, 69. 11. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 51. 12. Kyeong-Hee Choi, “Neither Colonial nor National: The Making of the ‘New Woman’ in Pak Wansô’s ‘Mother’s Stake 1,’” in Shin and Robinson, Colonial Modernity in Korea, 236. 13. Cho Yông-bok, The Modernity and the Quotidian of Korean Modern Literature (Han-’guk Modônisûm Munhak’ûi Kûndaesông’gwa Ilss’angsông, Seoul: Taunsaem, 1997), 147. 14. Ch’ôe Hye-sil, Of What Did the New Women Dream? (Sinyôsôngdûl’ûn muôsûl kk’umkk’uôtnûng’ga, Seoul: Saeng’gag’ûi namu, 2000), 171. 15. For more detailed account of this history see Ch’ôe, Of What, 160–65. 16. Yi Kwang-su, Collected Writings of Yi Kwang-su (Yi Kwang-su Chônjip, Seoul: Samjungdang, 1962), and also Ch’ôe, Of What, 95–96. 17. Ch’ôe, Of What, 174. 18. Ch’ôe, Of What, 301. 19. But biographical data and statistics of New Women show that the stereotype of them as gold diggers did not hold. For example, Ch’ôe Hye-sil’s data analysis shows that most New Women pursued romance in choosing their marriage partner, rather than financial wealth. Ch’ôe, Of What, 171–93. 20. For examples of Korean novels and short stories based on the lives of the New Women, see Ch’ôe, Of What, 275–76. 21. Ch’ae Man-sik, Muddy Water (T’angnyu, Seoul: Munhak Sasangsa, 1994, 1937).

22. Ch’ae, Muddy Water, 314. 23. Ch’ôe, Of What, 131. 24. There were only three other Western painters who preceded her in Korea at the time, all of whom were men. Yi Sang-gyông, I Want to Live as a Human Being: The Eternal New Woman Na Hye-sôk (Ing’gan’ûro Salgo Sip’tt’a: Yôngwônhan Sinyôsông Na Hye-sôk, Seoul: Han’gilsa, 2000), 65–67. 25. Yi, I Want to Live, 45, 77. 26. Ch’ôe, Of What, 327–30. 27. Ch’ôe, Of What, 34–36, 206–7. 28. Chungmoo Choi and Elaine H. Kim Eds., Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 14. 29. Choi, “Neither Colonial nor National,” 28. 30. Ch’ôe, Of What, 81, 171. 31. Ch’ôe, Of What, 92. 32. Tani Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 33. Choi, “Neither Colonial nor National,” 238. The system was finally abolished in March of 2005. 34. See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, and Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 35. Heartless (Mujông) is generally regarded as the first modern Korean novel. Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950) wrote it for a serialization in a newspaper Maeil Sin’bo in 1917. (Seoul: Ushinsa, 1979, 1917). 36. Yi , Heartless, 329–30. 37. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, 17. 38. Kenneth M. Wells, “The Price of Legitimacy: Women and the Kûnuhôe Movement, 1927–1931” in Shin and Robinson, Colonial Modernity in Korea, 191–220. 39. Wells, “The Price of Legitimacy,” 204. 40. I do not make a clear distinction between New Woman and Modern Girl here as the two identities are often conflated in discussions of modern Korea, though the New Woman has stronger connotations of high education. These identities, especially Modern Girl, were often used to describe kk’ap’e yôgûp, the young women working at cafes and bars whom the public perceived as not so removed from kisaeng, female entertainers, or even kalbo, prostitutes. 41. Cho Yông-bok, The Modernity and the Quotidian of Korean Modern Literature, 88. 42. Korean modernist writers’ worldview of this era was based on the belief that reality could not be understood in terms of rational causal relationships, human beings are innately alone, and that real communication and solidarity between people are impossible. The literature that expressed such thoughts and emotions was considered modernist literature. Ed., Kim Jae-yong, et al., History of Modern Korean Nationalist Literature (Han’guk kûndae

minjok munhaksa, Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1993), 645. 43. Cho Yông-bok, The Modernity and the Quotidian of Korean Modern Literature, 92, 95. 44. Cho Yông-bok , The Modernity and the Quotidian of Korean Modern Literature, 114. 45. Choi, “Neither Colonial nor National,” 231. Her essay is a reading of Mother’s Stake I by the Korean contemporary writer Pak Wan-sô. 46. Cho Nam-hyôn, Korean Novel and Conflict (Hang’guk Sosôlgwa Kaldûng, Seoul: Munhakk’wa Pip’yôngsa, 1990), 187. 47. Yôm, Three Generations, 58. 48. Ch’ae, Muddy Water, 490. 49. Kim Yun-sik, “Ch’ae Man-sik’s Philosophy of Life and Authorial Method,” in Ch’ae, Muddy Water, 509–17. 50. Ch’ae Man-sik, “Idiot Uncle” (Ch’isuk), 1938. First published in Tong’a ilbo (Tong’a Daily). 51. For more detailed discussions on KAPF see Kim, History of Modern Korean Nationalist Literature. 52. Yi Kyông, Patterns of Adapting Modernity in Korean Modern Novel, 113. 53. Yi Kyông, Patterns of Adapting Modernity in Korean Modern Novel, 67. Here Yi’s discussion is focused on work. His characterization of the colonial system in Korea is similar to the Althusserian concept of State Apparatus, especially of the Ideological State Apparatus. See Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86. 54. Passive anti-colonial resistance through art is a related and much debated issue. Shu-mei Shih writes in the above mentioned text (113) regarding semi-colonial Chinese modernist writings that, “even escape could be construed as a form of protest, since alienation from society often indicated the individual’s sense of nihilism toward desired social transformation.” Though he was never politically involved in openly anti-colonial groups or movements, the Korean writer Yi Sang’s exceptional individuality as an artist made him write poems that aggressively went against what is commonsensical and conventional, the very virtues on which Japanese colonial system depended. His escape as a form of protest came through the way in which he threatened logic, conventionality, and normalcy in his experimental writings—all concepts that are connected to colonial logic and rationality—by leading his reader to question the legitimacy of such readily accepted categories. 55. Mun Hûng-sul, The Author and Postmodernism (Chakkawa t’algûndaesông, Seoul: Kip’ûnsaem, 1997), 165. Kyông’in railroads connecting Seoul an Inch’ôn were built between 1897.5 and 1900.8 and Kyôngbu railroads connecting Seoul and Pusan were built between 1901.8 and 1904.11. 56. Yôm Sang-Sôp, Before the Cheers (Mansejôn, Seoul: Ch’angjakk’wa Pip’yôngsa, 1987, 1924). The novel is in the form of a travelogue, in which the protagonist Yi In-hwa, upon receiving the urgent message of his wife’s grave illness, travels from Tokyo, where he had been studying, to his parents’ home in Seoul, traveling on a ship and then via railways.

57. Ch’ae, Muddy Water, 186–297. 58. In “The Tale of Sim Ch’ông” the titular character volunteers herself as a human sacrifice to appease the sea, in exchange for a promise to cure her old father’s blindness. A rich man marries her upon hearing her touching tale and at her wedding feast she reunites with her father, whose blindness is instantly cured from the shock of reuniting with the daughter he had presumed dead. Ch’ae, Muddy Water, 212. 59. Yi Sang-gyông, I Want to Live, 199. 60. Yi Sang-gyông, I Want to Live, 305. 61. Yi Sang-gyông, I Want to Live, 316, 359–71. 62. Yôm, Before the Cheers, 576–81. 63. This was propaganda used especially during the war years, which claimed Japan and Korea are literally one body with a shared fate. For a more in-depth discussion on this issue, see Ss’ial Kyoyuk Yôn’guhôe, ed., Japanese Education of Colonial Subjects and Elementary School (Ilche hwangminhwa kyo’yukk’wa kung’min hakk’yo, Seoul: Han’ul, 1995). 64. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 44.

Chapter Two

Burden of the Past: Confessional Writings in the Space of Decolonization

SHAME AND COLLABORATION When Im Chong-guk’s Study of Colonial Collaborationist Literature (Ch’inil munhangnon) was published in 1966, it shocked and saddened many scholars of modern Korean literature who had not realized that so many of the leading writers and intellectuals of the colonial era, including the founding fathers of modern Korean literature Yi Kwang-su and Ch’ôe Nam-sôn, had left a legacy of collaborationist literature. Indeed, few issues in Korean literature incite such intense and emotional reaction as that of colonial collaboration. Until 1945, and perhaps even today to a degree, writers and intellectuals were seen as nationalist heroes and defenders of sacred national conscience and spirit, and Korean language was imbued with the essence of national spirit and purity of emotion.1 The very word for collaborator (ch’i-nilp’a) is pregnant with suggestions of ill-gotten gains and betrayal of one’s own people. As it is true of other emotionally fraught historical issues, the politics of the nomenclature surrounding the issue itself is a problem. Beside ch’inilp’a there are other terms like puil hyômnyôkcha, which is closer to the English word “collaborator” yet it does not have the emotional impact of the word ch’inilp’a.2 Given Korea’s tumultuous history of the last century, it is exceedingly difficult to examine modern literature while considering only the “facts” and the resulting artistic output after certain pivotal events and actions. A close inspection of colonial writers’ collaboration through writing of pro-Japanese literature is one such instance.3 Furthermore, as one critic points out, this particular body of literature may be the most dramatic expression of the colonial writers’ dilemma and also of their attempt to overcome the Western model of modernity.4 The period of the three years after the Liberation, until the establishment of the Republic of Korea on August 15th, 1948, was full of promise and possibility; but at the end of the three years, the nation was divided in two and foreign military governments came to occupy both South and North Koreas. Korean scholars use the term “haebang kong’gan” (space of decolonization) to indicate the hopeful yet chaotic period of the three years from the

decolonization to the national division and separate elections taking place in South and North. The “space of decolonization” connotes a symbolic space and a site of geo-political, ideological, and moral struggles, as much as it denotes the specific time and place. It also had the trappings of a semi-feudal colonial society, due to the old system of production still in place, as well as a rigid traditional class system (rigid despite the fact that the formal class system was abolished in the last years of the Chosôn dynasty) that continued to determine the nation’s political economy.5 Some scholars have argued that in the “space of decolonization” meaning and everyday reality cannot be united, because political ideology has taken over the meaning of everyday life. Moreover, this space is without time—or more specifically, it is a space where chronological continuity is virtually impossible. And in such a site, one cannot act righteously.6 It is a kind of Gramscian interregnum, in which time stops to function the way it is traditionally meant to function, i.e., towards completion. Instead, in the “space of decolonization” the nation’s fate was mired in the division of the land and the establishment of two ideologically opposed regimes. Progress and completion towards an independent, united nation were indefinitely postponed in this way. The period between the years 1945–1948 was clearly a transitional period, and during this time the nation’s leading writers and intellectuals were called upon to make a fresh start by purging their past mistakes of collaboration through self-criticism. Many people, including those intellectuals who had left Seoul to live in the countryside, did not discover that their nation had been decolonized until a day or two later. Once they realized what had happened, leading writers and intellectuals gathered in the capital on August 17th for the first writers’ meeting. At this meeting, some participants immediately raised the question of colonial collaboration. At the second such meeting in December with the heading of “Self-Criticism of the Literati,” that very question had indeed become a major issue among those who had gathered, and it soon turned into mutual attack among some.7 Given the decades-long history of scholarship on this subject, freshly assigning blame to those writers who eventually collaborated with the colonial regime would be pointless and even cruel. Rather, I will examine the connection between the era’s leading intellectuals’ sense of self-identity, their colonized condition, and their role as intellectual and moral leaders for the less educated (and thus assumed to be less enlightened) masses, which harkens back to the traditional Chosôn values rooted in neo-Confucianism. The following discussion focuses mostly on male writers, whose privileged socio-cultural position at the time is unquestionable. What I attempt here is to bring into light the kind of influence the circumstances around Korea’s decolonization had on its literature, and the subsequent production of confessional and repentant literature by some of the leading literary figures in the immediate postcolonial period, from 1945–1948. Interestingly, these writings—which I will call “confessional writings”—are almost always short stories, rather than non-fiction. Such writerly disguise through a fictional alter-ego seems to indicate the writers’ sense of shame and self-loathing, a prominent narrative thread in these writings. The confessional writings I examine show that the lack of autonomy or self-mastery is central to the narratives of writers I examine for this discussion, such as Yi Kwang-su, Ch’ae Man-sik, Yi T’ae-jun, and Chi Ha-ryôn.

The shame and self-loathing that is central to each narrative here not only stems from the authors’ memory of their collaborative acts, but also originates from their recognition that they have failed to act their proper positionality as cultural leaders and elite (male) subjects in a deeply patriarchal culture, and perhaps most importantly, from their experience of the lack of autonomy. Autonomy is an essential condition for being a modern subject,8 and thus, these colonial writers could never be modern even while they lived through the maelstrom of the constant changes that characterize the modernity of the early twentieth century. Modernity is a movement of mastery, of nature through cultivation, of the body through medicine, discipline, and hygiene, of the randomness and chaos of life through law, and of oneself through the practice of autonomy. Hence the essential condition of being a modern subject is an impossible ideal for a colonial subject: the one who lacks autonomy can never be fully modern. The writers’ self-perception of their own weakness in terms of their lack of autonomy is almost as much a source of self-loathing as the fact of collaboration, even though the latter is in part a function of their lack of autonomy, which in turn is an aspect of their colonized condition. The confessional literature of the immediate postcolonial years, then, is a site where issues of emotion, modernity, and identity come to a head within and surrounding the subject of the male intellectual. Such consciousness is intricately tied to their self-conception as male and elite subjects of their society, and must be understood in the context of the incessant financial, political, and cultural pressure under which they produced their texts. Perhaps no other writer represents this predicament better than Ch’ae Man-sik (1902– 1950). In some of his most noteworthy postcolonial writings he writes about shame and regret, and a uniquely Korean situation: unlike other colonies Japan tried to convert the emotions and sensibilities of Koreans to those of Japanese, as well as exploit its people and natural resources for Japan’s economic gain. These writings, such as “Criminal of the People,” show that at its core his sense of shame comes from the embarrassment of not performing his proper positionality, and moreover, of losing the mastery/ autonomy over himself. This autobiographical short story opens with a description of writers’ typical lifestyle. According to the narrator, the author’s alter-ego, the so-called writers rise a little later than everyone else then visit their friends in literary business for a lighthearted chat or a discussion of literature, sitting in a same spot for hours. He seems to deride this lifestyle but lives it himself. A fateful visit a few months after the national liberation, during which he was confronted and thoroughly humiliated by an old acquaintance Yun at his friend Kim’s magazine editorial office also begins in this typical manner.9 Yun is among those he fears the most because he did not collaborate with the colonial authorities, while it is a public knowledge that the narrator himself ultimately did. The narrator describes his sense of defeat mixed with rage, and also a deeply felt shame that makes his own body seem like a “miserable piece of flesh” (kuch’asûrôn nae momdông’i). After his humiliating encounter, he is bed-ridden for half a month, unable to face the world. His shame also makes him feel divorced from his body and alienated from himself to the point of wanting to deny that his body, which continues to exist after such a devastating incident, is his own. In his discourse of the individual’s development, Sigmund Freud describes the origin and

function of the “sense of guilt” as a condition for the existence of civilization. The important distinction, between the kind of shame and regret expressed in the writings I examine here and what Freud theorizes in his seminal work Civilization and Its Discontents, is that the Freudian concept of guilt functions to instill fear, rather than shame.10 This “sense of guilt” is a built-in system of check within oneself against aggressive instincts. It deters one from transgressions, and often, from even thinking about transgressive acts by making one feel guilty even before the act. The role of the super-ego is central to this mechanism because it is the fear of the superego, originally connected to the fear of parental punishment, which keeps one’s aggressiveness in check.11 On the other hand, Gerhart Piers’ influential analysis argues that one feels shame when “one fails to achieve a goal or an ideal that is integral to one’s self-conception,” whereas one feels guilty when “one transgresses a boundary or limit” set by one’s authority. In other words, Piers writes, “shame goes to failure, guilt to transgression.”12 Likewise, we see that “I” narrator’s shame in Ch’ae Man-sik’s narrative is of someone who acts as his own judge and sees himself as a moral failure and a man who lacks self-mastery. What torments Ch’ae Man-sik or his literary alter-ego after his collaboration is his own recognition that he has failed others that look up to him, those who are lesser than him. And from his perspective, such lesser subjects include his own family as well as those Korean youths who follow his career, read his books, and even personally visit him for advice. His short story depicts an exchange with a youth named Yi, for instance, who comes to seek his advice and to vent his rage against the colonial rule. Although initially wary of the youth and his friends who may be spying on his activities, the narrator soon realizes their sincerity, and even while he continues to make speeches praising the empire’s war efforts, he privately encourages Yi to avoid enlisting in the imperial army. During this conversation Yi openly weeps, unable to contain his rage and frustration, which also brings the narrator close to tears.13 At the same time, he feels intensely ashamed for having questioned the young people’s true motivation for wanting to meet with him in private. In looking back, the first-person narrator confesses his past in the following way (32): Many clever people followed the Japanese for their own self- interest and safety. And not a small number of people submitted to the Japanese because they did not have the courage to endure oppression. Those who had courage, and who hated submission, left the country and struggled for the people’s liberation. Those who were even more courageous did not go into exile, but went underground, and continued their struggle. As for myself, not being courageous or clever, I became one of those weak and foolish husbands who submitted in the end, even though it was not my true intention.

The passage reveals the tortured inner-workings and the calculations of a husband and a father, who must also act his public role as a figure that others respect and emulate. The keywords such as weak, foolish, husband, and intention, betray his ambivalence. He was weak and foolish, he regrets. And his shameful collaboration went against his own intention. However, his position as a husband and patriarch also demanded that he provide for his family. There is a certain tone of defensiveness there as well. In his depiction of this last question—the very question of his family’s daily sustenance— Ch’ae Man-sik’s writing eloquently reveals a vulnerable colonial subject who struggles

against the oppressive forces of the system. The quotidian demands of food threaten to overwhelm him, especially when he is jailed arbitrarily and tortured. In jail, he measures time only in terms of the food he receives in his cell, and comes to see himself as nothing more than a pig with no conscious thought other than the next meal. In the end, the material conditions for providing food that barely allow his family’s survival during the last years of the colonial era —which depend on his being out of jail—trap him into becoming something that he considers as less than human, i.e., a pig and a collaborator. Furthermore, collaborating with the colonial authorities allows him to continue and sell his writing, an activity that metaphorically turns him into a “prostitute” in his own eyes. Thus “Criminal of the People” illustrates the dual pressure put on the author: of the colonial authoritarian rule and its micro-level network of disciplinary practices, of surveillance, punishment and rewards on the one hand (which are positively Foucauldian), and on the other, the basic yet overwhelming obligation to feed his family. Ultimately, it is the small, everyday humiliations and violence that defeat him. In the narrative, the indignity of having to discuss his family’s hand-to-mouth existence both reveals the author’s shame and yet obscures it. He repeatedly mentions his shame yet the detailed explanation of the circumstances surrounding his collaboration serves to curiously blur the emotional clarity of the text. It was perhaps the writers’ gesture of impotent self-loathing and passive resistance; whatever the reason, I could not locate even a handful of collaborationist literature with literary merit in the Study of Colonial Collaborationist Literature. The writings are transparently propagandistic, designed to indoctrinate the reader with preposterous sentiments about the glory of the Japanese empire. For example, Ch’ae’s pro-Japanese writings from 1943 overflow with contrived and exaggerated sentiments justifying the rationality of Korea’s colonization, and with praise of those who work tirelessly for the empire.14 The voice in such essays and reports doesn’t seem to belong to the same inspired writer who penned Peace under the Heaven (T’aep’yông ch’ônha, 1938) and Muddy Water (T’angnyu, 1937), with his mastery of sarcastic wit, caustic humor, and devastating psychological insight. EMOTIONS RUNNING HIGH: DECOLONIZATION AND ITS AFTERMATH In 1986, two more volumes of Selected Works of Japanese Colonial Collaborationist Literature (Ch’inil munhak chakp’um sônjip) were published. Again, they contain a virtual “who’s who” of colonial Korean writers, including the “father of modern Korean literature,” Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950).15 Also included are works by such colonial luminaries as Ch’oe Nam-son (1890–1957), Kim Tong-in (1900–1951), and Chu Yo-han (1900–?), established writers who helped shape modern Korean literature. In colonial Korea, in a situation that outlaws any and all political activity, the only legal activity left is literary in nature, hence to be a poet and writer in such a context implies “wearing the sacred veil of political activism.”16 Thus, these writers either became revolutionaries, or at least were viewed as such regardless of their own wishes: they inevitably came to shoulder the burden of protecting the national spirit and voicing an anti-colonial nationalist sentiment.

Many scholars have posited that the philosophy of the aristocratic class during the last years of the colonial rule and in the period immediately following the decolonization was a profound sense of loss, particularly of the father and the nation.17 They also regard a group of writers on the political Right who opposed the leftist writers such as Im Hwa and Kim P’al-bong, after the decolonization, as inheriting and continuing this elitist aristocratic position that goes back five centuries and connects to the Chosôn dynasty’s neo-Confucian patriarchal tradition. The word sônbi (scholar official) succinctly captures the value invested in such learnedness, cultural refinement and Confucian leadership. Hence, according to the nation’s long-standing neo-Confucian tradition of public intellectualism and reverence towards the most learned and morally righteous members of the society (two qualities that were often conflated with each other, sometimes mistakenly) the public not only regarded these figures as famous writers, but also as opinion leaders who provide a moral guidance for them. The fall of the “great men” in the face of the colonial authorities’ mounting pressure is in itself tragic, but the tragedy becomes more poignant upon considering the kind of teacher-pupil relationship then in place between these cultural leaders and the general public, even those who were illiterate, that revered these illustrious compatriots. The emotional legacy of colonial intellectuals’ collaboration is comparable to the history of Vichy France, where “bitter experiences and memories continue to divide people,” and the “buried history . . . continues to play upon the national identity.”18 Many writers resisted the idea of writing a contrite essay or memoir even after their arrest in 1949. When his friends and colleagues approached Ch’ôe Nam-sôn to write an apology, for example, he refused on the grounds that to do so will be less than manly. And herein lies the intriguing link between the history of intellectual collaboration, literature, and a certain prevailing notion of manliness as an all-important center of self-identity for the male writers of this era. It appears that in Ch’ôe’s eyes, to admit one’s past wrongdoings may be one thing, but to ask for forgiveness, quite another. In addition, in light of Ch’ôe Nam-sôn’s self-conscious position of cultural leadership up to that point, his statement might also indicate his unwillingness to submit himself as a sinner before those he regarded as unqualified to judge or forgive him. Interestingly enough, Yi Kwang-su also refused to write an apology despite suggestions by his friends and colleagues, citing mostly one reason: he thought such a move would be “unmanly.” It is no doubt interesting that Yi’s words echo Ch’ôe Nam-sôn’s assessment. But given their similar social and cultural positions, it is hardly surprising. In the end he did write about his past collaborative actions.19 Meanwhile, there were some who did not write confessions of their past because their collaboration was passive and minor compared to the actions of figures such as Yi Kwang-su and Ch’ôe Nam-sôn, and thus they did not see the need for public contrition. This argument about confession and manliness seems to indicate that while they remain in control of their own narratives, they retain authority over themselves and to some degree, over the situation, and can thus claim manliness. The heart of such conceptualization of manliness is clearly neo-Confucian. In light of their unquestioned position as cultural elites who were nevertheless colonized subjects, it might have been especially difficult for Yi and Ch’ôe to

negotiate between these dual conditions that are simply incommensurable. And yet, these two key literary figures are also victims of their own privileged patriarchal position, because while everything around them was in flux and the late colonial society of Korea was experiencing sea changes, they steadfastly regarded themselves as national (cultural) leaders and patriarchs. The writers’ political conversion (chônhyang) is a significant, albeit painful, issue in modern Korean literary history. In many cases, the writers’ conversion—and subsequent collaboration—took place toward the end of the colonial occupation, from around late 1938 to 1943. Upon entering the war phase around 1938, Japanese colonial government in Korea began zealously mobilizing leaders and renowned figures in every social, cultural, economic and political arena for the purpose of using them to recruit Korean masses, in order to deploy them as soldiers (ching’byông), poverty-level wage workers (ching’yong), and the so-called comfort women (wianbu or chôngsindae).20 From 1943, many writers make speeches supporting the Japanese colonial government’s war time propaganda. During this period these writers, including people like Ch’ae Man-sik, write essays, reportage, and travelogue that supported, albeit passively, the so-called New System (sinch’eje) of the Japanese colonial government in Korea.21 The “New System” referred to the new measures in governmental, cultural, and bureaucratic arenas in colonial Korea that began in the mid-1930s until the end of the colonial rule, and particularly to the last two years of the colonial regime as it entered its final and most repressive military rule. These measures were specifically geared towards preparation of Japan’s entry into war; and hence they were meant to instill the propaganda of “Naisen Ittai” (naesôn ilch’e), to better utilize Korea in the war. As one may infer from the fact that as late as the spring of 1945, Korean colonial elites were touring the countryside making speeches in rallies in collaboration with the colonial authorities’ war mobilization efforts, the moment of decolonization came suddenly. It was like a gift from the allied forces and especially America, the most visible and influential ally. And it set the tone for the relationship between the two nations in the decades to follow. As the nation’s decolonization appeared to be a result of external intervention by foreign powers, it was like a congenital defect in the heart of the nation’s efforts to rebuild and reclaim the nation as a sovereign entity. In the newly decolonized Korea, masses of people were left in chaos with virtually no sense of a nation. It certainly did not enhance Korea’s national pride that at the end of the thirty-five years of anti-colonial struggle, the Japanese imperial forces were finally defeated by outsiders, who made no secret of their invasive interest in the newly liberated peninsula. Hence, the way in which Korea’s “liberation” came about caused much psychological damage at the national level; at the same time, it also pushed to the surface the problems and issues within the nation that were already present even before colonization, but had been lying dormant for the duration of the Japanese occupation.22 Meanwhile, South Korea had its first National Assembly election as a newly independent nation on May 10, 1948, under the U.N. supervision. The first National Assembly then passed the “Penal Law for Treasonous Actions” on September 22 of the same year. It also formed a Special Committee to investigate, arrest, and punish prominent Japanese colonial

collaborators. Yi Kwang-su himself, widely acknowledged as the founding father of modern Korean literature, was arrested on February 7, 1949.23 However, not all those in powerful and influential positions supported the mission and the enforcement by the Special Committee, as their complex political interests—not to mention their past compromises—came under the Committee’s scrutiny. The newly elected first President Rhee Syngman and the first Chairman of the Supreme Court, Kim Pyông-ro, and the Chief of Seoul Police Department Kim T’ae-sôn, for example, all had differing opinions on how the Committee should carry out its tasks and even as to its very purpose. Then finally on September 25, 1949, only seven months after the arrest of Yi Kwang-su and many other renowned colonial cultural and literary figures, Seoul police officers disarmed the Committee. With the committee’s dissolution, the nation’s early efforts to even partially resolve the issue of collaboration all but dissolved. This development frustrated many thousands who wanted to see collaborators brought to justice and created a culture of deep mistrust in the new government’s power and even its sincerity to correct the past history of injustice. And thus, the issue of collaborationist literature remained largely unspoken in the academia until 1966, when Study of Colonial Collaborationist Literature was published. Yi Kwang-su identified himself as a writer (munsa) and a public intellectual rather than a patriot (chisa). The origin of his fall lies in that the public desperately wished him to be a leader and a patriot, while he was steadfast in his self-identity as a poet and writer (Kim Yunsik 1999, 435). Yet because of his pioneering writings while still in his twenties and the intensely politicized cultural positions he took regarding, most famously, the evils of Confucian practices for example, he had already become a leader in the eyes of the public that looked to him for guidance. Kim Yun-sik writes in his exhaustive study Yi Kwang-su and His Time that the renowned writer considered himself a tremendously gifted nation-alistic statesman, among other things (32–35). It is for this reason that Yi wrote “Theory of Reforming National Character” (Minjok kaejoron) in November of 1921, stirring up much resentment and controversy. It was written at a time when Korean colonial intellectuals were beginning to divide themselves into political Right and Left. This controversy was completely different in character from the one he created in 1918 with his trenchant attack on Korea’s old customs and backward aspects of Confucian tradition in Heartless (1918), as well as in other writings. While Yi had an overwhelming support of the younger generation in 1918, “National Character” invited criticism and even hatred from both the nascent Left and the Right in 1921 because it contained what others perceived as a disparaging view of Korean national character (43–45). Kim further writes that Japanese imperialism based on European rationalism and Enlightenment philosophy, he also calls “Logic of the Day,” was a kind of science, whether one calls it modernization or Enlightenment. However, Korea’s answer to this phenomenon was comparatively less rational, based on emotions, soul, and heart, and he calls it “Logic of the Night.” He points out that “National Character” had its basis in somewhere between these two different kinds of logic. The author theorizes that the Japanese colonial collaborators are those who followed the

Logic of the Day, or rationalism, and that they had the ability to compromise with and thus survive the changing political climate that spans the last years of the Chosôn dynasty, Japanese colonial period, and the American Military Government after the liberation (440). By contrast, anti-colonial nationalists followed the Logic of the Night, and the belief in their heart and soul that Korea should reclaim its lost sovereignty. But by and large, this group was not successful against their opponents, a group armed with the logic of the Enlightenment and modernity that originated in the West, an entity that seemed far superior to Korea at this particular juncture in history. However, what this neat formulation of binary opposites, of the East and the West, day and night, science and emotion, misses is that in many colonial situations the line between logic and emotion blurs and dissolves. For anti-colonial nationalists, their emotional investment and attachment in the recovery of the nation cannot be divorced from the logic—seemingly modern and Westernized—that Korea is an independent nation, entitled to reclaim her sovereignty. Similarly, for the colonial intellectuals who eventually collaborated with the colonial authorities, their emotional pull and attachment to modernity and Enlightenment—what Japan represented for them—cannot be separated from their belief in the alluring promise of “naisen ittai” or naesôn ilch’e, the phrase for Japan’s war time propaganda that argued Japan and Korea were one and the same body with a shared fate. In short, for both factions of colonial subjects, their emotional investment took place of the rationale. It has been convincingly argued that Yi Kwang-su’s belief in liberal individualism made it convenient for the Japanese colonial authorities to use the writer’s rhetoric for their own purposes.24 His school of individualism was an unrealistic philosophy under the abnormal conditions of colonialism, and ultimately, it was the pervasive acceptance of the colonial rule and its oppressive practices that led to the disintegration of the traditional community and of the nation by extension, without providing a viable alternative community. It is bitter irony that for this individualist his rhetoric was turned against him, and he was compelled to preach group-oriented values geared towards the greater good of the Japanese empire and of the greater East Asia to other Korean colonial subjects. The Japanese war time propaganda exhorted Korean masses to think of the larger community (i.e., their colonial motherland or Japan), and do everything they can to help its war efforts, by voluntarily enlisting in the Japanese imperial army, for instance. The so-called Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere covered Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan and Manchuria, and its logic insisted that Koreans must help defend Japan against its aggressors in order to protect this co-prosperity sphere and for the greater glory of the far-extended “nation.” This shows the pitfalls of liberal individualism in colonial context, which was the larger social frame that corrupted and complicated every social movement and philosophical bent of the day. Looking closely at the dialectics between the part, the individual, and the whole, the colonized nation, is thus crucial here. This relationship, while almost always contentious, is also not always hostile. The Japanese colonial government in Korea, which was authoritarian in its character during this period, deployed exceptional individuals like Yi Kwang-su and Ch’ôe Nam-sôn, among others, to mobilize and manipulate the masses through various channels.

In considering this dialectic between the part (individual, or to be more precise for this discussion, the exceptional individual) and the whole (the colonized nation), I want to emphasize the particulars of such male subjectivity, especially considering that these writers were the elite, who were at the same time mired in the unequal power relationships with their colonizer, and could not overcome their predicament and limits as colonial subjects. This situation affects the dynamics of their relationship to various other subjects of the time, such as women and the disenfranchised. “AROUND THE TIME OF LIBERATION”: YI T’AE-JUN AND CHI HA-RYÔN For many intellectuals of this era, the fact of national division came as a “crisis in selfdetermination of conscience” that forced them to choose their political camp. This was especially true of writers such as Yi T’ae-jun and others who experienced political conversion. Yi T’ae-jun (1904–?) was a famous writer of the colonial era, but South Korean scholars could not teach or discuss his writings for four decades after the Korean War, as he defected to North Korea immediately before the war. Thus his name was among those blacklisted by the South Korean government, which prohibited sales, distribution, or even a possession of such writers’ writings as a crime under the notorious “Kukka anjôn poanpp’ôp” (National Security Law). In his short story “Around the Time of Liberation” (Haebang chônhu, 1946) in particular, Yi is critical of feudalism that finds its emotional self-justification in patriotism.25 This story was unique in its subject matter, which was the political conversion of the protagonist, a well-known modernist writer who becomes a staunch leftist in the period immediately following the decolonization. In this autobiographical short story, with its protagonist Hyôn as a stand-in for the author with no biographical details changed other than his name, he relocates to the countryside of Kangwôn Province to deflect the authorities' relentless demand for his cooperation in war time propagandizing and labor mobilization. They specifically want Hyôn to make pro-war speeches at local rallies and use his cultural influence as a famous writer to persuade young Korean men to volunteer for the imperial army. Although he is a renowned writer, he too cannot avoid the humiliation of being treated like a child. When he is spotted with his fishing rod by a colonial authority, for instance, he is ordered to stop going fishing until the Japanese empire wins the war as that kind of laziness reflects badly on the town’s leadership.26 No matter how ridiculous the demand, he must follow the order without complaint. The “I” narrator also feels intensely ashamed for his own laziness and cowardice, for not doing more to lead the youths who, just as Ch’ae describes in “Criminal of the People,” come to visit him out of respect for his writing and to seek his advice, a famous writer of the older generation (267). In part, the shame Hyôn feels stems from his own recognition and acceptance of his inability to change his personality. But for the most part, his particular emotion of shame and regret is deeply connected to the Confucian notion of self as a complete subject only in its network of hierarchical socio-cultural relationships. The nature of this relationship between the writer and his readers is one of trust and accountability, and modeled after that of a teacher

and pupil. Therefore his shame is both social and private in nature, and comes from his sense of failure to fulfill a certain role that he recognizes as his own. And yet Hyôn, the colonial subject, has no authority over himself in a crucial, practical way. Therefore, his failure to properly fulfill his position as an elder and a renowned cultural figure stems, at least in part, from the sheer impossibility of being a colonial subject with autonomy. During his stay in the countryside—where he acutely feels the local authorities’ pressure to contribute to the war efforts—Hyôn befriends an old Confucian scholar named Kim in charge of the local Confucian study hall. The old man Kim resists the colonial authority with all his being, mostly out of his deep sense of outrage against the loss of Korean Confucian tradition. As the protagonist’s character foil, he embodies both the dignity and the impotence of the late Chosôn-era aristocrats’ refined lifestyle that is no more. As his extremely subjective assessment of his predicament shows, the author depicts his alter-ego Hyôn as an ineffectual and powerless intellectual, whose lucidity and refined sensibility hinders, rather than helps, his situation. He cannot resist the pressure to attend a rally in Seoul and goes to the capital to make a speech. But he flees from the scene, just as his turn approaches to make his pro-war speech: “What are you? Why did you come here and why are you sitting here?” he asks himself, and feels that he’s living in some “frightening nightmare.” This passage clearly shows his dilemma. On the one hand, he cannot openly fight the system, thus passively collaborates by attending the rally as a prominent colonial subject; on the other, he cannot endure the shame and self-loathing, so he escapes his turn at the podium by running and hiding in the foul-smelling restroom (277–78). To his relief and also embarrassment, the local authorities’ treatment of Hyôn changes for the better when he returns home, even though he did not make a speech. Later in the narrative Hyôn goes to Seoul upon belatedly learning of the national liberation, hoping to do something productive towards the nation building as a cultural worker. But what he discovers at the writers’ meeting place is only chaos and mutual mistrust. “Around the Time of Liberation” indirectly reflects the chaotic reality of the day, where yesterday’s enemies must work together and, even worse for the protagonist, the recovered nation is still a contested site in which people must settle old scores and justify their past mistakes, as well as their decisions for the future. It is a place, in other words, where an intellectual like Hyôn feels as though he should help create or rebuild something greater than himself, but at the same time, completely lacks direction or clear purpose. In the end, the narrator’s sad and conflicted encounter in Seoul with the old sônbi Kim shows that the author is mainly interested in explaining his reason for political conversion to the Left, and the narrator sententiously lists the reasons why he chose the Communist Party. Therefore, the story reveals the narrator as an unreliable storyteller, though the story does reflect the prevailing problem for the writers of the era having to choose their political position in a public manner. In this way, despite his professed feelings of shame and selfdisgust the character Hyôn shows little self-reflection and inwardly directed criticism. Around the same time, a writer named Chi Ha-ryôn (1912–1960) wrote a short story in 1946 entitled “A Path” (Tojông) from a similar political position of the Left.27 It is one of very few

works of literature that directly deal with the issue of conscience with the backdrop of the political activities in the months immediately following the decolonization. Upon hearing the news of the liberation the story’s protagonist, a young man named Sôk-jae, goes to join the Communist Party in the chaotic Seoul. What he discovers at the temporary party headquarters, much to his chagrin, is an old acquaintance Ki-ch’ôl who now sits in a position of power as the party’s central committee member. The man is an opportunist whose profession changed with the political and economic shifts of power—one of his latest professions being a mine broker during the anarchic last years of the colonial period. It is clear that Ki-ch’ôl wants to secure a position of power for himself before the “true leadership,” those who either had to go underground or go into exile, returns to rightfully claim their position within the party. In the climactic ending, unable to leave nor take over Ki-ch’ôl’s position, Sôk-jae writes his class background as “petit bourgeoisie” in his application for the party membership and runs out of the building. As in Ch’ae Man-sik’s and Yi T’ae-jun’s short stories, the protagonist of this story also repeatedly confesses his shame—for not doing more for the nation, for not helping his comrades who needed help, for momentarily wishing to take the position of power that his old acquaintance now occupies in the party, and finally, simply for surviving the last years of the colonial occupation.28 Significantly, the protagonist Sôk-jae feels ashamed for these varied reasons, even though no one else blames him for his past. He is his own harshest critic, prompting a friend’s comment that he is overly sensitive and fastidious. And yet it is indeed his own reflection that he must face in the mirror. Although schematic, the short story is interesting because it brings into focus and at the same time questions an intellectual’s capacity for selfreflection in the new social context. It leads readers to also ponder the role of intellectuals in the first days of postcoloniality. Still others on the political Left would emphasize another class of people, such as poor agricultural workers like tenant farmers. These different branches of the Left seemed to agree on only one thing, which was that the status quo of the society needed urgent changes and even dismantling.29 “CRIMINAL OF THE PEOPLE”: A COLONIAL INTELLECTUAL REPENTS Now we return to Ch’ae Man-sik, another survivor from the colonial era. He writes an autobiographical short story tellingly titled “Criminal of the People” in aserialized form in Paegmin, a monthly magazine, from October 1948 to January 1949. As mentioned earlier, the first-person narrator describes himself as first and foremost a father and a husband, before he is a writer or a public figure. This self-image has a central importance in his story, which one can read as either a frank apology or an eloquent excuse for his past mistakes, as it is his opinion that no one is entirely without blame, and that Korea as a nation is tainted by Japanese colonial collaboration. The narrator “I” voices this opinion early in the narrative, though tentatively, in order to explain the violent oppression and relentless pressure he faced in the past that eventually coerced him towards collaboration.30 In fact, the tone of the entire story is tentative, until it reaches its climactic ending. The narrator speaks about how, concerns about

economic hardship aside, as the family’s patriarch he had to compromise his integrity in order to protect his family. And yet among the many who produced pro-Japan literature during the last years of the colonial regime, Ch’ae Man-sik stands out for producing frankly introspective writings about his past mistakes, which he views as a “crime against the people” of Korea. Ch’ae was the only one among the many intellectuals and writers of the period who shared his past that wrote an apologetic account of it.31 Given the nation’s long-standing tradition of Confucian leadership of the literati and public intellectuals, it was widely believed that at least writers must make an effort to confess, explain, and apologize for their collaboration. In retrospect, today’s critics view both the way in which these leading intellectuals attacked and accused each other and the way they responded to such attacks—let alone the fact of their collaboration—as less than forthright and brave. One scholar posits that such response was the result of the lack of established traditions in confessions, autobiography, and even religious conversional literature in Korean tradition. Korea does not have an equivalent of confessional literature tradition that exists in the West, whether religious or secular, such as The Confessions of Saint Augustine.32 As for Ch’ae Man-sik’s writings, the authors of History of Korean Literature (Han’guk munhaksa, 1973) write that irony is a major common thread holding Ch’ae texts together, and that it was through irony that Ch’ae was able to mock and criticize current issues like colonial education or accumulation of wealth through abnormal, illegal channels.33 In the 1990s, other critics such as Kim Hong-gi, Hwang Kuk-myông and Chông Ho-ung came to view his writing philosophy as more passive.34 These critics argue that although Ch’ae’s novels and short stories provided a sharp criticism of the ugly reality of his day, he could not imagine a future generation that will change and shape history, and that this showed his skeptical view of history. According to his view of history, people did not make progress. Ch’ae Man-sik arrived at such a nihilistic view ultimately because he could not find a solution to actualize his vision of progress and transformation of history in his own predicament. By 1941 it is as though he loses his identity as a writer. He expresses skepticism about his life’s work, and in some of the essays he wrote in 1941, confesses that he no longer sees any meaning behind the act of writing.35 All of his works written during this year are nihilistic in their tone, and the characters in the stories also reflect the author’s attitude about life and future.36 By the end of 1941, Ch’ae Man-sik’s nihilism and pessimism about the nation’s predicament and his own powerlessness lead him to lose his resolve to continue his struggle through writing, and thus he finally comes to collaborate with the colonial authorities. Ch’ae Man-sik’s time did not allow him to write about the good and the beautiful. He felt that writing about such aspects of human life meant a divorce from reality. Thus he wrote about the dark side of humanity in order to illuminate the positive. His writings until 1941 were his attempt to testify to the evils of the colonial regime. One critic argues that the essence of Ch’ae’s writing lies in the pattern of denial and negativity. But this author also emphasizes that the negativity and discontent Ch’ae wrote about was collective and national in character, rather than individual. These writings were his way of bearing witness to the national situation.37

A good example is his short story “Ready-Made Life” (1934). In this story, the author depicts the reality of colonial intellectuals who have no place to go and have no way of supporting themselves and their families. Colonial intellectuals’ experience is that of profound psychological dislocation and displacement. Their inability to find a place of their own in colonial Korea tells the tragedy of talented people who had little or no opportunity to fulfill their potential as “natural leaders.”38 The intellectual characters’ action in the narrative denies the colonial government’s propaganda and the value of education for colonial subjects. The story ends with the protagonist’s decision to send his child to work at a factory, having realized the meaninglessness of education. Through these denials, the characters reflect the author’s view that the life in a colony is far from normal. In “Criminal of the People,” although Ch’ae Man-sik’s alter-ego still makes it clear that the world was crazy and that he had much to be discontent about, he nevertheless honestly admits that he did make some grave mistakes in the past.39 In this writing he describes his struggle to hold out against collaborating with the authorities, but in the end, admits that as a mere writer, it was beyond his capacity to become a nationalist hero (chisa). CONCLUSION: THE AFTERMATH In Ch’ae Man-sik’s 1947 short story “Railways” (Yôkno), again it is the author’s experience as a colonial intellectual that he recounts for his readers.40 In this short story, he makes an attempt to see the “space of decolonization” (haebang kong’gan) in an objective way, which adds a layer of sadness to the nihilistic and self-deprecatory tone of the narrative. The narrator, an intellectual, runs into his friend Kim, another intellectual, on a train going from Seoul to Pusan. Kim has collaborated with colonial authorities in the past, and the two men’s discussion is largely about their immediate past, especially focused on Kim’s collaboration, for which he is ashamed and regretful. On the way, the two friends look out the window and see the pandemonium of people going to and from all directions, many of whom are unable to secure a place on the train. In the midst of this chaotic scene, they spot a brightly lit train car reserved for American soldiers, the only car with any room for more passengers. In fact, the car is almost empty. Next to the train, a middle-aged Korean man has been stopped by the American military police while attempting to enter this empty car, looking as though he were a common criminal. Witnessing this scene, the two men turn away in vicarious humiliation and anger, but remain helplessly seated. The characters’ response to this scene of national(-ized) humiliation that seems to signal a subjugated relationship to yet another dominant foreign power in Korea is poignant— especially because it is a moment that gets to the heart of the problem Korea faced at the time, and also because the incident foreshadows the nation’s fate in the future. Kim wonders aloud whether the way this Korean man is being manhandled by the American military police, and the fact that his fellow Koreans are not coming to his rescue, is any different from the relationship between China and the West emblematized by a sign hanging on a gate to a park in Shanghai announcing, “No Dogs or Chinese May Enter.”41 At the same time, the first-person narrator

also wonders aloud whether the ideologically divided Korea can successfully detach itself from America and the Soviet Union. In a nation reverberating with the aftermath of such devastation, intellectuals were expected to fulfill an important role. And as a matter of course, Korean intellectuals had a leadership role in the traditional society. The sense of identity and even masculinity for colonial writers such as Ch’ôe Nam-sôn, Yi Kwang-su, and Ch’ae Man-sik, among others, seems specifically rooted in their role as public intellectuals, who provide leadership especially by leading an exemplary life. But under colonial pressure, their role had become a travesty of leadership. As a result of such betrayal, albeit often committed under considerable duress, the relationship between intellectuals and the general population became tainted with mutual mistrust and perhaps resentment. The viciousness of the Japanese colonial project, of relentlessly recruiting and deploying these influential public figures, resulted in a damage whose reverberations and ripples are still felt even today. Many writers who collaborated during the colonial era increasingly turned to writing historical novels, which was seen as a genre that seemed safer, since it was viewed as less political. The problem of those writers who betrayed such implicit trust of their public was never fully discussed nor resolved—as much as it is possible to resolve it. This problem was compounded by the fact that there was an enormous gap between the general population, who were mostly of agrarian origin with little or no formal education, and the cultural figures of the era. These figures were not only different because of their education, but also because of their experience. Many of them had come of age in Japan, drawing emotional, cultural, and intellectual nutrients from what was taking place in Japan. Korea’s colonial oppression, as it is true of other former colonies, manifested in disparate ways for people of different socio-economic classes. Im Chong-guk’s 1966 work on collaborators is not without problems. His scholarship, although pioneering and necessary, is heavily nationalistic and he includes any and all who helped the Japanese colonial authority, regardless of the seriousness of what Ch’ae Man-sik calls their “crimes against Korean people.”42 What is striking in glancing at the list of the writers in the latter collection Selected Works of Japanese Colonial Collaborationist Literature (1986) is its all-inclusive nature. It covers both genders and both sides of the ideological divide, the Right as well as the Left. This long list of names seems to indicate the tremendous pressure the colonial regime put on these writers’ physical and psychological safety, and their livelihood, in order to coopt and deploy them as pro-Japan propagandists. And as the collections of their writings themselves testify, they were not spared the humiliation of having to face their literary legacy after decolonization. They are mostly famous writers, many among them pioneers of modern Korean literature and the first to come in contact with foreign literature and learn its techniques and trends; in other words, they were the most cosmopolitan and urbane of all writers, who were in the position of leadership. The writers’ predicament, then, reveals their dual membership and split loyalty, to their country Chosôn and its people, and to the metropolitan, modernizing Japan that nourished their artistic imagination. Ch’ae Man-sik believed that everyone who lived through the colonial era in Korea was

tainted in some way by colonial collaboration in a larger sense. In his eyes the older generation was tainted, despite their struggle against colonialism to remain “pure”; and he readily acknowledged that he himself was a part of this generation. To borrow his selfdeprecating trope, collaborators were like prostitutes, who can never become pure virgins even after they return home.43 Hence he knew that he could not overcome this devastating limitation and that his generation could no longer be the central moving force behind history. The younger generation did not have this taint of a shameful colonial past, he wrote hopefully, and thus their era had just begun. NOTES 1. Man-gil Kang, et al., Haebang chônhusaûi insik 2 ([Understanding the History of Decolonization Era 2], Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1989b), 457. 2. The very definition of colonial collaboration is heavily politicized. According to one particular perspective, articulated by Kim Chae-yong, collaboration performed under duress is not collaboration. He only considers those actions done voluntarily, and after the subject rationalizes his pro-Japanese worldview. Further, he argues that there are two widely held but false beliefs about colonial collaboration: one is that they were performed under duress, and that two, there are very few among the leaders and intellectuals who did not collaborate. While I may tentatively argue with his second assessment I hold the conventionally held position, which sees colonial collaboration in a larger context. For a detailed argument, see Kim Chaeyong’s books in the references section. 3. Yông-min Kwôn, Haebang 40nyônûi munhak Vol. 1 ([40 Years of Postcolonial Literature Vol. 1], Seoul: Minûmsa, 1985), 20–21. 4. Yi Kyông, Han’guk kûndaesosôl’ûi kûndaess’ông suyong’yangsik ([Patterns of Adapting Modernity in Korean Modern Novel], Seoul: T’aehaksa, 1999), 203–26. 5. Yi Kyông, Han’guk kûndaesosôl’ûi kûndaess’ông suyong’yangsik, 42–43). 6. Man-gil Kang, et al., Haebang chônhusaûi insik 2, 490–91. 7. Man-gil Kang, et al., Haebang chônhusaûi insik 2, 449–53. 8. For a discussion on autonomy, see Immanuel Kant’s central argument in his works, Critique of practical reason (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 9. Ch’ae Man-sik, “Minjokui chwein” (Criminal of the People), Paekmin October 1948– January 1949, 15. 10. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961), 84. 11. Freud explains the mechanism of guilt, or the “sense of guilt” in the following way. “[The individual’s] aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from—that is, it is directed towards his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of ‘conscience,’ is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The

tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment.” 12. Gerhart Piers and Milton B. Singer, Shame and Guilt: A Psychoanalytic and a Cultural Study (Springfield, Ill: Charles C. Thomas, 1953), 11–12. Quoted in John Diegh, ed., Ethics and Personality: Essays in Moral Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 133. 13. Ch’ae,“Minjokui chwein” (Criminal of the People), 35–36. 14. Ch’ae 1989b. 15. Kim Kyu-dong and Kim Pyông-gôl, eds., Selected Works of Japanese Colonial Collaborationist Literature v. 1 and 2 (Ch’inil munhak chakp’um sônjip, Seoul: Silch’ôn munhaksa, 1986). 16. Kim Yun-sik 1989, 12. 17. Chong-guk Im, Ch’inil munhangnon ([Study of Colonial Collaborationist Literature], Seoul: P’yônghwa ch’ulp’ansa, 1966), 33. 18. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), 183. 19. Man-gil Kang, et al., Haebang chônhusaûi insik 2, 452, 456–58. 20. A discussion of the so-called comfort women (wian’bu) issue is beyond the scope of this chapter. But it will suffice to say that thousands of young Korean women and girls as young as twelve years old were persuaded, coerced, or simply kidnapped into what they believed were military nurse and other war time production work units, only to discover that they had become comfort women. They were forced into sexual slavery and also had to provide unpaid labor for the Japanese imperial military that were camped around various parts of Asia. This mass-scale war crime is one of the most lasting and painful chapters of Japanese colonial history in Korea. See Keith Howard ed., True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women: Testimonies (New York: Cassell, 1995), Yonson Ahn’s doctoral dissertation , Korean “Comfort Women” and Military Sexual Slavery in World War II (Boston Spa, U.K.: University of Warwick, 1999), and Hye Seung Chung’s “Korean Comfort Women Trilogy as Subaltern Autobiography” (Albuquerque: Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, 2000). 21. Kugômunhak’hôe, ed., Ch’ae Man-sik munhak yôn’gu ([Study of Ch’ae Man-sik’s Writings], Seoul: Han’guk Munhwasa, 1997), 140. 22. Kim Sûng-hwan, Haebang kong’gan’ûi hyônsil chu’ûi munhak yôn’gu ([Study of the Space of Decolonization’s Realist Literature], Seoul: Iljisa, 1991) 28–30. One can see the contentious nature of the decolonization even in the politics of naming the historical moment. The literary critic Kim Sûng-hwan, for example, highlights the nomenclature of the recovery of the nation, i.e., the different ways of naming what happened in Korea at the moment of Japan’s defeat on August 15, 1945. Firstly, there is the word haebang, or “liberation.” According to the author, the word indicates the nation’s passive position that received decolonization through the bigger world powers’ intervention. Next is the word tong’nip or “independence,” which he also designates as inaccurate, for Korea did not achieve independence purely through

its own means and through internal struggle. Then there is kwangbok, or “recovery of light.” He argues that of all the possible names for Korea’s decolonization this is the most problematic and objectionable, as it harkens back to the politics of feudal Korea and the loyalist sentiment with which it is associated. It was first used in the context of anti-colonial militia belonging to the Provisional Government of Korea in Shanghai. It reflects, according to the author, a view of history that belongs to the aristocratic ruling class of the Chosôn dynasty, or yangban. His explication commands one’s attention, as the phenomenon is a good indicator of the degree to which the decolonization of Korea immediately became politicized, revealing how even the politics of the very naming continues to highlight the emotionally fraught history surrounding such national recovery and its agent. While this explication is helpful, the author curiously continues to use the generally accepted term haebang (liberation) without much justification for doing so. 23. Kim Yun-sik, Yi Kwang-suwa kû’ûi sidae 2 ([Yi Kwang-su and His Time 2], Seoul: Sol, 1999), 417–22. 24. Kim U-ch’ang, Kungp’ip’han sidaeûi si’in ([Poets in Destitute Times], Seoul: Minûmsa, 1982), 16–17. 25. Man-gil Kang, et al., Haebang chônhusaûi insik 1 ([Understanding the History of Decolonization Era 1]. Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1989a), 554–55. 26. Yi T’ae-jun 1995, 281. 27. Chi Ha-ryôn, Selected Representative Novels of Modern Korean Literature, vol. 7 (Han-’guk hyôndae taep’yo sosôlsôn vol. 7, Seoul: Ch’angjak’kwa pip’yôngsa, 1996), 220– 39. This story first appeared in the inaugural issue of the literary magazine Literature (Munhak) in July, 1946. Chi Ha-ryôn is a pen name of Yi Hyôn-uk, who was married to Im Hwa. 28. Chi Ha-ryôn, ibid., 221, 223, 224, 232, 238. 29. Kim Sûng-hwan, ibid., 12. For his brief yet effective review of previously existing scholarship on agrarian novels of the space of decolonization, refer to his text, 15–27. 30. 44 19. 31. Kugômunhak’hôe, ed., Ch’ae Man-sik munhak yôn’gu, 141. 32. Saint Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine (New York: Modern Library, 1949). Tr. Edward B. Pusey. 33. Kim Hyôn and Kim Yun-sik, Han’guk munhaksa [History of Korean Literature], Seoul: Minûmsa, 1973), 189. 34. Kugômunhak’hôe, ed., Ch’ae Man-sik munhak yôn’gu, 23. 35. Ch’ae Man-sik, “Recent Days” (Kûnil), Ch’unch’u (February 1941). 36. Kugômunhak’hôe, ed., Ch’ae Man-sik munhak yôn’gu, 149. 37. Ch’ae, “Recent Days,” 246–47. 38. Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 172–73. 39. Ch’ae, “Recent Days,”257–59. 40. Ch’ae, Sinmunhak ([New Literature], March 1947). 41. Ch’ae, Sinmunhak ([New Literature], March 1947), 58. This short story was written

before it was discovered that no such sign existed in the semi-colonial China. However, the apocryphal lore of the notorious public sign is suggestive of the (semi) colonized people’s emotional investment in their nation’s sovereignty that manifested on the level of the everyday. 42. For a longer discussion of the history and the politics of writing about colonial collaboration in South Korea, see Koen De Ceuster, “The Nation Exorcised: The Historiography of Collaboration in South Korea,” Korean Studies 25.2 (Fall 2001): 207–42. 43. Ch’ae, 38. 44. Ch’ae,“Minjokui chwein” (Criminal of the People),

Chapter Three

Literature of Instability and Despair: Woman and Masculinity in Postwar Fiction

RHEE SYNGMAN AND THE CULTURE OF MILITARIZATION IN POSTWAR KOREA The decolonization of Korea arrived at the historical moment when it was not adequately prepared to live as an independent nation in many ways. The colonial rule had worn down people’s resistance, and often, only the strongest—and those in exile—could continue their anti-colonial struggle. But with the U.S. military intervention that changed not only the outcome of WWII but also shifted the dynamics of world power and established the U.S. as a superpower after the war, Korean independence came about not as a result of the nation’s struggle against Japan, but of Japan’s defeat against the Allied Forces. Thus Korea’s decolonization in this context was like a gift bestowed by external forces. It was a significant fact that seriously undermined Korea’s self-image and complicated its relationship to its allies that came to its rescue, especially affecting its relationship with the U.S. in the decades following the decolonization. In August 15, 1945, Korea came out of its colonial era a brutalized and depleted nation. One of the greater reverberations of the thirty-five years’ colonial rule was the internal fraction among its leaders, and especially their ideological division into left- and right-wing groups. The tension that had been simmering beneath the surface—and barely under control due to Japanese repression until 1945—exploded with the decolonization. The ideological division even among artists, and writers in particular, manifests in the fact that immediately upon decolonization, each camp established its own association; the Left grouped together to establish the Chosôn Writers’ Federation (Chosôn munhakka tongmaeng) in December 1946, while the Right set up the Chosôn Writers’ Association (Chôn Chosôn munp’ilga hyôphôe) and the Young Chosôn Writers’ Association (Chosôn ch’ôngnyôn munhakka hyôp’hôe) in March and April of the same year.1 In fact, many such associations and groups were established and disbanded just as quickly during the chaotic three years after Korea’s liberation. But as time passed and the U.S. Military Government became the established power in the South, the left-wing groups had to disband, move North or go underground altogether, as the right-wing and moderate groups became the only groups that had official acknowledgement

and the Left became the target of repression and imprisonment.2 Thus the South held its first election as a democratic republic and elected Rhee Syngman as its first president. An important aspect of the traditional Korean mentality was its unquestioning reverence of the king, which provided the backbone of the popular support for the Chosôn dynasty during its reign. This historical context, combined with the reality of Korea’s lack of experience in modern, American-style representative democracy, explains why South Korea’s first president Rhee Syngman was touted as the “Father of the Nation Building.” Once elected, Rhee functioned essentially as a one-man government and South Korea’s nascent People’s Assembly could not fulfill its function during his regime.3 Meanwhile in the northern provinces another charismatic personality, Kim Il Sung, emerged as a prominent leader and soon, Korea effectively had two leaders and governments even before the Korean War in 1950 and the official national division that followed it. The Korean War came as a fresh shock and devastation to the nation that barely had time to recover and cohere itself after the decolonization, and established what the literary critic Kim Yun-sik calls “the system of division as a way of life.”4 Poverty was the biggest and most immediate crisis people faced. The war left millions destitute and stranded without shelter and employment; it also tore apart and scattered family members and loved ones with no way of knowing whether they were dead or alive. In fact, the impact of the war and the national division has been greater and more lasting than people could have imagined. MISOGYNY AND EXISTENTIALISM IN POSTWAR FICTION This chapter examines postwar Korean literature in light of the crises of the nation and gender. The following is a discussion of fiction from 1955 to 1960, works that one can truly describe as postwar in periodization and character, that expresses the general social mood of despair, loss and frustration. Postwar Korean literature of the late 1950s, born out of a socio-cultural atmosphere of extreme militarization which led to pervasive militaristic culture and ideals of masculinity that seeped into people’s everyday life, as well as ideological battles and internal fractions, reveals a crisis mentality surrounding the issues of the fragile nationhood, social chaos, and threats of emasculation. Such mentality often manifests as misogynistic and existentialist narratives. The obliteration of the female subject and voice in postwar literature, whether through her objectification as a diseased body, her infantilization, or through an abject oversexualization of woman as the sexual Other, was a cultural response to the sense of crisis and challenge to the masculine self. To understand this literary trend, one should bear in mind the hyper militaristic and staunch anti-communist stance of South Korea at this time, which is a crucial part of the larger sociocultural picture. Intertwined with this is the exaggerated claim of national boundary and its unquestioned unity inculcated in its people to support the postcolonial, postwar vision of the nation, which is essentially defensive and reactive by nature. The postwar Korea’s cultural and economic domination by America was unprecedented. The complex, almost neo-colonial relationship between South Korea and America of the 1950s is one of simultaneous

dependence and resentment; of particular significance for the literary issues at hand is the way in which Korea’s traditional male authority was challenged and threatened, especially when desperate Korean women turned to prostitution servicing American soldiers stationed in Korea. For instance, consider the following passage which testifies to the atmosphere charged with threats of sexual aggression and emasculation for Koreans: In postcolonial South Korea in the 1950s, on streets of residential area of Seoul, Koreans used to hear American soldiers calling indiscriminately for “saekssi (young women)” from the passing military trucks to all passersby. The call was a public declaration of the soldiers’ intention to violate Korean women. If this was not an indiscriminate threat of metaphorical rape of the nation, it was clearly a display of masculine domination over the women and men of Korea, constructing all Korean people as the sexualized feminine Other.5

When American soldiers call out to the general public addressing everyone as women, presumably available for transaction of sex for money, it is a moment of neo-imperial interpellation. The blurring of boundaries between the so-called “camp town,” the red-light district established around American military camps and residential areas, adds to the alarm and resentment that people must have felt. The message, an insult and a challenge to the Korean male ego by foreign soldiers who first helped liberate the nation and then returned in a dubious rescue scenario during and in the aftermath of the Korean War, is all the more wounding for its casual, almost jocular quality. The war affected Korea’s writers and intellectuals just as it did everyone else, and in the pandemonium created by war, literary production all but ground to a halt.6 When writers picked up their pen again, short stories, rather than novels, dominated postwar literature from 1955 to the end of the 1960s.7 South Korean literary establishment somewhat regained its footing after the war, around 1955. The three years of war was a “season of slaughter” that left little room for literary introspection, and there was only one notable literary journal, Sasang’gye (Word of Thought). But beginning in 1955, writers established several important literary journals, such as Hyôndae munhak (Modern Literature, 1955), Munhak yesul (Literary Arts, 1955), and Chayu munhak (Freedom Literature, 1956).8 Modernism in literature manifested in various ways since Korea’s colonial period, throughout the tortuous modern history of the nation. In the 1950s, a decade that saw dismantling of social order in the midst of the shock and chaos of civil war, it manifested as nihilistic, existentialist modernism.9 Some examples are Sô Ki-wôn’s “Amsajido” (The Uncharted Map, 1956), “I sôngsuk’an pamûi p’o’ong” (An Embrace on this Mature Night, 1960), and O Sang-wôn’s “Paekjiûi kirok” (The Record of a Blank Page, 1957).10 The general concept of “existentialism” I use here refers to French existentialism, of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular. The two French writers’ works reflect a belief that the norms in society no longer exist, and that there are no universal constraints on human will other than what one’s will imposes on itself. Its logical conclusion is that human beings are not bound by social norms and that in our nature, we are absolutely free. Thus whatever constraints we have are our own creation and burden that the humanity chooses to put upon itself. This philosophy is born out of a massive historical and cultural trauma, after people of Europe had experienced the unthinkable moral and physical horrors of WWII. And so it was in Korea that

existentialist philosophy and novels became popular in the postwar era, after the horrors of a fratricidal war. For the postwar Korean writers, as well as for the French writers, existentialism was a fitting expression for their painful, lived experiences. As with many other applications and emulation of Western literary and cultural movements in Korean context however, postwar Korean writers’ embrace of French existentialism can be problematic, for much of this cultural adaptation and translation stem from a blind desire to find an echoing voice among the revered, dominant western European cultural tradition.11 It consciously or unconsciously established the European experience and tradition as a universal example for the particular (Korea) to follow. A WOMAN-CHILD ALONE IN THE WORLD: “RAINY DAY” Although there were many writers still working during the war, it was with Son Ch’ang-sôb, the first representative member of the postwar generation of Korean writers who began his brief but prolific career in the mid-1950s that postwar literature began to take shape. Son was born in P’yôngyang in 1922 and left home at the age of fourteen to wander around Manchuria and Japan for the next ten years. He struggled to put himself through schools and colleges in Japan but his was not an average student’s life by any means. After much hardship and suffering, he eventually returned home in 1946, only to come to the South two years later.12 As one can imagine from the biographical facts, his early life and coming of age was marked by poverty and loneliness, and his writing is also closely connected to the shock of the Korean War and the national division (582). Son Ch’ang-sôb writes in an autobiographical note at the end of a collection of his stories that he is an amateur, since he never actually studied writing as a craft, let alone fiction writing. He recounts his early life filled with hardship, a “malnourished one,” that had “no parents, siblings, home nor hometown, country, money or birth-day.”13 His experiences in life led him to view human beings as no better than animals, and the protagonists in his stories are typically those who are diseased, disabled, amoral, or sometimes, intellectuals who lack any common sense (60). The world is full of despair in Son Ch’ang-sôb’s stories; his characters are either dying or so lethargic that they are barely alive; the atmosphere of nihilism saturates the lives of his characters (588). They don’t have much agency to control their environment and fate. In his stories, the plot moves through external events, rather than compelled by the characters’ internal motivations. Son Ch’ang-sôb’s “Pionûn nal” (Rainy Day, 1953) is a pitch-perfect short story of three characters, the protagonist Wôn-gu, his childhood friend Tong-uk and his disabled sister Tongok, who run into each other as war refugees in Pusan, a large southern port city that became extremely crowded, chaotic and cutthroat with war refugees, soldiers, and shady profiteers.14 A housebound Tong-ok paints American soldiers’ portraits to make money, while her brother brings in the business. But even this small business has been drying up as it becomes increasingly impossible for Tong-uk to get into the military bases. Tong-uk keeps hinting, then outright pleading with his friend to marry his poor sister. Though he takes care of his sister and confesses to his friend that he is worried about her, he nevertheless voices his resentment and

curses her often. Tong-ok, who refuses to leave the house nor meet strangers, predicts that her brother will abandon her eventually. She is by turns lifeless like a doll or openly hostile and bitter. As her brother says to the protagonist, her personality is twisted as well as a result of her physical disability. She begins to demand her share of the money she earned by painting portraits, angering her brother even more (147). Wôn-gu begins to visit the siblings in their shack and likes the positive changes in Tong-ok that he observes with each visit, which is like the improvements of a patient who recovers from the throes of death (146). In the end, however, he cannot bring himself to take on the burden of marrying her, a virtual invalid who is as helpless as a child. Religion plays an interesting role in this highly symbolic narrative. Tong-uk attended church and belonged to its choir as a child. Now he frequently talks of going to a seminary and becoming a pastor, but mostly as a means of survival. For him, it is no different from wanting to enlist in the army; it is just another way of feeding himself and continuing to endure the present, somehow. The narrative takes place during a long rainy season and there are references to the Biblical forty days of rain and Noah’s ark. In the narrative, it is connected to the palpable sense that the world as they knew it is over and that somehow they are being punished for their wickedness (148). The author makes the Biblical allusion to Noah’s ark not necessarily in a religious tone but rather, much in the same way Tong-uk talks about becoming a pastor. Interestingly, the siblings’ shack was indeed a kind of an “ark” or a vessel of quarantine and rescue, as it was originally a sanatorium during the Japanese colonial period. It is an existentialist view of the world, where religion and its authority (or its salvation, for that matter) can no longer influence people’s lives. The symbolic significance extends to the narrative’s space, as well. The two siblings live in a shack that cannot be called a proper house. The description and the sense of space are crucial in the narrative, much as in “The Stray Bullet” and “The Uncharted Map,” two stories I will discuss later in this chapter. Specifically, the two rooms of the “house” that the siblings occupy, one of which is converted into a makeshift kitchen, are described in dismal detail. The unreal-ness of the barely standing “house” and its emptiness create an impression of a theater stage. The house is in such disrepair that it is “like a goblin’s house in children’s comic books,” “dark as a cave or the inside of a grave” (143–44). It is also referred to as a condemned house, painting an almost fatalistic image of its occupants as already dead though alive, or meant for a life of suffering. As the title indicates, the rain provides a key element in the story as well, because the protagonist/narrator cannot think about the siblings without also remembering the interminable rain: “Tong-uk and Tong-ok’s lives are always soaked with rain” in the narrator’s recollection (141). The house blooms with mold in the endless rain. The rain sets the mood of depression, darkness and isolation from the world outside: in fact, rain and darkness dominate many of the author’s works, creating a general atmosphere of loneliness and gloom (455–56). It has been pointed out that the protagonist’s name sounds like the reverse of the SinoKorean word for “salvation” or kuwôn. In the end, he is powerless and also unwilling to do anything about the desperate predicament of Tong-ok, a disabled, childlike woman who is left

alone to fend for herself. The story ends as he discovers that in the few weeks’ time since his last visit, his friend has abandoned his sister. And after crying for her mother like a child for several days, Tong-ok has also disappeared from the house. He suspects that his friend has enlisted himself in the army, and more sinister, that the landlord might have sold Tong-ok into prostitution because it is the “only way” she has any worth now: “You bastard, you sold Tongok!” (151). However, these unarticulated words only echo in his head, and the blame and the rage Wôn-gu momentarily feels towards the man quickly turns to himself as he walks away from the house. The one bright spot in their lives as refugees is memory and nostalgia of better times in childhood. Thus it is only when Wôn-gu recalls how Tong-ok used to follow himself and her brother around as a little girl that he sees any human emotion in her other than aloofness, and often, bitterness and hostility. There is a frequent association of Tong-ok with childhood; she cannot will herself to leave her small room, cries for her mother “like a child” before she finally leaves the house, and generally depends on others, such as her brother, for daily survival. On the first day he sees her at the house the narrator is startled to discover that her disabled leg is “thin and short like a child’s wrist” (145). Through a metonymic relationship Tong-ok is turned into a symbolic child, or a grown woman who has regressed to a child-like state in her disabled, helpless state. This story contains a major tendency found in postwar Korean fiction: it infantilizes woman and also depicts her as a diseased, sick body. As it is also noticeable in other narratives, her physical illness or disability has also affected her psychologically, making her a twisted personality. But this sick body is still useful as a sexual object. This particular characterization of Tong-ok is significant, because as the landlord tells the protagonist at the end, the only way she can survive now is to sell herself. The author’s writing style is partly responsible for creating this psychological distance between Tong-ok, the symbolic child, and the protagonist who is unwilling to take care of this child. His sentences end with (-hanûn) kôsida, indicating both his recollection of past events and a demonstrative mode of speech that makes it clear the speaker is imagining some kind of audience. This speaking style creates a distance between the present and the past, the subject of the recollection and the object of such cognition, and also between the narrator and the audience. No matter how vivid the image and the incidents recollected, the reader is ever aware that this is a remembered story, and the characters in the story are of the past. Son Ch’ang-sôb is often accused of being a cynical writer. His protagonists are often physically or psychologically disabled. This narrative element plays an important symbolic function in his work, but it also seems to preclude deeper interpretations beyond the obvious suggestions of helplessness, tragedy, and the impossibility of imagining a bright future.15 His characters are fully occupied with the mere daily survival in the present to construct their future. According to the literary critic Yu Chong-ho, the short story genre is overly developed in a “crippled way” in modern Korean literature, which in part has to do with the external conditions.16 Another reason is that Korean authors do not have what Yu calls the “writer’s eye,” a unique view and understanding of the world and people in it. Son Ch’ang-sôb, however, has this “eye.” The problem, however, is that the picture of the humanity filtered

through this eye shows the author’s misanthropic philosophy, and it actually hinders further expansion of his ideas and characterization. This is reflective of the socio-cultural situation of postwar South Korea in the 1950s. And unfortunately, Son Ch’ang-sôb’s limit as a fiction writer also seems to be the limit of his generation of authors writing in this period. Their world was too dark and hopeless to move beyond the all encompassing darkness. Their physical and psychological situation of living the desperate lifestyle of refugees and prisoners of war, compounded by their shaky grasp of their own written language and the resulting influence on their confidence as writers, no doubt created the kind of work that can only be and must be appreciated with all of “their world” in mind. Decades later, some of the postwar writers spoke of the 1950s’ literature as very limited and immature upon looking back at their own early works. For example, Yi Ho-ch’ôl speaks of the works written during the period between 1955 and 1960 as being influenced by Western literary movements, especially existentialist novels. He then points out that those works still embarrass him, as the influence came from a misunderstanding and blind emulation of existentialist literature of the West.17 In fact, it seems natural to agree with the literary critic Hong Chông-sôn who imagines that to the writers and other intellectuals of postwar Korea who had to let go of using their familiar language of intellectual production, Japanese, after the decolonization, what Korean literature had to offer must have appeared meager by comparison. This generation was familiar with other national literatures such as English, French, and German, and thus their own national literature must have seemed “dwarfish.”18 Another critic who belongs to this generation writes that postwar Seoul’s atmosphere, especially the intellectual atmosphere around universities in the late 1950s and early 1960s that writers like Yi Pôm-sôn and Kim Sûng-ok experienced was not of reality, but of surreality; he paints a vivid picture of the poor and, in many cases homeless, young intellectuals of Korea learning and discussing western European philosophy and theories by the likes of Hegel, Baudelaire, Camus, and Sartre in the midst of the postwar ruins.19 The unbridgeable chasm between their own reality in Korea and the rarified “reality” of the western European intellectual tradition was a cause for much despair and intellectual posing, as was the ultimate realization of the futility of such gestures. Furthermore, this generation of writers was born and educated during the Japanese colonial period. Perhaps not so surprisingly, a large number of them lacked the most essential and basic skill that a writer needs, a good knowledge of one’s spoken and written language. For example Chang Yong-hak, a renowned and prolific postwar writer of the late 1950s, recalls that he only learned Korean after the Liberation. Chang later wrote the novel St. John’s Poems upon reading Sartre’s Nausea in 1955, only ten years after teaching himself Korean by reading the previous generation of writers’ short stories and novels.20 One of the most crucial periods in the history of modern Korean language was the two decades after the decolonization, for it was during this period that the public, and especially writers, struggled to escape from the hold that Japanese language had on their mind and learned to think, speak, and write in Korean. This struggle with language most seriously affected the

postwar writers of the 1950s, for they attended high school or college during the culturally and linguistically confusing period between 1940 and 1955. For example, it was only in 1950 that Korean language finally became standardized in South Korea.21 Chang’s stories are in a mixed script of Sino-Korean and pure Korean, similar to those written in the 1910s and for this reason, he and others who wrote in this fashion were accused of bad, incorrect writing and of regressing Korean literature by several decades. But one should remember the historical and cultural context for this generation of writers; that they lived as homeless, displaced war refugees, barely escaping death as soldiers and prisoners in the war, and that they began their literary career with a shaky knowledge of their mother tongue. NATION, INDIVIDUAL, AND POSTWAR DISPLACEMENT: “THE STRAY BULLET” For many, the experience of the Korean War was more destabilizing than their experience in Japanese colonialism, because the war and the chaos it brought to their lives seemed to negate the very existence of the nation of Korea, while their anti-colonial struggle actually affirmed and solidified the concept of Korean nationhood. In other words, the nation became more tangible during the colonial period because it was deemed worthy of personal sacrifice and struggle. The postwar nation as such, now the Republic of Korea, was in hopeless political and economic disarray and lacked the capacity to fold into its fabric many thousands who came to the South as refugees. “The Stray Bullet” (Obalt’an, 1959) by Yi Pôm-sôn is a representative and much celebrated postwar short story that underlines the moral bankruptcy and the failure of the nation to adequately provide for its own people. It is an economical narrative highlighting the horrible life circumstances for the protagonist Song Ch’ôl-ho’s family, war refugees from the North, a displaced people who suffered what one might call an internal loss of the nation perhaps even more acutely than did others.22 For these unfortunate people, concepts like “freedom” and “liberty” are mere words emptied out of their significance. The story juxtaposes such vague concepts against the squalid materiality of the ironically named “Liberation Village” where the Song family lives. The author describes the “Liberation Village” in the following way: “The village was a collection of wooden shacks, flung at random one against the other into gouges in the hillside. . . . At the end of the alley was the door to Ch’ôl-ho’s house, a patchwork of yellow cement-bag paper tied to the frame with white string” (272). And in the absence of the substance supporting concepts like “liberty,” “freedom,” or indeed, “nation,” the devastated society has turned into an arena of bloody battle for the survival of the fittest. The protagonist’s search for food and sustenance is often futile, for the world is cruel and only those who are willing to break the moral and social laws seem to gain anything of material value. His brother Yông-ho, a war veteran embittered by the hopelessness of his and his family’s situation, wants to “go beyond the law” in order to live a comfortable life. He believes that each individual is responsible for his or her actions and the individual has a moral and ethical obligation only to oneself. He claims that conscience is like a thorn in one’s

fingertip, and once one gets rid of it, it will no longer get in the way of realizing one’s wishes (283). The concept of nation as a physical and ideological entity to which one belongs and with which one identifies does not allow room for existentialist beliefs. Hence the very concept of coexistence between the nation and existentialism is seemingly false. Put differently, postwar Korean writers like Yi Pôm-sôn wrote stories that are either heavily influenced by French existentialism of Sartre and Camus or at least contain germs of existentialist thought because the nation as such no longer existed for them, and if it did, it no longer seemed to hold much meaning. Their existentialist literature is born out of such despair and loneliness that they discovered the ideological and emotional shelter of the nation, not to speak of the practical shelter of the infra- and superstructures it was meant to provide, was an illusion. The protagonist Song Ch’ôl-ho is equally overwhelmed by the oppressive reality of his life and family, and the story hints that his death from a massive blood loss after an impulsive, dangerous dental surgery comes as a relief to him. Although it seems that he fails to do much about his dismal situation, there is a small ray of hope in his very passivity, because one can see it as an active, courageous struggle to refrain from doing something illegal, or more importantly, something immoral.23 Despite his struggle the narrative ends with his utter defeat, a complete loss of all hope, and more than one death. As we will see with “The Uncharted Map,” the war has turned the physical, material world upside down. Moreover, this topsyturvy quality of the tangible reality is but a reflection of the characters’ lives and inner landscape. As a patriarch the protagonist Song Ch’ôl-ho fails in his endeavor to save himself by keeping his family whole. When his younger brother laments that the situation is already out of control, that they should have done something, anything, before things went so terribly wrong— before their mother went insane and their only sister became a prostitute—his words have a larger reverberation that underlines the utter failure of the nation and its patriarchal authority that Rhee Syngman’s government represents. It is significant that the character’s lament points to the sufferings of his mother and sister as the reason to compel the hero into action. The story depicts that in postwar South Korea’s patriarchal world, women are in need of male protection, but upon the patriarch’s failure to protect the family’s womenfolk, the women turn into unsympathetic, dysfunctional, and transgressive subjects. For example, the family’s old matriarch has lost her sanity while going through the extreme experiences of war, the loss of socio-economic status, and displacement. She is now bedridden in one corner of a room, a living corpse that repeats only one phrase all day, “Let’s go!” It should actually be “Let’s go back!” for that is her one last wish. Gazing at his own mother, the protagonist sees a mummy: “He had seen a mummy at the museum once during his middle school. Here was another one, wrapped in its cotton tatters” (273). Even before she goes insane, the old matriarch of the family is depicted in an unsympathetic light, as someone whose incessant nostalgic ramblings are disconnected from reality. Hence it almost seems inevitable that she completely loses all senses and becomes a relic of the past, morbidly continuing its existence in the present (as a “living mummy”) and constantly reminding the young of the past

by pleading to go back. The mother goes insane because her mind does not allow her to accept the changed circumstances of her life after the war. Furthermore, she fails to grasp abstract concepts such as “freedom” and “liberation” and their attendant ambiguities and contradictions: [Though] she knew little of the world, she still could not believe that this Liberation Village—its cratelike shacks tacked one upon the other, perched in cavities that had been scraped out of the mountainside—was really liberation.

The cruel irony of the situation is lost on her as she contemplates the disparity between a “liberated” nation and a “free” society of South Korea and her surroundings, which utterly fail to satisfy her humble desire for a peaceful, plentiful life in the old village: “It was all beyond her. How was it that someone could win back the country and yet lose his home? It didn’t make any sense” (277). The mother is defined only by this simple desire to return to her home in the North and the comfortable life of the prewar past that it represents. Although it is a natural desire, her wish to go back to the North becomes maniacal and obsessive when she cannot adjust her wishes according to the changed environment and a changed world. In this way the narrative characterizes the family’s matriarch as someone who stands outside of larger realities of history and nation as ongoing historical processes and living entities: instead, she is gender-stereotypically associated with home and the genteel past that is no more. Her insanity and old age is thus symptomatic of her exclusion from the present in the postwar nation, where even the young and the healthy cannot survive unscathed. The protagonist’s wife is also without voice—quite literally so in her case. The hardships and squalor she has suffered and is still experiencing take away her will to speak, and she has become virtually mute. She once lived a life of privilege as a beautiful young woman, a graduate of a fine women’s college. Yet now, she has turned into someone who resembles “some dull-witted animal,” whose heavily pregnant physique only underlines such mute, animalistic quality (287). Just as the old matriarch is characterized by her mad desire to return to the past, the wife of the protagonist, the younger generation’s matriarch, is characterized by her maternal instinct that somehow survived all the difficulties in life she has gone through. Her devotion to her young daughter even in the midst of the squalor and deprivation of her life is remarkable, yet it is also a suspect narrative point. Her otherwise one-dimensional characterization leads the reader to question whether her maternal devotion is the author’s expression of “stronger ties” that bind woman to nature and biology, as to define woman only as her biological facts and her presumed natural instincts for nurturing and mothering. Later, such suspect associations of woman with maternal instincts, nurturing, and biology seems confirmed when she dies in the hospital giving birth. In the narrative, the character is eliminated at the moment of her reproductive failure. The family and by extension the nation thus loses both the old and the young matriarchs, and the latter in a failed attempt to reproduce the next generation. But perhaps most significantly, there is an over-sexualization of women in postwar literature, who are typically figured as prostitutes or otherwise promiscuous. It is a dominant motif that is disturbing and revealing at the same time. It is a telling detail that in Korean, the

nomenclature itself underlines the victimization of women “by their own history of foreign dominations and homonational misogyny.” The etymology of the derogatory word “slut” (hwanyangnyôn) is hwanhyang nyô, which means “homecoming women” and goes back to the mid-seventeenth century when young women were a part of the tributary items sent to Qing China during its suzerainty over Korea. When their youth passed they returned to Korea only to face the stigma as dishonored and promiscuous women. In this way, “the ‘promiscuous’ ‘homecoming women’ signified a nomenclature that constructs Korean men as the victims of the emasculation of the Korean nation,” rather than as members of the same patriarchy that contributed to, if not created, the victimization of the “homecoming women.”24 Centuries later, the pattern repeats itself as a certain prototypical relationship gets constructed in literature as well as in reality; only in the new context of postwar literature, it is between Korean woman, Korean man, and American soldiers, who represent the dominant and threatening masculinity and racial Other. In this triangular relationship of unequal powers Korean man is the constant narrator who assesses and judges the sexual and racial Others. In these narratives the only voice and meaningful agency typically belong to the (male) narrator. And when the narrator takes it upon himself to go beyond the moral judgment of the Other, to punish them in some manner, he tellingly targets the sexual Other, Korean woman, rather than the rival masculine subject and his racial Other, American soldiers. Postwar fiction depicts the Korean masculine subject/narrator attempting to regain control over their masculine identity and patriarchal authority by exerting control over Korean woman. Male authority that manifests through the narrator may have the power to punish woman, but lacks the power to punish his rival. Hence Korean woman exists under a double structure of oppression, imposed on her by both male authorities that have economic and socio-cultural hegemony over her. The paradigm of power and its gendered nature points to the enduring nature of gender hierarchy that reveals itself through the ideology of chastity, which essentially remained unchanged since the midseventeenth century. In “The Stray Bullet” it is the protagonist Song Ch’ôl-ho and his sister Myông-suk who exemplify this oppressive relationship. She sacrifices her dignity and turns to prostitution because of the family’s abject poverty. On his way home one day, Ch’ôl-ho sees his sister from a crowded streetcar while she is at work: although she is only seen riding on an American army jeep with an American soldier who has his arm around her, her dress and situation clearly mark her as a prostitute. The pain of her brother’s shock is compounded when other men in the streetcar, with no clue that the woman is Ch’ôl-ho’s sister, make contemptuous comments about her (290). The following is his reaction: He wasn’t just sick at heart. Something beyond words, like burning charcoal, had thrust itself hard into his throat. . . . He gritted his teeth with a sudden urge to drive his head right through the large window in front of him. . . . Since that day Ch’ôl-ho had said not one word to his sister.

Violence against women in postwar fiction, especially against those who are depicted as promiscuous, is actually a reflection of the male subject’s hatred of the powerless, emasculated self that is incapable of protecting the women in his life. In this narrative, the protagonist Song Ch’ol-ho is also completely powerless to do anything about his sister’s situation that he

himself witnesses, and his response is to silently distance himself from her. His utter contempt, expressed through silence and alienation, is no doubt also a kind of violence. In this story, violence against the woman who is seen as promiscuous comes out as disconnection, silence, and estrangement that the protagonist, her older brother, metes out. Though this violence is not physical in nature, it wounds just as deeply. Although Myông-suk seems unaffected, she is devastated by what is happening and silently weeps at night under a blanket. The ideology of chastity behind the protagonist’s estrangement from his sister that seems so naturally accepted in South Korean society in postwar cultural context is actually a cultural construct, like any other ideology of gender and sexuality. According to this ideology, woman must remain a virgin until marriage and after marriage, she must be faithful to her husband until her own death. But this ideology entirely targets only woman, while man’s responsibility is not articulated in terms of chastity, whether they are Korean or not: [The] ideology of chastity, while exempting men of their self-appointed responsibility to defend the nation, safeguards masculine authority at the expense of women’s lives.25

Yi’s narrative unintentionally reveals how this ideology is enforced and such enforcement reaffirms the gendered power hierarchy behind it. For example, several times, the older brother has to get his sister released from the police station after she is arrested for soliciting American soldiers. In these occasions he “would sit before the judge, head bowed, until [his sister] is led in by a policeman” (295). He would then walk her out the back door, and they would wordlessly go their separate ways as though they were strangers: “The only sister he had, but really he resented her. Without once looking at her, Ch’ôl-ho would walk ahead. . . .” The authority figures in this passage, the judge and a policeman, represent postwar Korea’s law and order that fail to eliminate the root of the problem (i.e., the very presence of American soldiers in Korea), yet go on enforcing the ideology of chastity by only punishing woman. They symbolically occupy the top position of a social hierarchical ladder whose bottom rung holds someone like Myông-suk, a transgressive, promiscuous female subject. The protagonist is only a little less reprehensible and tainted in the eyes of the law that these judge and policeman represent, and Myông-suk is released to her older brother as though she were a minor, someone not to be trusted to make her autonomous decisions. However, it is Myông-suk who gives her older brother the money for his wife in child labor (299). It is only then that the protagonist feels an older brother’s love towards her for the first time in a long while. Despite everything that happens to her, Myông-suk is the strongest character because she does not take the easier way out to escape her life and predicament: her mother lost her sanity, while her brother Yông-ho turns to heavy drinking and finally commits a robbery, and one might say that the protagonist’s wife was no longer alive even before she dies in the hospital. And the protagonist also gives up his struggle at the end by committing suicide through a dangerous surgery, knowing he will lose too much blood. In the end, it is the character Myông-suk who survives with her sanity and presence of mind intact, no matter how painful such survival may be.

COLLAPSE OF MORAL UNIVERSE: “THE UNCHARTED MAP” “The Uncharted Map” (1956), is a short story by one of the representative postwar Korean writers, Sô Ki-wôn.26 Unlike their predecessors who came of age during the colonial period and experienced the decolonization as adults, the generation of postwar writers came of age with the shattering experience of the Korean War, a catastrophe that left an indelible mark on their collective mind. Sô Ki-wôn is a member of this group of writers, and not surprisingly, the central motif in his stories is always the collapse of one’s world.27 The author himself fought in the Korean War and later confesses that he also experienced a world shattering disillusion and nihilism during and after the war (608). As one sees in the works of many other postwar writers, the philosophy that governs the characters’ mood in these stories is nihilism. The postwar literature of the late 1950s, like the society that gave it birth, is full of existentialist gloom. Young intellectuals of South Korea became “historical nihilists.”28 Their contempt for the world, the loss of the center in their lives, the interminable ennui, and their inability to feel anything anymore ultimately lead them to feel that they continue living in this empty world because they cannot find any strong reason to kill themselves.29 I have mentioned that much of postwar Korean literature deals with existentialist questions. This is a distinguishing tendency for the 1950s’ literature, but this very unique context and background also disabled the works from this era from becoming a long-standing literary tradition, as the social atmosphere and living conditions rapidly changed after the April 19th Revolution of 1960 (599). In “The Uncharted Map” the author tells the lives of three young people who have experienced such collapse of the world as they knew it and seem to no longer accept any value system, which propels them toward amorality that ultimately overwhelms and destroys them. This short story is virtually a “map” of postwar male anxiety—about economy, social status, female sexuality, and their own masculinity. This anxiety surfaces in a misogynistic violence and contempt, and in particular, through oversexualization of women in the narrative. Woman’s body is grotesquely foregrounded and her sex represents emotional chaos and disruption. At the same time, the male narrator and his alter egos erase and usurp woman’s voice and individuality, tautologically constructing and reinforcing her Otherness. The story depicts two best friends Sang-dôk, who used to be an elite law student, and Hyông-nam, who was an ambitious art student before the war. They are army buddies who served together in the Korean War and later accidentally reunite in postwar Seoul. Sang-dôk invites Hyông-nam to live in his house that he inherited from his father who passed away. The house in fact used to belong to his father’s mistress. And although this is mentioned rather casually, the house, its purpose, and it ownership metaphorically reveal both the hypocrisy of the older generation and the damaged soul of the youthful generation that comes to inhabit the house. Upon arriving at this house which was shelled during the war but that is still standing with most of its former glory intact, Hyông-nam is surprised to see an attractive young woman, Ch’ôe Yun-ju living there, as well. Sang-dôk tells Hyông-nam that he met Yun-ju by chance and that they began to live together when Yun-ju told him she had no home. Gradually, Hyông-nam

finds himself attracted to Yun-ju and also soon begins to support the artificial family in the house with his meager earnings as a movie poster painter. All the while, there is much negotiation, balancing of power, and emotional pulls between the three young people in the house. At Sang-dôk’s proposal, the two men eventually begin to share Yun-ju, which leads to the destruction of the friendship and love among the three characters. Finally, Yun-ju announces she is pregnant and after denouncing paternity of both men, leaves the house. As the narrative begins, the reader discovers that the war caused a significant fall in all three characters’ socio-cultural status. Despite his artistic ambitions, Hyông-nam paints movie posters for a pittance in order to survive, while Sang-dôk has nothing but the empty shell of a house and is often unemployed. Yun-ju seems as if she is from a good family and a refined background, but she also finds herself with no money and no place to go before joining Sangdôk at his house. The fall from the upper social and economic status the characters experience represents a bigger social reality of postwar Korea, a nation in crisis where the world is turned upside down and people are left without homes, employment, and even future seemingly overnight. The house in this context functions as a metaphor for the lives of its three young occupants: Although dilapidated in many ways, still [the house] was a sturdy looking wooden house. One of the rooms and the roof over the front gate had been shelled and left unrepaired.30

Like the house that used to be solid in the prewar past, the lives of the young people are damaged and left unhealed while they learn to live as they are. The house-owner Sang-dôk’s fall from the upper class grace to low class is hinted at through his singing; while he still sang “melodies of symphonies or concertos” in the army, now he sings “degenerate beggar’s tune in an obviously drunken falsetto” (75). The West, glimpsed at only in movies and works of fine art in the narrative, seems to signify material abundance and emotional wholeness that stems from such material well-being. The culture is saturated with Western influences and movies in particular are one of the most available cultural products from the West. Hence the West as such is an alluring entity, exotic in the true sense of the word for the characters. The movies are also a bitter reminder of the ideal that the three characters cannot realize in their own lives. The ideal of a happy life for them is essentially an actualization of bourgeois values, which the foreign (French and American) movies symbolize in the story. So it is worth noting that Sang-dôk and Yun-ju accidentally cross paths while waiting in line to see a French movie. And later, Yun-ju scoffs at Hyông-nam’s declaration of love for her: “The only place love exists is in the movies” (84). The exotic allure of a better life in the West is nowhere more tragicomically expressed than in a movie poster Hyông-nam paints with his boss’s urging to make it as sexy as he can, depicting “a cowboy kissing a blonde girl against the background of green meadows” (74). Hyông-nam sees his new profession as degrading and in his mind, his artistic frustration and his frustration with Yun-ju, who does not reciprocate his feelings, mingle with each other. It is telling, for instance, that he would visit a brothel in his despair and further “abuse” himself on these nights by “masochistically studying” color reproductions of European masters’ works

(79). As the narrative progresses, the delicate emotional and libidinal balance between the three people in the house becomes increasingly nerve-wracking and exhausting to maintain, as their relationship with each other gets more and more complex and fraught with sexual tension, considerations of money, and obligation. While Sang-dôk increasingly turns degenerate, Hyông-nam becomes the sole breadwinner of the house and thinks that, “he could definitely tell that Yun-ju was backing away from Sang-dôk; moreover, it was obvious that she was making a creeping approach to [himself]” (78). The unconventional cohabitation of the three soon turns into something “strange and grotesque” when Sang-dôk one day suggests a “co-ownership” of Yun-ju. Hyông-nam is initially outraged at this suggestion, yet he cannot bring himself to refuse the offer and coerces Yun-ju into a sexual relationship with him. This new development destroys the already precarious equilibrium between the three and their relationship finally turns mutually destructive and humiliating as, for instance, Hyông-nam’s reflection here shows (87): He could not figure out what sort of life they were leading in that house. Of course one thing he could be sure was that he was not gaining anything from that life. . . . Might be that he was simply drawn by the power of that strange and grotesque life.

From the beginning of the narrative Sang-dôk reveals his extremely disparaging view of women, hence it seems inevitable that he eventually makes a suggestion of “joint owning” the woman who loves him, by reminding his protesting friend that they used to share a prostitute during their time in the army. He imagines that Yun-ju had no home because she was chased out by a man who lived with her for a while, adding, “these broads are all like that, aren’t they?” (85). He believes that Yun-ju is no different from a prostitute and indeed, seems to believe that all women are not only prostitutes but they are instinctively so. For example, he tells Hyôngnam that his friend overrates Yun-ju who is in no position to refuse him and that “all women have nothing but the instinct to love” (80). In Sang-dôk’s view, women clearly represent baser instincts of physical love and they are thus oversexualized beings, with only an animal-like cunning rather than human emotions and intelligence to guide them. Yet the only clue the reader gets about the origins of his misogyny is that his house used to belong to his father’s concubine. Hyông-nam is not much different from his friend, though he does not articulate his misogynistic opinions quite as freely. His view of women is just as skewed, which his idealization of Yun-ju shows. He prefers to believe both himself and Yun-ju as Sang-dôk’s victims because he believes Sangdôk meant to humiliate both Yun-ju and himself, and only made his suggestion knowing that Yun-ju will rebuff his friend, and also that she will eventually agree only at his command to do so—even though Hyông-nam himself agrees with Sang-dôk’s suggestion to sleep with Yun-ju. He even entertains a fantasy of rescuing Yun-ju from the house (“from this inhuman condition”) and living together in a cozy domestic bliss, though he knows it is impossible. At the center of their struggle for control—and in an indirect way, also for love—is a crisis in gender relationships. Cornered and pursued by two men with nowhere to turn, Yun-ju sells herself and negotiates the price of her sex and domestic labor in explicit monetary terms (83–

84). You want to buy me with this money, don’t you? . . . Believe me, I have no illusion about what I am. All right, the contract is done! . . . That will make things simple enough from now on. Everything on a cash basis. Well, well, I’d better be careful with my calculation.

Her self-deprecating negotiation is actually an attempt to hold on to the last shred of dignity and to claim agency for herself in a situation that is spinning out of control. For Hyông-nam who believes he loves her, her negotiation signals a clear refusal to belong to him or be “owned,” as Sang-dôk puts it. But the struggle for power and control in this relationship is just as dire for the two men, as no less than their masculinity is at stake. Although Sang-dôk does not articulate his wishes in clear terms of power, his desire to involve and manipulate Hyôngnam and Yun-ju according to his own will in a mén-age a trois reflects his desire for power. At the same time, his actions seem to underline his bottomless despair and perhaps his belief that the future ceased to matter for the three of them: “‘I don’t care anymore,’ said Sang-dôk, and to Hyông-nam it sounded like the groan of a wounded beast” (91). For Hyông-nam who thinks that he loves Yun-ju, his struggle to command authority in the face of her rejection and mockery is deeply intertwined with his desire for her approval. But actually, at the root of such desire is his conviction that the recovery of his manhood depends on whether he can bend Yun-ju to his will: It was no longer so much his desire for Yun-ju as the wish to prove his manhood by trampling on her. It became an obsession with him and he felt that unless he violated her he would be pinned on a dangerous pinnacle forever. . . . [Now] he felt that violating her was the only action left to him if he wanted to live his life with any sincerity.31

The passage contains an interesting choice of words and strange logic that claims a crucial kind of passivity on the part of Hyông-nam, which allows him to actually blame his act of violation on the woman who is violated. Hyông-nam also believes living his life truthfully, “with any sincerity” depends on proving his masculinity, which in turn depends on violating Yun-ju. Following this logic, it is clear that his masculinity is the essence of his self-identity and self-worth, for it enables him to live truthfully. But it is a logic that contains within itself a basic flaw; namely that rather than independently true, the proof of such masculinity wholly depends upon someone else. In the above passage we see a familiar leitmotif in postwar fiction: misogyny. More specifically, what this text reveals is a misogyny that not only reduces women to only their biological facts, but also curiously leaves them out of the picture even while discussing them, for such discussions are almost entirely preoccupied with the status of threatened masculinity. The postwar socio-economic predicament that often transformed women into primary breadwinner also resulted in women’s increasing autonomy and their necessary excursions beyond the familiar/familial domestic sphere. On the other hand, their transformation into prostitutes in the desperate years following the war, especially those who serviced American soldiers, became a major social problem of the day in the newly formed republic. These issues all brought about a socio-cultural atmosphere heavy with male anxiety over women’s sexuality and the threat to Korean masculinity.

The three characters’ lives eventually fall apart when Yun-ju announces her pregnancy and leaves the house after denouncing paternity of both men. At this moment of crisis, their delusion of living in a social vacuum and being in control of the (at the least) domestic situation finally falls away. In desperation, Hyông-nam tells her that going to a brothel will be infinitely better for her than living in such inhuman circumstances, while Sang-dôk sits in silence. It is in this climactic last passage in the narrative that the significance of the title becomes most meaningful. The three young people whose world had collapsed during the war begin new lives and attempt to map out a new territory for themselves, from the ashes of the prewar life that no longer exists nor matters, free of social and cultural burdens and conventions. But their design for living backfires and consumes them. What is telling in this passage is that even at this last moment of their shared lives, the two men fail to comprehend or recognize Yun-ju’s humanity. Instead of shared humanity and pain, all Hyông-nam sees in her at this instant is something like a madness, “an obsession that went beyond all sense and logic,” which once again suggests a disconnection between the male subject/narrator who soberly perceives the female Other as irrational and incomprehensible (90). The tragedy that unfolds in the narrative exemplifies the Hegelian dialectic movement that Albert Memmi borrows to theorize the relationship of the colonizer and the colonized. Colonizer destroys his own humanity upon destroying the humanity of the colonized: in our context this irony applies to the “hierarchical relationships between men and women of the oppressed nation.”32 Finally, the last pervasive theme that repeatedly surfaces in postwar Korean fiction with its contents of misogyny and threatened masculinity, is patriarchy in trouble. It is also a major theme in “Rainy Day,” “The Stray Bullet” and “The Uncharted Map,” some of the representative short stories of the postwar era I have discussed here. Just as the character Song Ch’ôl-ho, the patriarch in “The Stray Bullet,” is overwhelmed by the dismal circumstances surrounding him, and eventually fails to maintain his patriarchal position, so do the young future patriarchs in “The Uncharted Map.” Fathers and father figures are completely absent in this narrative and when referring to his father, the character Sang-dôk calls him “that guy.”33 In addition, all male figures of authority, whether they be Sang-dôk’s military superior or Hyông-nam’s manager at work, are shallow, greedy, and laughable. It is not an accident that the two men meet in and share the experience of the army service—that most quintessential of Korean male rites of passage and inculcation of a masculinist culture. The depiction of the military life as a kind of absurd dream, empty of meaning or reality, is particularly poignant and ironic, given the background of the story—the postwar nation that was steeped in military and extremely patriotic culture. In this light, it seems almost a foregone conclusion that the two male protagonists in turn fail their own test of masculinity and patriarchy. The woman they thought they “co-owned” rejects their paternal rights, as well as responsibilities, and claims the unborn child as her own before leaving them. Hence, despite the two men’s actions that could have annihilated the female protagonist’s subjectivity, in the end, she refuses to be a victim. Furthermore, paternity that is at the heart of patriarchal power is called into question when it cannot be pinned down and the female

protagonist denies it. In this way, what takes place in the narrative in regards to masculinity is a series of self-delusion in different contexts of the military, civilian, and domestic arena of influence, which reveals the interconnectedness of postwar Korea’s crisis in masculinity, gender relationship and the nation. CONCLUSION: PATRIARCHY IN TROUBLE Decolonization of Korea came as almost a gift, but suddenly and with many attendant problems. The problematic nature of decolonization led to a deep, seemingly irrevocable ideological split that eventually erupted in the Korean War in 1950. The Allied Forces came to South Korea’s aid during the war but also helped to escalate it into something far more serious and damaging than a mere civil war among Koreans. The most significant effect of foreign intervention in the Korean War is the development of the national division into a semipermanent condition, which influences every aspect of life for Koreans. Postwar literature reflects that all arenas of life—social, economic, cultural, and political— in South Korea was in a state of chaos and disorder. And though there was a great effort to rebuild the nation, the Rhee Syngman regime was also coming into its own at same time, to the detriment of democracy and establishment of civil society in South Korea in retrospect. The regime founded a culture of over-militarization and overzealous, monolithic culture of masculine patriotic ideals and ideological stance founded on vehement anti-communism; and with the overgrowth of the military, its culture seeped into the lives everyone, creating an oppressive atmosphere of a monolithic, exclusive, patriarchal nation that does not allow room for ideological freedom and transgression of traditional gender ideals. The writers’ denial to give women voice and subjective agency within each narrative is connected to the way in which Korea’s crisis on the national level travels down and poses challenge to its denizens on the quotidian and personal level. In addition, such narrative violence is rooted in “homonational misogyny,” which displaces male resentment and powerlessness against foreign dominance onto women, who are doubly victimized in the situation. Through an abject oversexualization of woman, postwar writers respond to the sense of crisis and threat Korean male subject feels in the neo-colonial predicament of postwar South Korea, where Korean women prostitute themselves to American soldiers. As the etymology of a word that literally means “homecoming women” yet denotes promiscuous women illustrates, Korean woman’s victimology is by nature gendered, displaced, and connected to the national history. Moreover, the triangular network of power between dominant foreign male subject, Korean male subject, and Korean female subject apparently has not changed since the seventeenth century. The picture that emerges at the end, as I illustrated with a reading of “The Uncharted Map,” is one of patriarchy and its traditions in trouble. Reading against the grain, the stories show that some women characters are the last women standing, surviving with their limited autonomy and integrity intact under the narratives’ annihilating circumstances. In the postwar era, there was also a sea change of culture, represented by the availability of foreign cultural products. Postwar narratives, including the ones I examined here, are filled

with evidence of American popular culture transplanted in South Korean soil, represented by American consumer goods in black markets, American soldiers, and especially emblematized by popular songs and visual images of Hollywood movies. On the other hand, western European culture, juxtaposed against American popular culture, became the pinnacle of civilization and highbrow culture during this era. The poverty-stricken postwar Korea’s yearning for the affluent America, and the popularity of French existentialist novels among its intellectuals should be viewed against such cultural backdrop. Though they sometimes misunderstood existentialism in their enthusiastic embrace of it, as it often happens when a culture travels to another national context, and even their very desire to adopt French existentialism as their own contains within it problems of cultural imperialism, Korean writers found a worthy model of emulation in existentialism that spoke to their own experiences. The limit of many postwar writers of the 1950s is that they do not bring a larger historical perspective into their works and cannot move beyond the despair and impasse of the present situation, so that they depict life as an isolated space and time, cut off from the larger reality of the past and future. It is a distinguishing tendency for the late 1950s’ postwar literature, but its very unique context and background disabled the works from this era from becoming a longstanding literary tradition, as the social atmosphere and living conditions rapidly changed after the April 19th Revolution. NOTES 1. Kim Yun-sik, Kim U-chong, et al., History of Modern Korean Literature (Hanguk hyôndae munhaksa, Seoul: Hyôndae munhak, 1994), 253. 2. Kim Yông-mo, et al., Thoughts and Prospect on the Half Century’s Decolonization of Korea (Haebang pansegi hang’guk sahôe’ûi sôngch’al’gwa chônmang, Seoul: Hyônamsa, 1996), 102–5. 3. Im Yông-t’ae, History of South Korea’s 50 Years (Taehanminguk 50nyônsa 1, Seoul: Tûlnyôk, 1998), 117. 4. Association for the Study of Literary History and Criticism, ed., Study of 1950s Literature (Munhaksawa pip’yông yôn’gu’hôe p’yôn, 1950nyôndae munhak yôn’gu, Seoul: Yeha, 1991), 13. 5. Chungmoo Choi and Elaine H. Kim, eds., Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 15. 6. As with any such phenomenon, there are a few exceptions. Writers such as Yôm Sangsôp and Hwang Sun-wôn did continue to write even during the war, yet the quality of the works is not on par with their earlier or later works. 7. Kwôn Yông-min, ed., Study of Modern Korean Writers (Hang’guk hyôndae chakk’a yôn’gu, Seoul: Munhak Sasangsa, 1991), 80. 8. Association for the Study of Literary History and Criticism, 26. 9. However, as popular as existentialism was at the time, critics have pointed out that the Korean writers who wrote existentialist stories often misunderstood the literary technique and movement, in a sense that while the French existentialist novels emphasized the noble nature of

human subjectivity in the face of history, Korean writers wrote about the death or the absence of human subjectivity. Minjok munhaksa yôn’guso (Institute of National Literature Studies), ed., Lecture on National Literature 2 (Minjok munhaksa kang’jwa 2, Seoul: Ch’angjakkwa Pip’yôngsa, 1995), 230. 10. Na Pyông-ch’ôl, Modernity and Postmodernity in Korean Literature (Hang’guk munhakûi kûndaesông’gwa t’alkûndaesông, Seoul: Munye Ch’ulp’ansa, 1996), 230. 11. In a similar vein, see Edward Said’s discussion on Camus’ writing, which was itself deeply intertwined with French colonialism and perhaps produced by it. This essay reveals the irony of the French writer’s great influence on postwar Korean writers. “Camus and the French Imperial Experience” in Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 169–85. 12. Kwôn Yông-min, ed., 55. 13. Son Ch’ang-sôb, Modern Korean Literature Collection Vol. 3: Son Ch’ang-sôb, 473. 14. The short story first appeared in the November issue of the literary journal Munye in 1953. 15. Traditionally Koreans regarded disability not simply as a condition but as a great affliction on both the individual and his or her family, often viewing such physical or mental handicap as a burden, and almost an existential punishment. This attitude continues to the present era, though the tendency towards such fatalistic attitude is usually found among the older generations today. 16. Son, Modern Korean Literature Collection Vol. 3: Son Ch’ang-sôb, 448. 17. Korean Fiction Series, Volume 39: Collected Works of Yi Ho-ch’ôl (Hang’guk sosôl munhak taegye, Seoul: Tong’a ch’ulp’ansa, 1995), 559–60. 18. Kim Pyông-ik and Kim Chu-yôn, eds., Forty Years of Decolonization: Korean Intellectuals’ Retrospection and View (Haebang 40nyôn: Minjok jisông’ûi hôegowa chônmang, Seoul: Munhakk’wa jisôngsa, 1985), 177. 19. Association for the Study of Literary History and Criticism, Study of 1950s Literature, 35. 20. Association for the Study of Literary History and Criticism, Study of 1950s Literature, 41. There are many such examples of postwar writers in which they recollect teaching themselves Korean by reading and copying by hand dictionaries and works by an older generation of writers. 21. Pyông-ik and Chu-yôn, eds., Forty Years of Decolonization: Korean Intellectuals’ Retrospection and View, 176, 182. 22. Yi Pôm-sôn, “The Stray Bullet,” in Flowers of Fire: Twentieth-Century Korean Stories, Peter H. Lee, ed., (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1974), 270–306. 23. In a similar vein, Hong Chông-sôn points out that the extreme fatigue which the protagonists in Son Ch’ang-sôb’s stories suffer could be viewed in a positive light, i.e., that their passivity in the face of morally compromising situations is actually a struggle to remain moral through passivity, and that they mask their refusal to act on their darker impulses with fatigue. Pyông-ik and Chu-yôn, eds., Forty Years of Decolonization: Korean Intellectuals’

Retrospection and View, 185. 24. Chungmoo Choi and Elaine H. Kim, eds., Dangerous Women, 13. 25. Chungmoo Choi and Elaine H. Kim, eds., Dangerous Women, 13. 26. Sô Ki-wôn, “The Uncharted Map,” in Postwar Korean Short Stories: An Anthology, Chong-un Kim, trans. and ed., (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 72–91. 27. Korean Fiction Series, Volume 35: Collected Works of Sô Ki-wôn and Yi Pôm-sôn (Hang’guk sosôl munhak taegye, Seoul: Tong’a ch’ulp’ansa, 1995), 601. 28. Im Yông-t’ae, History of South Korea’s 50 Years, 141. One convincing explanation that historians provide is that South Korea never resolved the issue of Japanese colonial collaboration. Most collaborators were never called to account for their past actions, and moreover, many of them came to occupy important and financially rewarding social and political positions of leadership and power after the decolonization. This turn of events sent a message of nihilism to the people of South Korea, who came to mistrust their own government. 29. Korean Fiction Series, Volume 35: Collected Works of Sô Ki-wôn and Yi Pôm-sôn (Han’guk sosôl munhak taegye, Seoul: Tong’a ch’ulp’ansa, 1995), 605. 30. Sô, “The Uncharted Map,” 74. 31. Sô, “The Uncharted Map,” 85. The italics are mine. 32. Chungmoo Choi and Elaine H. Kim, eds., Dangerous Women, 25. 33. Sô, “The Uncharted Map,” 73.

Chapter Four

Nation Rebuilding and Postwar South Korean Cinema: The Coachman and The Stray Bullet

Ever since the late Chosŏn dynasty period, Korea has consistently endured various threats to its nationhood. The twentieth century in particular was punctuated by a series of social and political upheavals. Given Korea’s strong tradition of patriarchy, it could be said that the state perceives the nation as a collective, universally male subject. As such, a threat to the nationhood of Korea can also, by extension, be interpreted as a threat to the Korean masculine subject. Ernest Renan articulated centuries earlier that a nation that conceives of itself as a nation is a “soul, a spiritual principle.”1 The sheer impossibility of a universal national subjectivity does not diminish the power of that narrative and national longing for cohesion. The postwar South Korean state responded to the threats on its nationhood, both imagined and otherwise, by overmilitarizing the nation, and by constructing a masculine national subject in monolithic, exclusive, and specific ways. This chapter examines two remarkable films from the Golden Age of South Korean cinema (1955–1972)—Mabu (The Coachman, Kang Tae-jin, dir., 1961) and Obalt’an (The Stray Bullet, Yu Hyôn-mok, dir., 1961)—against the larger sociocultural backdrop of postwar South Korea.2 In terms of both the number and the quality of films produced, South Korean cinema reached its peak during this Golden Age, the period between the end of the Korean War and before the wide availability of television. The star system in South Korean cinema was also established during this period, after the government announced a huge tax break for the film industry in 1954, which abolished the tax on movie theater ticket sales. There was very little else in the way of mass entertainment in South Korea during this period—television became a household fixture for the middle class only around the late 1960s—and audiences therefore flocked to the movie theaters. Both The Coachman and The Stray Bullet were released during a shift in the national leadership from the Rhee Syngman regime (1948–1960) to the equally repressive, and arguably even more violent, Park Chung Hee regime (1961–1979). As such, the two films serve as cinematic texts filled with sociocultural and historical significance. These two films, born in a crucial historical moment for South Korea’s nation rebuilding and postwar industrialization efforts, reveal much about Korea’s nationhood, its masculine character, and its responses to postwar chaos and America’s quasi-colonial presence. Through

their reaffirmation of patriarchy, construction of a modern masculine national subject, and vilification of women who are visually and otherwise associated with modernity and Westernization, the films offer insight into postwar Korean life and values—and betray Korea’s deeply ambiguous feelings towards modernity. This chapter seeks to illustrate the connection between popular movies and the government ideology of this period, and, more specifically, how the issues of family, masculinity, and modernity are connected to the nation rebuilding project that the South Korean state proposed during the early 1960s. In The Coachman, the protagonist’s son represents state-sponsored masculinity, and in turn suggests a model that the new national leadership might follow in rebuilding the nation.3 By contrast, The Stray Bullet depicts a kind of liminal masculine figure that hovers around the edges of two worlds and does not fit into the state agenda of building a consumerist society. This film’s protagonist is never quite able to make clear choices, and his angst manifests as a painful physical symptom. However, even though the two films have fundamentally different messages, they are both thoroughly mas-culinist in tone and point of view. The women’s stories of suffering are either completely elided or, shown only as men’s symptoms. THE HISTORICAL BACKDROP TO SOUTH KOREAN CINEMA’S GOLDEN AGE By first revisiting colonial Korea, we can better examine the historical events and contexts that shaped the nation in the postcolonial period. Korea’s industrial revolution began around 1935, with such attendant problems as rapid and uneven urbanization, the emergence of a working class, and, of particular importance for this discussion, the massive uprooting of the peasant population. The effects of industrialization were tremendous. They manifested, especially in the last decade of Korea’s colonization, in phenomenal and massive shifts and dislocations of people.4 The 1930s ushered in the earnest beginnings of modern Korea, but it was also the same decade that saw many of the modern state’s most intractable problems. The dislocation of the Korean population after the Korean War had already begun in the 1930s: “What the Japanese had begun with their massive shifts of Korean population in 1935–1945, what the national division had intensified, the Korean War completed: Koreans of all classes were now thoroughly displaced from their local roots.”5 Given that Korea’s population was largely agrarian at the time and thus strongly connected to their local roots, one can imagine the chaos as modern Korea emerged from colonial rule only to go through a devastating fratricidal war. The concept of nation rebuilding is embedded in this historical context. Postcolonial South Korea was far from being a cohesive, well-organized “nation,” even after the First Republic was established in 1948. Beginning in the 1950s, the state led a national reconstruction project, and sought to build a modern, sovereign nation by mimicking other national models, including Japan, Germany, and the United States. Even though the government inherited a massive—and oppressive—colonial bureaucracy, postwar South Korea lacked both infrastructure and superstructure.6 Many saw these weaknesses as a threat to the national sovereignty.7 Korea had freed itself from colonization, but the chaotic events that ensued gave the nation no time to recover, reorganize, nor, indeed, to rebuild. But from the very beginning of the republic, South

Korea suffered from patterns of corruption in which the politically and economically powerful helped one another, and sacrificed fairness and democracy.8 Throughout the 1950s, the Rhee Syngman administration perpetuated the chaos and instability in the South—culturally, socially, economically, and politically. For example, the administration’s majority party unilaterally passed newly revised National Security Laws in January 1959. These laws expanded the perimeter of treasonous acts to a ridiculous degree, in order to preempt progressives and anyone who dissented from the administration’s practices. The laws were passed over fierce protests from the minority party members, who were physically dragged out of the National Assembly building by policemen trained in martial arts.9 All of this turmoil came to a head and erupted in the April 19th Student Revolution in 1960. The revolution created a power vacuum that allowed another charismatic, dictatorial leader, Park Chung Hee, to seize power in a military coup d’état on May 16, 1961. It is worth noting that Park immediately created the national reconstruction committee (kukk’a chaegôn wiwônhôe) after his successful coup and appointed himself as chair. Searching for an effective way to reach the masses, Park’s regime wanted to use the mass media in their “modernization of the motherland” project (choguk kûndaehwa). The regime actively set up amplifiers and distributed speakers and radio sets to even the remotest villages. Under Park’s rule, the state’s broadcast network eventually reached the entire country, and so, therefore, did the administration’s anticommunist propaganda and educational messages to the citizens of the republic.10 Although I use the descriptive phrase “nation rebuilding,” I will also problematize the content of this project, the eventual economic success which was called the “Miracle of the Han River.” The nation worked to reconstruct itself during a succession of repressive regimes and a state-led modernization plan, and in so doing, excluded many of the people who must necessarily make up a modern nation. The Park administration attempted to garner legitimacy by adopting the “modernization of the motherland” as its motto, but the major problem of unequal distribution of wealth persisted and the administration ultimately failed to gain people’s consent.11 Among those left out of postwar, modernized South Korea include the workers, who were never adequately compensated for their labor; the poor, who stayed poor and became even more marginalized as the state sought to hide their existence within the newly industrializing nation; women, whose gender-based oppression never fundamentally changed; and even some men who did not fit the state-sponsored ideal of the new Korean masculinity. Rhee Syngman’s dictatorial leadership determined the cultural atmosphere of South Korea in the 1950s. The literary critic Kim Hyôn observes that writers during that decade faced a particular predicament, which he terms as a “closed openness.”12 This meant that besides ideologically inclined works deemed “friendly” to North Korea or Communist philosophy, the writers of this decade were exposed to every other kind of work that was freely imported to South Korea. Hence, the era’s ideological rigidity and the Cold War mentality penetrated the intelligentsia, and even affected the assessment and the historiography of Korean literature. The critic Cho Yôn-hyôn, for example, wrote History of Modern Korean Literature (Hang’guk munhaksa) from 1955 to 1958, with the express intent to justify and lend support to

South Korea’s political legitimacy after the Korean War.13 This work criticized the leftist literary tradition in modern Korean literature in an extremely politicized manner. At the same time, the author argued, ironically, for “pure literature” or “sunsu munhak” that was untainted by politics. Although the Rhee government was actually a civilian leadership, since Rhee was not then and never had been a military leader, his regime utilized the South Korean national police, the military, the notorious youth groups, the “political thugs,” and other violent terror organizations with chilling efficacy to disseminate progovernment propaganda and to eliminate oppositional political forces. Some of the better-organized political thugs had names like “The White Skulls”(paekgg’oltt’an) and were mobilized to threaten and terrorize dissenters within the National Assembly, as well as anyone who vocally opposed the Rhee administration’s policies. As a result Rhee and his political party held virtually dictatorial power even though South Korea was nominally a republic.14 As part of the progovernment propaganda after he became South Korea’s first president, Rhee’s followers touted him as kukbu (the nation’s father).15 This title of “nation’s father” illustrates the way in which Korea’s Confucian patriarchal tradition still held sway in the national imagination. Given these conditions, South Korean society experienced rampant corruption and violence during the 1950s, from the highest levels of the national leadership down to the black marketers and smugglers.16 Meanwhile, the South Korean military had swelled from 100,000 in 1950 to over 600,000 by 1953. In the immediate postwar period, it was “the strongest, most cohesive, best-organized institution in Korean life.”17 One significant impact of the overdeveloped military was that it normalized military-style authoritarian practices for the whole society. In other words, as the military became South Korea’s most influential institution, elements of military culture—such as hierarchy, unconditional obedience, and nationalism—also penetrated the everyday, civilian society. This penetration, in turn, engendered a kind of masculine ideal in postwar South Korea, which is prominently displayed in the films I discuss in this chapter. Needless to say, this ideal differs greatly from the gentle Confucian scholar-official ideal of the Yi dynasty. The person most responsible for the Rhee regime’s state ideology was An Ho-sang, the country’s first minister of culture and education.18 An played a major role in creating postwar Korea’s educational system, which educated every student in anticommunist propaganda, ethics, and nationalism, and made military-style drills in school mandatory for all male students. He called this military ideology ilmin juûi (ideology of one people); together with anticommunism, it served as the state ideology throughout the Rhee regime.19 While the nation was being thoroughly militarized, there was an equally strong counter-push toward democratic government, or at least the appearance thereof. Postwar Korea appeared, and to some degree was, a democratic republic modeled on the American system.20 The Rhee regime was closer to a dictatorship than a democratic administration, but Rhee and his handpicked followers wanted it both ways: they remained in control, and yet they sought to appear democratic. To this end, they did in fact implement some elements of democracy, such as holding elections. In typical paternalistic and patronizing fashion, Rhee called this system kyodo minjujuûi (guided democracy): “ignorant” Koreans did not comprehend democracy, and

therefore needed to learn it from their leadership.21 However, scholars like Ch’ôe Chang-jip have pointed out that modernization never happens in a vacuum. As we see in South Korea, the particular dynamics of tradition and modern changes is that the changes borrow the guises of the traditional elements in people’s lives, such as their neo-Confucian mind-set. Hence it would seem natural for people to see the elected officials (and the president) as their teacher and moral guide.22 The Coachman and The Stray Bullet came out of a nation marked by massive dislocation and displacement of the population, extreme political and social chaos and the resulting elision of ethical boundaries, overgrowth of the military forces, and a widespread defeatist and fatalistic attitude. On the one hand, the state-sponsored subjectivity in postwar South Korea was heavily associated with militarism. The military was the most powerful organization in Korea and the mandatory conscription of all males into the already overly developed forces affected the psyche of the general population. Militaristic discipline and education extended to the male students in schools, and the nation’s leaders envisioned a country that adhered to a specific kind of masculine ideal. The ideal subject was disciplined, obedient, and respectful of hierarchy and nationalism. On the other hand, and with the help of its greatest ally, the United States, the government also created and fostered a class of elites—such as professors, journalists, legal professionals, and other members of the intelligentsia, nearly all of them men —who could claim legitimacy without the use of violence or coercion. They were the legitimate “face” of the democratic South. The implication of such a narrowly defined masculine ideal—militaristic or elite—seems clear: the nation had no room for other masculine subjects who did not meet these criteria. Not surprisingly, women were handed the conservatively prescribed role of proverbial hyônmo yangch’ô (wise mother and good wife).23 IDEAL KOREAN MASCULINITY AND THE COACHMAN In the following discussion, I posit that The Coachman is a representative film text that illustrates the connection between the postwar South Korean patriarchy and the national rebuilding project. In the film, the protagonist, Ha Ch’un-sam, is set up as a sympathetic everyman in postwar Seoul, where thousands of uprooted poor urban working class people live. While life presents Ch’un-sam with a series of difficulties, he never loses his humanity and decency. Ch’un-sam’s ultimate triumph explicitly addressed the audience’s need for the film’s happy ending, because it strongly identified with his character and his very plausible struggle to make ends meet until his son, Su-ôp, transforms himself socioculturally by becoming a prosecutor.24 The film’s deus ex machina ending is nothing short of a modern-day fairy tale, in which the son of an impoverished but morally righteous family becomes a prince (or at least a modern-day aristocrat) by passing the bar examination, a rite of passage marking the individual’s successful transformation into a modern (nationalized, masculine) subject.25 At the end of the film, the audience could appropriate and internalize the family’s triumph for themselves. This narrative teleology of the family that pulls itself up by its bootstraps showed

the audience that they too, could make such dreams come true. As I discuss later in this chapter, the character Su-ôp typifies the masculine ideal of this period, but not in militaristic style. Rather, he is a modern subject, a member of the national elite that American aid and “guidance” created after the Korean War. The Coachman follows the lives of a poor widower and coach driver, Ch’un-sam, and his children, who live in postwar Seoul. The patriarch of the family lives with his oldest son, Suôp, who is studying to become a prosecutor, and a daughter, Ok-hûi, who is experiencing a tumultuous coming of age. Ch’un-sam’s youngest child, Tae-ôp, is a teenager who is fast turning into a juvenile delinquent. His eldest daughter, a deaf mute named Ok-rye, is married to a man her father rescued during the war from a certain death, but he is an abusive philanderer and eventually drives her to commit suicide. The coachman’s fondest wish is for Su-ôp’s success, for it is a sure path to financial security and high social status for the entire family. During the film’s lighter moments, Ch’un-sam courts his employer’s maid, Suwôndaek, who warmly reciprocates his affection.26 This relationship is juxtaposed with the daughter Ok-hûi’s relationship with a man, which she enters in hopes of escaping her poverty-stricken life. Her reckless romantic adventure results in disappointment but her brother’s decent, hardworking friend rescues her and she finally accepts his love. At the film’s climactic ending, the wayward daughter Ok-hûi returns home, Ch’un-sam and Suwôndaek are united as a couple, and most significantly, Su-ôp finally passes the bar examination, thus validating all of his father’s sacrifice. The Coachman’s director, Kang Tae-jin, typified postwar South Korean film directors in that he was most comfortable with what is known in Korean narrative tradition in film and literature as the shinp’a (new wave) style, which uses tear-jerking melodramatic conventions.27 The popularity of the shinp’a drama continued long after the colonial period; most of South Korean films of the 1950s belong in this category.28 In terms of genre conventions, The Coachman is a melodrama with shinp’a undertones. It does not feature the exaggeratedly emotional acting style typical of the genre, but it does include some typical shinp’a elements, such as clearly defined “good” versus “evil” characters who function as each other’s foils; the poor but morally righteous protagonist (Ch’un-sam) versus his wealthy and morally corrupt adversary (Ch’un-sam’s employer, Mr. Hwang); a tragic love story; numerous coincidences; and the ultimate triumph of the good (the coachman becomes the father of a prosecutor, positioning him socially higher than his evil boss). Such victory restores order to the characters’ moral universe, and by extension, to that of the audience as well. The coachman, Ch’un-sam, seems powerless and unsure of himself at times when he faces overwhelming problems. Both literally and metaphorically, he loses his footing in the narrative, first when he gets pushed out of the way by his employer’s car, and again when he discovers the happy result of his son’s examination. The first incident leads to a sequence of crises, as Ch’un-sam is not only injured but also loses his job, and is led to believe that Suwôndaek has left the city, presumably never to return. Being sideswiped by a car occupied by none other than his ruthless capitalist boss, Hwang, signals Ch’un-sam’s surplus status in the industrializing, capitalist South Korean economic landscape. And, although the emotional tone

of Ch’un-sam’s second fall at the end of the film is comic rather than tragic, it also underscores that the Coachman no longer needs to support his family, a burden lifted and transferred to the shoulders of his son Su-ôp. Su-ôp represents all that was positive about the next generation of South Korean patriarchs. He is every hardworking father’s dream—intelligent, polite to his elders, unfailingly moral, and always providing guidance for his younger siblings. When his father is out of commission, Su-ôp gladly shoulders the burden of providing for his family by taking over his father’s horsecart. Unlike his father, however, Su-ôp has been educated in modern schools and can successfully function as the bridge between the inexperienced new, represented by his younger sister, and the old, represented by his father. In a nation that was hurriedly entering a period of state-led modernization and rebuilding, those who bridged the gap between these two were no doubt crucial. Su-ôp’s chosen profession, as a prosecutor in the newly democratized, constitutional South Korea, is another significant narrative facet that dovetails at various points in the film with the larger national rebuilding project. Su-ôp’s connection to modernity—the state of grace toward which the newly emerging nation was striving—is evident in his association with modern education and the rule of law. Visually, this connection is driven home because he wears a school uniform in some of the scenes. He wears the school uniform (even at home) for the same reason his father wears a military-issue bomber jacket over his traditional Korean clothes: because they happened to be cheaply and widely available in the postwar period. When Su-ôp finally passes the bar examination, it is as if he symbolically takes off his uniform, signaling his passage from being a student, with its boyhood associations, to manhood. His success in the modern system of meritocracy confirms both his masculinity, and, for the audience, the supposition that even a coachman’s son can become an elite member of the society. On the one hand, by showing Su-ôp in his school uniform, the film inadvertently directs the Korean viewers’ attention to the Japanese colonial education, which dictated that all male students wear some variation of the black school uniform, itself modeled after the nineteenth century Prussian military uniform. Due to Korea’s colonial education experience, this image of the school uniform functions as a visual code that conjures up the ghosts of Japanese colonial discipline, hierarchy, authority, and finally, the empire’s militarism. Indeed, many young male students wearing such uniforms were forcibly conscripted to serve the Japanese empire in the Pacific War in the early 1940s. On the other hand, this young, future patriarch’s school uniform also signals that he is a beneficiary of the modern educational system, which is in turn part of the mixed postliberation legacy of the American neo-colonial presence in Korea.29 In one sequence, Su-ôp goes to meet his father’s employer, Mr. Hwang, after his father’s injury and loss of job. When he asks to work in his father’s place, Mr. Hwang and his mistress refuse, and try to put him in his place by remarking that he is only a coachman’s son and thus should not aspire to be anything better. This positively feudal statement reflects their belief in the traditional hereditary class system. It also signals to the audience that Mr. Hwang’s era is waning, while Su-ôp’s era—that of the modern, self-made elite—is just beginning. Su-ôp replies it is only right that the strong should help the weak, and points out the unfairness of Mr.

Hwang’s arbitrary decision to lay off his father, who is not to blame for his accident. Su-ôp’s righteous speech brings to mind the new, postwar South Korea that was heavily influenced by America. The United States played a crucial role, first as a superpower military presence and powerful ally during the Korean War, and later as a dominant cultural force in the war’s aftermath. In 1959, for example, more than three out of four foreign movies screened in Korea were American.30 The cultural atmosphere of postwar South Korea was such that many saw America as the national savior and indiscriminately accepted its culture. If something was made in America or was even associated with America, it immediately gained a caché that was beyond calculable currency. A certain metropolis-periphery relationship was also established between the United States and South Korea, and Korean masses longed to experience America in some way, doing so mostly through their contact with American consumer goods, available during this era through both legal and illegal markets. Such fetishization of all things American—at its height between the 1950s and the 1970s31— stemmed from South Korea’s introduction to its culture through its popular songs, through the mostly young American soldiers stationed in Korea, and especially through the Hollywood movies that filled many of the nation’s movie theaters. These films featured modern and hightech consumer goods that dazzled the people of the then poverty-stricken nation. The content of Su-ôp’s remarks in The Coachman does not derive from the part of his education that recalls the Japanese colonial past in Korea, but rather, from the American influence that popularized concepts like democracy and equality among all men. In many ways, the character of Su-ôp embodies Korea’s mixed heritage of Japanese colonialism on the one hand, and postwar American influence on the other. The streets of Seoul captured in The Coachman share this quality of postcolonial pastiche. In the film, Seoul is a place of layered temporality, in which traces of colonial influence compete with Korean tradition.32 The capital city is disorganized and disjointed at this historical moment in time. Dirt roads coexist with paved ones, and the coexistence of several temporalities is represented by corresponding modes of transportation. There are automobiles, American military Jeeps, horse-drawn carriages, handcarts, as well as truck-motorcycle hybrids used for deliveries. The visual images of these machines in Seoul streets attest to the hybrid time and space that was postcolonial, postwar South Korea. The chaotic atmosphere is not limited to the landscape of Seoul. It also spills into the characters’ moral landscape, which still displays deep-rooted Confucian patriarchal tradition. This moral universe is both pure and dignified on the one hand, and hopelessly outdated on the other: the ideal of a gentle world of wise, morally impeccable scholar-official rulers had long passed. The Seoul captured in The Coachman aspires to be urban and industrialized, changes that bring with them a new kind of morality, where one tries to get ahead by acquiring as much of the ultimate prize, money, as possible, by whatever means possible. It is a place where “rough people . . . prospered at the nexus of human despair.”33 The Coachman depicts how, in the harsh postwar society, human relationships, and even romance, have become economic transactions. The film also reveals the overmilitarized postwar South Korea as a ruthless marketplace. Some of the characters, such as the

coachman’s young daughter Ok-hûi and her suitor, embody this new kind of morality; they try to use each other to gain access to wealth and higher social status. In this capitalist society, one’s virtues appear worthless unless they can be translated into hard currency. In the narrative, the daughter Ok-hûi’s innocence and perhaps, virginity (which the film only hints at) function as her bargaining chips with her suitor, who is supposedly rich and socially prestigious. In one scene in the film, a girlfriend who introduces Ok-hûi to the suitor helps her prepare for her first date. To appear wealthy and sophisticated, Ok-hûi abandons her own traditional Korean clothes and borrows Western clothes, a scarf, a handbag, and a pair of high heels from her friend. The persona of this girlfriend is depicted in a way that spells trouble to the contemporary audience; she wears risqué Western clothes with heavy makeup, and smokes cigarettes. In other words, she is not the demure, chaste Korean woman who retains traditional values and morality. Ok-hûi is thus transformed, with this friend’s help, into a modern woman hiding her true identity as a poverty-stricken coachman’s daughter behind borrowed clothes. Predictably, she is punished for this transgression when her suitor, who has the same ulterior motive as she, abandons her upon discovering her true identity. Ok-hûi’s actions follow a familiar pattern of the era’s films, in which young women leave the domestic sphere, taste freedom of spending money and having romantic relationships, then return home after paying dearly for their experience.34 In this case, it is hinted that the loss of her virginity was the price she paid. Ok-hûi’s union with her rescuer (her brother’s hardworking friend) at the end of the film reassures the audience by restoring order to the moral universe that both the characters and the audience inhabit. The young woman and her dangerous sexuality are returned to the safe sphere of family and marriage. Interestingly, The Coachman’s most emblematic representations of gender are actually captured in its silences and gaps; that is, in the diegetic amnesia about the deaf mute eldest daughter’s tragic life and suicide. After Ok-rye kills herself, it is as if the whole family—and the film’s narrative itself—forgets she ever existed. Ok-rye’s suicide expresses both her absolute despair and her resolve never to return to the house that she must share with her relentlessly abusive husband and his mistress, nor to her father’s house, from which he always drives her away, for her own good. The film’s narrative presents Ok-rye as the ultimate outsider, a metaphorical and, in some ways, real figure who cannot find a place in the new nation. Significantly, the mise-en-scène associated with Ok-rye is the claustrophobic, domestic milieu of her home and that of her father, and especially the traditional woman’s sphere, the kitchen. In fact, the only time Ok-rye is seen outside of either home is when she wanders the street in despair and visits her mother’s gravesite before committing suicide in the most public of all spaces, by jumping into the Han River. She is a victim of both patriarchy and tradition, because it is not only her husband’s abuse but also her father’s paternalistic, Confucian desire to return her to her home, to her husband’s house, where tradition dictates she belongs, that drives her to commit suicide. The father’s desire for order ultimately corners her, and Ok-rye, finding no place of her own, kills herself in a final act of desperation, defiance and rejection of the status quo that had oppressed her in life. The lacunae surrounding the issue of gender inequalities that the Ok-rye character embodies

are never filled up in The Coachman—afterwards, the narrative seems to forget her completely. She is never mentioned again, and the film simply returns all the characters to their traditional positions, as we see with the example of her younger sister Ok-hûi, who returns home. The climactic ending sequence only confirms this suspicion of a convenient masculinist storytelling when women appear as peripheral characters. Suwôndaek suddenly reappears to reunite with the coachman, and young Okhûi likewise returns to complete the happy family portrait, although this seems only an afterthought. At the film’s end, all is well with the world: the family is together again, as the once-wayward daughter returns home, and romantic couples —not just one, but two—are born. The Coachman’s last sequence shows Ch’un-sam’s family happily reuniting in a snowy landscape after discovering Su-ôp’s successful examination results. According to the film scholar Soyoung Kim, this final sequence had a special resonance for the contemporary audience watching it in light of the historical events that followed the film’s release. As she points out, the film was released in the same year that the repressive Park Chung Hee regime came to power in South Korea. Watching the film’s climactic, happy ending of the film was actually an ironic, and even a depressing experience, given that it was shot against the backdrop of the famous central government building (chung’angch’ông) and shows the reconstituted family marching towards a brighter future.35 In 1961, while the film industry enjoyed an apparent Golden Age—the audience went to the movies in record numbers, numerous film stars were born, and the general technical quality of films improved—Park Chung Hee’s dictatorship was only just beginning its eighteen-year stretch. The visual image of chung’angch’ông, one of the most famous colonial-era structures, awakened viewers of The Coachman to Park’s original power base—the Japanese colonial rulers. Park served in the Japanese imperial army and his early military training and familiarity with militaristic discipline served him well when he later established himself as an ardent Korean nationalist leader in the postcolonial, postwar period. Thus reading the filmic text against the grain yields a picture of the intimate and enduring association between colonialism, militarism, and state-sponsored masculinity, which unfolds in The Coachman as a saga of the triumph of the nation’s patriarchy, both young and old. The last, and lasting visual image in the film—of the euphoric reconstituted family under patriarchy in front of the storied government building, about to march off together into a glorious future—reminds the viewer of the real story, of sociocultural inconsistencies and political repression. LIMINAL MASCULINITY AND THE STRAY BULLET The second film I examine in this chapter, Obalt’an (The Stray Bullet, Yu Hyôn-mok, dir., 1961), differs from The Coachman in a variety of ways. Many consider its director, Yu Hyônmok, to be one of the best filmmakers of postwar South Korean cinema. Whether or not one agrees with this assessment, it is clear that he is a self-aware intellectual who is self-conscious about filmmaking as a form of controlled artistic expression.36 He made his first film in 1949 as a college student,37 and soon got a chance to work with the legendary director Shin Sang-ok

on the film Ak’ya (Evil Night, 1950) but the Korean War erupted during production.38 Also around this time Yu watched Vittorio De Sica’s post–World War II Italian neo-realist classic The Bicycle Thief (1948), which made a profound impression on the budding filmmaker. Later, he recollected that he wanted to make such films when he became a director.39 Indeed, this black and white film includes some striking street sequences whose virtuoso lighting and stark beauty recall the Italian classic.40 After working as an assistant director on many films, Yu made his directorial debut in 1956 with Kyoch’aro (Crossroads).41 The foregoing key moments in his life are noteworthy because they show his pedigree as a rare cerebral director in postwar Korean cinema, and explain why The Stray Bullet stands the test of time, both intellectually and technically. Yu Hyôn-mok began filming The Stray Bullet in 1959, toward the end of the Rhee regime, when the government’s censorship practices severely restricted artistic expressions in all media. Scholars today and the filmmakers who were working at the time largely agree that there seemed to be few or no clear guidelines for materials appropriate for censorship. Rather, the government bureaucrats involved in film censorship were overzealous and paranoid, which resulted in arbitrary censoring of films, and of Korean films in particular. For example, a Korean film historian Lee Young Il writes that various Korean films were censored for nudity, social criticism, and political content, including pro-Communist propaganda.42 Korean films during this period frequently lost anywhere from ten to twenty minutes of both sound and visuals, which virtually ruined some films. The arbitrary film censorship was only one element of the anticommunist paranoia on which Rhee Syngman’s corrupt regime was built. Rhee’s own paranoia was not limited to actual Communist groups; he used authoritarian tactics to control, destroy, and terrorize other groups that dared to oppose him. During this time, South Korea’s mostly agrarian economy was left destitute, because much of the agrarian population had left rural areas for urban centers in search of livelihood. As a result, the number of urban poor was also growing rapidly. Amid these changes, the refugees from North Korea, along with many thousands of people whom the war uprooted, displaced, and separated from their villages and families, faced abject poverty, unemployment, economic inflation, and the loss of their former status and identity. The society at this time, in short, was in extreme moral, economic, and political chaos, and the social circumstances were ripe for a democratic revolution. The revolution did arrive. Rhee Syngman’s regime finally toppled in 1960, following a student-led revolution on April 19th (commonly known as sa ilgu or 4.19). Even before 1960, though, changes were happening in South Korea. Between 1948 and 1960, college and high school enrollments nearly quadrupled. By the late 1950s, the number of newspapers and reporters had soared, with one survey counting some 100,000 people who claimed to be journalists in the period immediately after Rhee Syngman’s exile to Ha-waii.43 And just as the Korean War defined a generation of Koreans and their sensibility, so did the 4.19 Revolution. In the aftermath of the student-led revolution, popular culture—and especially youth culture— bloomed in South Korea, and a generation of cultural consumers and producers would come to identify themselves as the “April 19th generation” (sa ilgu sedae). Aside from its political

significance, the revolution and all it symbolized for South Korea’s democratic possibility had become a cultural and social barometer for possible change and progress. The shared sensibility of the April 19th generation was more Westernized, modern, and democratic.44 This timely shift in political atmosphere was crucial to the making of the film The Stray Bullet, as Yu himself mentions in his memoir: the film’s gloomy plot and dark atmosphere meant a virtual guarantee at the time that it would not be finished, and almost the entire staff and stars worked on it without pay.45 In terms of pure content, The Stray Bullet would have been a different film altogether had the 4.19 Revolution not erupted. It opened in March 1961, immediately after the fall of the Rhee regime. During this window of time, when the government (briefly) shut down its film censorship organization, The Stray Bullet could honestly and completely depict the hopelessness that pervaded the postwar South Korean society.46 It seems that Yu had pre-censored the story’s dark ending in order to earn the censorship board’s approval. But after the revolution, he rewrote the script as he originally intended it, and re-filmed some of the sequences. The end result is a canonical, poetic postwar film that reflects the gloomy reality of the period that also earned a lasting fame for its director. The Stray Bullet, in which Yu tried to realize his personal vision of neorealist cinema, took one year and two scripts to finish. Other films produced during this period typically took only a month.47 The Stray Bullet is based on a short story of the same title written in 1959 by Yi Pôm-sôn, a well-known writer of the Korean War generation. In his essay on this famous short story, Ha Chông-il observes that it is based on the author’s principle of “no longer.” Yi creates main characters that represent the majority of the postwar South Korean population: the downtrodden and destitute masses who can no longer maintain their miserable existence. Ha reads the protagonist’s repetition of his mother’s cry (“Let’s go!”) as a metaphorical representation of the South Korean predicament, in which a societal integration and “suture” (ponghap) are no longer possible.48 The relentlessly gloomy short story clearly touched a nerve in postwar Korean national consciousness.49 Though the point is debatable, many consider The Stray Bullet to be the very first South Korean film with modernist sensibility. The story begins with the protagonist Song Ch’ôl-ho suffering a severe toothache. He is an accountant in his mid-thirties, a war refugee who fled with his family from the North to the South to avoid communist persecution. He belonged to the landlord class in the North, and was thus considered a reactionary. The Song family—Ch’ôlho’s pregnant wife, young daughter, two younger brothers, younger sister Myông-suk, and elderly mother who went insane from the shock of her war experiences—settle in the Liberation Village, in one of the shantytowns that sprouted up all over in the South after the war. They live in dire poverty. Myông-suk’s lover, a veteran who returns from the war emotionally and physically wounded, rejects her. Driven to desperation, she becomes a prostitute for American soldiers. Ch’ôl-ho’s younger brother, Yông-ho, also a wounded veteran, is equally desperate and bitter about the war that took everything from his life—his love, status, and he believes, his future. He rejects an offer to be in a movie after discovering he was hired to display his “authentic” war wounds, and eventually robs a bank, believing that

rules no longer exist in the world. Meanwhile, Ch’ôl-ho’s wife dies after childbirth, from a prolonged malnutrition. The insane mother’s cries—“Let’s go!” she continually shouts— punctuate the film and heighten its desperate atmosphere.50 At the film’s powerful end, Ch’ôlho’s world collapses as he learns of his brother’s bank robbery and subsequent arrest, and hears the news of his wife’s death at the hospital. Contemplating which of the numerous family crises to handle first, he suddenly decides at last to pull out the teeth that have been tormenting him night and day. Ch’ôl-ho insists on a dangerous surgery and leaves the dentist’s office bleeding profusely. Finally, he gets into a taxi and cries out “Let’s go!” as he slowly loses consciousness. In The Coachman, postcolonial, postwar Korea is a site of chaos, where several temporalities seem simultaneously present. The Coachman celebrates modernity, its exciting possibilities, and new values, including democratic ideals and meritocracy for the recovering nation, underscored by the film’s masculine subjectivity. The Stray Bullet, by contrast, paints a darker, more ambivalent picture of modernity in postwar Korea. The film shows that the signs of modernity’s postwar collapse are everywhere, side by side with the trappings of modernity. The film addresses the difficulty of Korea’s postcolonial situation, and suggests that far from embracing modernity, the nation has merely moved from one unequal relationship (with Japan) to another (with the United States). It is to be expected, then, that modernity should surface in The Stray Bullet in mostly negative contexts. Many of South Korea’s pervasive social ills and postwar devastation manifest themselves in the Song family, which might be seen as a microcosm of the nation. Given postwar Korea’s anxiety about the national rebuilding project, through An Ho-sang’s realization of the ilminjuûi, for instance, the film’s plot and characterization clearly ran counter to the state’s ideal of new Korean masculine subjectivity and rebuilt nation. The Coachman portrays a positive, accessible patriarch who ultimately overcomes adversity. But the patriarch in The Stray Bullet does not summon the hopeful—and quite unrealistic—dream of economic success and harmonious family life despite poverty. Instead, the film presents a defeated patriarch who loses everything by the end of the narrative, including his will to continue his struggle. Furthermore, the nation is not presented as a space of harmony, nor as one that permits any semblance of a family life. The family’s matriarch is insane, the pregnant wife dies from malnutrition, the sister resorts to prostitution, the brother robs a bank, and even the young daughter suffers from near starvation. In addition, other characters in the film seem to exist only as individuals, divorced from the idyllic connotations of home and family, of support, warmth, stability, and moral foundation. Not coincidentally, given the South Korean political and social backdrop of the 1950s, many young intellectuals during this period found affinity with the writings of Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and other proponents of the French existentialist philosophy. The contemporary popularity of existentialism surfaces in the characterization of Yông-ho, who embodies this philosophy more than any other character in the film. In an essay on modernity in Korean cinema,51 particularly about the liminal characters that live in kijich’on—a name that literally means military base town but actually refers to the red-

light districts around U.S. military bases in Korea in existence since the Korean War—a film scholar discusses the film Chiok’hwa (Flower of Hell, Shin Sang-ok, dir., 1958). She describes two of the main characters as liminal because they struggle with the decision whether to return to their rural hometown, which they imagine as a pristine paradise of their innocent past, or remain in Seoul, set up in the film as a depraved, corrupt place emblematized by kijich’on, a “wasteland” where “Baudelaire and existentialism bed each other.”52 The concept of liminality here refers to a state of being in which the subjects are acutely aware of being caught between two worlds, whether literal or metaphorical. The subjects are tormented not only by their dilemma of living in two worlds, but also by their consciousness of it. This concept offers a point of departure for my reading of The Stray Bullet, a film which the protagonist and his home also represent a liminal subjectivity and space within the rebuilding nation of postwar South Korea. Song Ch’ôl-ho is a mild-mannered man defeated by the overwhelming circumstances of his present life. Throughout the film he seems unable to make decisions or act upon his wishes. The horrible toothache he endures until the end of the film functions as a metaphor for his liminal subjectivity: he is well aware of his problem (the toothache is terrible but he cannot afford to see a dentist), and yet his consciousness of it seems to paralyze him. All he can do is endure the blinding pain. Song Ch’ôl-ho is no less sympathetic for his lack of action. In fact, as a dialogue with his brother Yông-ho illustrates, he possesses considerable fortitude of character to endure his harsh reality and resist the urge to escape it through violence or crime. Ch’ôl-ho chooses to endure his predicament while Yông-ho commits a robbery out of desperation. The film presents a refugee family whose dire poverty and displacement from their home in the North lead to their psychological displacement as well. Along with the war’s more tangible aftermath, they suffer from other, intangible effects, including their loss of identity and sense of belonging. The sense of loss renders them even more inconsolable because, as Koreans, their identity is firmly attached to their home village or kohyang. When people become rootless, they lose their ontological bearings. Ch’ôl-ho and his family fled to the South, but they do not firmly belong in the nation being newly constructed all around them. The tragedy that unfolds for the characters in the film is a layered one, but the common cause that underpins it is their failure and/or unwillingness to be integrated and co-opted by the nation’s rhetoric of nationalism and hope (however false) for a better future. The characters’ liminal subjectivity dooms them, for they see, all too clearly, the fallacy of the state’s rhetoric of patriotism and progress. The Stray Bullet’s mise-en-scène also directs one’s attention to the characters’ liminal masculinity. The code for the female characters seems clear: their attire visually signals their moral and sexual compromises or passive, long-suffering feminine “virtues.” For the male characters, the code is more complicated, as particular spaces and visual cues in the narrative focus our attention on given masculinist elements of their plight. For example, Yông-ho is often seen in a run-down bar, drinking and raging against the unfairness of life, keeping company with cronies from his glorious army days, who look up to him as their leader. The shabby bar is a masculine space filled with drunken, impotent despair, yet it is also the stage for hatching

his reckless plan to rob a bank, fueled by his resentment, anger, and the courage he draws from his admiring friends. Ch’ôl-ho’s liminal masculinity likewise comes across through his physical, geographical situation: as he sits working in his claustrophobic office, walks along the crowded streets of postwar Seoul, or makes his daily grim ascent to his home in the Liberation Village, looking like a martyr. The disparity between his home and the Seoul streets around his office is striking. His house presents a surreal vision of extreme poverty, while the streets are full of cars and bustling with crowds. This stark contrast visually underlines his alienation. He is left out of the consumerist culture despite his seemingly middle-class occupation as an accountant. His guilty feelings about his inability to provide for his family, especially his wife and sister, reveal the emasculating power of poverty in a capitalist patriarchal social context.53 His lack of financial prowess and, more significantly, his recognition that he is not a reliable wage earner, seem to make him less of a man. As if to illustrate this point, a young female co-worker tells him as much when he repeatedly refuses to dine out with her. Audiences, especially the intelligentsia, responded enthusiastically to The Stray Bullet; people even held spontaneous discussions after viewing, in bars and restaurants around theaters.54 However, the interim phase that allowed for the uncensored production and screening of this film did not last long. The 4.19 Revolution permitted only a glimpse of democratic possibilities and civil liberties. In this sense, it was an unfinished revolution.55 Another dictator soon rose to power, this time through a military coup d’état on May 16, 1961 (commonly known as o ilryuk or 5.16). South Korean Army Brigadier General Park Chung Hee, one of the leaders of the coup, proclaimed a national state of emergency and became the next president shortly thereafter. The United States had been hoping for an oppositional leader strong enough to defeat Rhee Syngman’s system, but Park Chung Hee’s military creden-tials— which included his tenure in the Japanese colonial army—made the United States uncomfortable. Nevertheless, his staunch anticommunist stance and agenda to modernize Korea allowed him to come to power with a tacit approval of Korea’s biggest ally. Indeed, as Seungsook Moon argues, Park’s “nationalist themes as the mainstay of official nationalism share certain elements with earlier forms of nationalism of the colonial period as well as the turn of the century.” Park fostered the national common interest in “restoring history and tradition as the essence of the nation,” and deployed the “themes of ‘reconstruction’ and ‘selfreliance,’ first made current by the Protestant nationalist intellectuals such as Yun Ch’i-ho and An Ch’ang-ho.”56 Meanwhile, encouraged by critical acclaim it had received, Yu Hyôn-mok applied to reopen the film but it was banned by the same government organization that had temporarily stopped censoring films after the 4.19 Revolution. The Stray Bullet was banned for what the censors considered its suspicious ideological content, as revealed (they argued) in the insane mother’s repeated cry, which the censors believed showed her wish to go back to the communist North.57 The degree to which anticommunist paranoia penetrated every facet of postwar South Korean society is apparent in the very setting of the film: Ch’ôl-ho and his family live in “Liberation Village,” a “squatters’ town” inhabited by war refugees.58

As noted earlier, the military culture’s penetration into the everyday life of postwar South Korea engendered a particular kind of masculine ideal. Those who did not fit the new ideal of Korean masculinity, such as the defeated characters in The Stray Bullet, were relegated to the margins of society. The character Yông-ho’s story is especially interesting—and ironic—in this context, because he is a victim of the state-sponsored masculine ideal of the patriotic young man/soldier. He volunteers for military service during the war, but subsequently comes to believe that he lost everything because of it. He comes to regret his decision bitterly, along with the “foolish patriotism” that drove him to it.59 In an action that sets a disastrous chain of events in motion, Yông-ho steals a pistol from his lover’s apartment, which she confiscated as a joke from one of her suitors she calls “cowboy.” Significantly, the “cowboy” is actually a military officer, drunk on his own power, who enjoys waving the pistol around. It is the pistol, easily rendered as the ultimate phallic symbol of destruction and masculine power, which leads to Yông-ho’s reckless bank robbery and eventual demise. Ultimately, however, it is not only Yông-ho’s fundamental marginalization, but also his crucial consciousness of his status as a young man who refuses to buy into the patriotic propaganda that makes him a true outsider and a liminal figure in the context of this discussion. It is equally important to consider the postwar nation’s construction of ideal femininity. In The Stray Bullet, women seem to be worse off than even the miserable men. Of course, the film’s sympathy lies firmly with the men, and especially with the protagonist Ch’ôl-ho. The women’s suffering registers on screen only as the men’s symptom, because the camera does not capture the images of women’s suffering directly, but expresses it by showing its impact on the men responsible for the (suffering) women’s well-being. Visual codes signify two different kinds of femininity in The Stray Bullet. The first is located in the female characters’ clothes. For the first half of the film, Myông-suk’s character wears hanbok (traditional Korean dress), but when she begins to work as a prostitute, she wears Western dresses. In one telling sequence, Ch’ôl-ho sees, from inside a bus, his sister Myông-suk sitting in a military Jeep with an American soldier, who is probably her customer. She does not see her brother. The male passengers on the bus literally look down on and contemptuously laugh at her, immediately assuming her to be the worst kind of Korean prostitute, yang’gongju or “Western Princess,” who caters exclusively to American soldiers.60 In this sequence the audience sees, on the one hand, the impassive face of Myông-suk, whose eyes are hidden behind a pair of dark sunglasses, and on the other, a close-up shot of Ch’ôlho’s face, which registers humiliation and agony. The Stray Bullet depicts the brother’s witnessing of his sister’s prostitution as more painful than his sister’s own experience as a prostitute. The female character’s dark sunglasses effectively block the viewer’s emotional identification with her, while the close-up of the male character’s face facilitates identification and sympathy. This is a revealing cinematic moment, a glimpse at the way in which this masculinist film pushes women’s pain and misery out of the frame. At the same time, this moment reflects the nation’s miserable condition better than most films of the era. While the film presents the nation’s postwar predicament metaphorically, in the form of Ch’ôl-ho’s toothache, his wife’s postpartum death from malnutrition and his sister’s

prostitution occur outside the visual frame.61 The women’s experiences make an impact on the narrative only insofar as they weigh on the male protagonist’s already tortured psyche. Women in the story are thereby further marginalized, and broadly represent the truly precarious position of Korea’s women during this period. The bus sequence also shows how the film deploys the familiar trope of the woman as the nation. While the bus passengers gaze at Myông-suk in the Jeep, two kinds of music compete in the background. One is a Western popular song coming from the Jeep and the other, playing on the radio in the bus, is a traditional Korean opera, p’ansori. The effect here, achieved through a series of metonymic associations, is both subliminal and ideological. The traditional Korean music seems equated with Myông-suk, the native woman, and the native woman with the nation of Korea, the nation thus feminized under the threat of the highly sexualized foreign masculinity, represented in the scene by the anonymous American soldier in the Jeep. The sequence implies that the dignity of the feminized nation of postwar Korea has indeed been compromised. The new nation relates to woman in a once-removed way; she is recruited to represent the nation only at critical moments. Woman’s pain serves the film’s rhetorical purpose insofar as it is mediated by the man’s tortured condition, rendered more real because it is projected on a screen. The characters of Myông-suk and Ch’ôl-ho’s wife clearly illustrate this point in the film: the pain belongs to the sister and the wife as well as to the male protagonist, yet the consciousness of it belongs only to him. The women’s pain materializes in this masculinist film text only as a symptom of the male protagonist’s masochism, as when Ch’ôl-ho insists on dangerous surgery.62 It is these unspoken associations in The Stray Bullet, as opposed to what is conveyed through dialogue in the less subtle The Coachman, that makes the former such an interesting text.63 The female characters that wear Western dress are encoded as fallen and/or promiscuous, while those attired in traditional Korean dress are associated with the traditional feminine virtues such as patience, domestic service, self-effacement, and deference to the men of the family. We can read these associations along the same lines as the scene on the bus that captures the male subject’s pain and humiliation while glossing over the woman’s suffering, with which the audience cannot identify. At the same time, The Stray Bullet almost irrepressibly highlights women’s sacrifice, seemingly despite its male-centered narrative. The protagonist Ch’ôl-ho is defeated by poverty, and its brutal, humiliating effects have turned his and his family’s world upside down. But because he seems so weak at first glance, the story can be read against the grain, with the suffering of the women at the core of the narrative. Indeed, in this film, we see another death of a wife/mother/woman. But unlike the suicide in The Coachman, which is never referred to again, the death of Ch’ôl-ho’s wife reverberates in the narrative and acts as the catalyst that sends him off into the self-destructive tailspin and literally bloody climax that ends the film. Finally, through a metonymical process, Myông-suk is again associated with the troubled nation of Korea vis à vis America that dominates her/ Korea. A poignant scene depicts Myôngsuk standing in front of the massive traditional-style gates of Choson Bando Hotel, soliciting American soldiers, when she runs into her former lover. The name “bando” or peninsula

evokes Korea’s colonial past as the country was often referred to as peninsula, just as Japan was referred to as “naeji” or inland, identifying it as the colonial motherland, or mainland, in relation to Korea. Choson Bando (Chosŏn Pando) was the most famous Korean hotel at this time, and the film shows how the nation must again cater to another quasicolonial presence in the nation, represented by American soldiers. The encounter between Myông-suk, her former lover—whose physical condition as a wounded veteran on crutches hints at his emotional and sexual impotence—and a drunken American soldier illustrates the power dynamics among the neocolonial master, the colonized native, and the native woman, who is doubly oppressed through her race and gender. On the one hand, the American GI’s leering presence in the scene signifies the powerful, neo-imperialist masculinity that had already become part of postwar South Korea’s contemporary culture. On the other hand, Myông-suk’s wounded lover stumbles onto the scene in a manner that represents the lack of masculinity, both physical and psychological, in the native men. The mise-en-scène of the hotel’s elegant traditional door, now used as a backdrop for the sex trade between Korean women and American soldiers, adds irony and pathos to the scene, and the focus on Myông-suk’s shame at encountering her former lover turns her into an emblem of the ravaged postwar Korean womanhood.64 As in the scene on the bus when Myông-suk’s mortified brother spots her in a military Jeep with an American soldier, she stands in for her downtrodden nation. Another female character in The Stray Bullet, Myông-suk’s friend Miri, serves a different cinematic purpose. A caricature of a vain movie actress, Miri usually appears on screen in the middle of a film set, with its unrealistic, idealized props of gaudy modern consumer goods, such as a parasol and a vanity chest set. Her ostentatious Western dress and hairstyle add to the impression of her as existing outside the reality of the rest of the film’s characters. The paraphernalia of film production strewn around Miri’s film studio also bring to mind accounts of the early years of the film viewing experience in Korea, which was nothing short of a magic show. Korea’s first filmgoers thought the movies (moving-photograph show or hwaltt’ong sajin) showed people who came out of the little box to play, and thus endowed it with an array of incomprehensible, magical powers, as many did to other trappings of modernity, including trains, telegraph, and telephone.65 Ch’ôlho’s house looks just as unrealistic as Miri’s film set, but its unreal, stagy quality comes not from a lack of reality, but rather from the hyperreality of the cluttered hovel that serves as a family home in the context of postwar South Korea. Today’s audience may view this scene with the skepticism of those who have never experienced such widespread dire poverty and despair. The unreality of Miri’s life on the film set coexists in the narrative with the unreality of the squalid poverty of Ch’ôl-ho’s family and that of many thousands who lived that life in the postwar era. The Stray Bullet shows both the glamour of modernity, represented by the character Miri and the modern consumer goods that surround her, and its collapse after the Korean War, as shown by the protagonist’s dilapidated home. CONCLUSION: MODERNITY AND PATRIARCHAL TRADITION IN THE COACHMAN AND THE STRAY BULLET

In The Stray Bullet, characters that are associated with modernity, such as the film industry people and American soldiers, are depicted as deplorable. For instance, the scene of Miri on the film set portrays the film producer and the director as shallow and callous; they ask Yôngho to show his “authentic war wounds,” letting him know it is the only reason for putting him in the movie. The incident enrages him, and indeed functions as a critical turning point for this character. Thereafter, he decides to live life on his own terms, whatever the consequences. The dizzying landscape of postwar Seoul is full of modernity’s recognizable trappings—replete with cars, tall, Western-style buildings, and a bustling crowd of people dressed in Westernstyle clothes. However, the imposing tall buildings are in fact the remnants of Korea’s Japanese colonial past, and the women busily walking around the city just may be looking for their next meal ticket in the form of an American GI. Amid all this, cars speed by—and through —the crowds of people, for there are modern cars, but no modern roadways to separate people from machines. In the same vein, the tall buildings and cars mingle in the film with premodern materiality, such as the Liberation Village and the protagonist’s ramshackle house situated within. The American influence in South Korea was at its height during this era, and the visual and aural codes for cheap “Yankee” culture—unwelcome signs of modernity—are everywhere: American soldiers chase prostitutes on streets, loud American popular songs blare from passing military vehicles and shops catering to the soldiers, and people are eager to use what few English words they know, only adding to the general atmosphere of stilted affectation of being “modern,” or, in this context, Americanized. The corrupting yet also immensely compelling influence of the new, powerful, and wealthy Other testifies to the power of the modern, which hypnotized and then stung the postwar Korean population with its phantasmagoric powers. And yet for the characters in The Stray Bullet—and the kind of real people they represent—the primary experience of modernity is despair. The kind of moral bankruptcy we saw in The Coachman surfaces again in The Stray Bullet, most notably in the character Yông-ho. To be sure, his sister, Myông-suk, also transgresses the society’s law when she becomes a prostitute, but a self-destructive impulse, rather than greed, motivates her transgression. This film depicts how the historical rupture brought on by Korean War also comes to signify a personal rupture in time, space, and indeed, of self-identity for the characters. During this period, French existentialist thought became popular among intellectual South Koreans.66 They embraced it out of necessity, and intellectual curiosity, as they sought to respond to the overwhelming experiences of fratricidal war and its aftermath, the militarization of their country, and its repressive, ideologically rigid atmosphere. In the film, the character Yông-ho espouses such philosophy; he believes that every man is ultimately responsible for his own actions and that no one can judge those of another. At the same time, his desperate act of violence in robbing the bank reveals him to be a coward, one who is defeated by life, though at first glance his brother seems the more hopeless and defeated of the two. Yông-ho justifies his transgression on existentialist grounds: that he is responsible for his own actions, and that he cannot be judged according to some external normative measure, such as society’s laws. Instead, one should be judged according to his own subjective psychological structure. For

example, feeling a subjective sense of shame and guilt for an act of transgression is one’s “judgment,” rather than formal legal prosecution. Interestingly, Yông-ho’s capacity to feel shame and guilt—to be a part of humanity—dooms him, and his bank robbery eventually fails. He could ignore the law’s claim on his individual desire, but he could not silence his own humanity, and he surrenders to the law rather than kill an innocent bystander to escape punishment. This existentialist attitude also underpins the male protagonists’ masochistic behavior. Masochism in The Coachman and The Stray Bullet does not occur in a context of sexual perversion (though it is related), but is framed instead in social and gender discourse of postwar Korea. In the two films, the male protagonists’/patriarchs’ loss of power seems only temporary. This issue is fruitful to investigate as it points to the hidden male desire to lose power, knowing it is only a temporary condition, in the face of overwhelming adversity. In other words, as desperate as they are at certain moments, these men’s struggle can be read as a masquerade of powerlessness. The male characters allow women to usurp their power position, creating a temporary vacuum. This arises both with the surrogate mother/maid in The Coachman, and with the prostitute sister Myông-suk and Ch’ôl-ho, who provide money for the family at times of crisis—but after the crisis, the men return to reclaim their power. Tania Modleski quotes Christopher Newfield’s argument that one must consider the “extent to which male power is actually consolidated through cycles of crises and resolution, whereby men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it.”67 Further, male power often works “to efface female subjectivity by occupying the site of femininity.”68 In The Stray Bullet, this manifests in the depiction of men’s struggle and their loss of social standing amid the postwar chaos. Men “occupy the site of femininity” when the narrative emphasizes their lack of masculinity via some physical and psychological defect/defeat, such as Yông-ho and his wounded army buddies who incessantly grumble about losing “everything” in the war, not to mention their lack of financial power to protect the women in their lives from dishonor, and even death. Their talk is actually about the war having stripped them of their most vital characteristic: their masculinity. The women in the film, by contrast, are completely silent on the subject of loss of social position and wealth, and the narrative elides their glorious past. In her analysis of the gendering of melancholia, Juliana Schiesari posits this as the precise scenario through which the male thinker is culturally empowered to represent his “losses” at the expense of the female subject. Schiesari’s concept of the “ideology of melancholia” argues that men can temporarily appropriate women’s real sense of loss and later compensate for it as a “privileged form of male expression.”69 On the other hand, the hidden, masochistic male desire is culturally constructed as weak and shameful, because ultimately, it is regarded as effeminate. This “effeminate” desire is an urge to stay down for the count, rather than get up again only to be repeatedly beaten down by circumstances. In the last scene of The Stray Bullet, the protagonist bleeds so much that he passes out, a clear example of the masochistic male desire to voluntarily forfeit one’s control over a given situation. Sitting in a taxi he cannot afford, Ch’ôlho finally repeats his insane mother’s plea, “Let’s go!” He, too, is losing his true self. This loss of control actually marks a

liberating moment for the protagonist, in a narrative that held nothing but overwhelming adversity until now. It is not a moment of complete dejection and pessimism, as others have argued, because it is still possible that he, and the new patriarchy he represents, will triumph in the end. What is also interesting is that, when the patriarchy’s loss of control becomes apparent in both films, they reveal too much, disclosing how patriarchy’s main players harbor a self-contradictory, masochistic desire for a temporary loss of control. This desire is repressed, of course, and the status quo is restored at the end, in an especially spectacular fashion in The Coachman, as the younger generation patriarch passes the bar exam and thus becomes the law for the rebuilding Korean society . The Stray Bullet reveals a different kind of nation under reconstruction than the one depicted in The Coachman. Unlike The Coachman’s hopeful portrayal of postwar South Korea and its cheerful people looking toward a bright future, The Stray Bullet shows people filled with despair and impotent rage, living in a present so painful that they cannot imagine a better tomorrow. In The Coachman, two couples eventually come together to create new families and rebuild lives once blighted by war. In The Stray Bullet, many couples are either unable to create families together or to protect or continue their existing ones.70 The obstacles to these family-building objectives are practically insurmountable: poverty shatters romantic and familial bonds, and self-destructive impulses lead to crime, violence, prostitution, and death. In short, the characters in The Stray Bullet represent precisely the aspect of the nation that the postwar South Korean state wanted to make invisible. On the one hand, The Coachman and The Stray Bullet are conventional texts that served the cause of modern Korea’s Confucian patriarchal status quo, not least because they were shot from a perspective of a typical male gaze. On the other hand, both films exhibit ideological struggles that belie their otherwise mainstream messages. Both present critical views of the newly emerging social hierarchy and crass materialism that were intertwined with the nation’s militarization and modernization/Westernization, and its quasi-colonial relations with America. For example, The Stray Bullet, which is essentially a story of suffering, uses woman as a trope for the degraded nation, even as it signally fails to acknowledge women’s suffering. Both films show the postwar Korean patriarchy’s efforts to confine women’s sexuality to the conventional spheres of family and marriage. Both also reveal projections of Korean masculinity that reflect the social and cultural concerns of a difficult and transitional time. These projections—manifest, significantly, both in the portrayals made visible on screen (presence) and through those that are withheld (absence)—illuminate how Korea’s nationhood and its masculine subjects responded to the social, moral, sexual, and cultural challenges of the postwar period. They answered the chaos by reaffirming patriarchal values and vilifying women, whose association with modernity, imagined or otherwise, made them suspect in the eyes of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and their nation. NOTES 1. Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” in Nationalism, ed., John Hutchinson and

Anthony D. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 17–18. 2. “Coach” is actually a misnomer for the horse-drawn cart that protagonist Ch’un-sam drives for a living in the film. Nevertheless, I use the better-known title The Coachman to avoid confusion. Officially released DVDs of The Coachman and The Stray Bullet are now available from various Internet sellers in Korea and the United States. For a detailed examination of the period designation of the Golden Age of South Korean cinema, see Nancy Abelmann and Kathleen McHugh, eds, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema (Detroit, Mich.71 3. In his discussion of Christianity in Korean melodrama, Jinsoo An also argues that Korean melodrama movies show that the nation itself becomes the virtuous hero(ine) who eventually triumphs over hostile circumstances. Many such narratives appear in this period’s film melodramas. Jinsoo An, “Screening the Redemption: Christianity in Korean Melodrama,” in South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema, ed. Nancy Abelmann and Kathleen McHugh (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 65–97. 4. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), 175. 5. Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 301. 6. O Myông-ho, Hang’guk kûndae chôngch’isaûi ihae [An Understanding of Modern Korean Political History], (Seoul: Oruem Publishing House, 1999), 175–78. 7. Postwar South Korea depended heavily on foreign aid, was especially reliant on the United States. Along with the military aid that gave the United States decision-making power, this economic dependency essentially meant that South Korea and the United States were bound in a neocolonial relationship. See Yông-t’ae Im, Taehanmin’guk 50nyônsa [History of South Korea’s Fifty Years]. (Seoul: Tûlnyôk, 1998), 195. 8. This pattern of symbiotic relationships between South Korea’s political and economic powers-that-be is called “chông’gyông yuch’ak” in Korean. It has appeared repeatedly in the country’s history since 1945. Many historians see “chông’gyông yuch’ak” partially as a result of the republic’s inauspicious beginnings, when power positions were still occupied by those who had collaborated with the Japanese during the colonial era. See Im, History of South Korea’s Fifty Years, 193–94. 9. Kim Sam-ung, ed., Saryoro ponûn 20segi hang’guksa: Hwalbindang sônônesô chôn, no hangsosim p’angyôlkk’aji [Perspective on the Twentieth-Century History of Korea through Documents: From the Declaration of Hwalbin Party to the Appeals of the Ex-Presidents Chun and Noh] (Seoul: Karam kihwek, 1997), 237–8. 10. On the one hand, scholars have pointed out that Park Chung Hee might have learned this practice from Japanese colonizers, who had built an effective surveillance grid through the police boxes scattered all over the peninsula. On the other hand, this kind of policymaking and execution seems to typify Park’s repressive regime, and, interestingly, left a legacy of unexpected side-benefits from the forced march toward “progress” and “modernization.” See Hang-’guk chôngsin munhwa yôn’guhôe [Association for the Study of Korean Spiritual Culture], ed., Hang’guk hyôndaesaûi chae’insik 9: 1960nyôndae sahôe pyônhwa yôn’gu,

1963–1970 [Rethinking Modern Korean History, vol. 9—The Study of the Social Change in 1960s: 1963–1970] (Seoul: Paeksan sôdang, 1999), 158–62. 11. The Department of Modern Literature, Institute for the Study of National Literary History [Minjok munhaksa yôn’guso hyôndae munhak punkkwa], 1960nyôndae munhak yôn’gu [Study of 1960s Literature] (Seoul: Kip’ûnsaem, 1998), 255. 12. Kim Hyôn, Sahôewa yulli [Society and Ethics] (Seoul: Munhak’kkwa chisôngsa, 1991), 243. The Korean phrase is p’yeswejôk kaebangsông. 13. The Society for Research of Literature and Thought [Munhak’kkwa sasang yôn’guhôe], 20segi hang’guk munhak’ûi pansông’gwa chaengjj’ôm [The Reflection and Prospect on Korean Literature in Twentieth Century] (Seoul: Somyông ch’ulp’an, 1999), 45–48. 14. See , for example, Modern Korean History Study Group [Hang’guk yôksa yôn’guhôe], Hang’guk hyôndaesa 2: 1950nyôndae hang’guk sahôewa sawôl minjung hangjaeng [Modern Korean History II: Korean Society in the 1950s and the April Revolution] (Seoul: P’ulpp’it, 1991), 89–123; and the Institute of the Study of History [Yôksahak yôn’guso], Hamkk’e ponûn hang’guk kûnhyôndaesa [A Look at Modern Korean History] (Seoul: Sôhae munjip, 2004), 317–18. 15. Im, History of South Korea’s Fifty Years, 176. 16. Modern Korean History Study Group, Modern Korean History II, 89–123. 17. Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 303. The national conscription “sent every male who could not bribe his way out through its brand of education: boot camps, drills, discipline, patriotism, anticommunism, and an authoritarian practice that chilled even the most hard-bitten American officers.” 18. Im, History of South Korea’s Fifty Years, 216. An Ho-sang studied in Germany and had already been actively involved with the establishment of the nascent postcolonial educational system during the American Military rule in South Korea (1945–1948). 19. When the First Republic was established, leftist political and cultural leaders were coerced to declare their allegiance to the new democratic republic. Many among them chose to defect to North Korea between 1948 and 1953. See Im, History of South Korea’s Fifty Years, 215. 20. Modern Korean History Study Group, Modern Korean History II, 83–86. 21. Modern Korean History Study Group, Modern Korean History II, 115. 22. Ch’ôe Chang-jip, Hang’guksa 17 [Korean History, vol. 17] (Seoul: Hangilsa, 1994), 107. 23. Hyônmo yangch’ô is a Sino-Korean expression that denotes “wise mother and good wife,” and connotes the paragon of female virtue according to the Confucian worldview. Confucian philosophy argues that all beings and all things have their proper place in the world, and that a society is harmonious when people, including women and children, know and respect their own and others’ place in the society. 24. Ho Hyôn-ch’an, et al., Korean Filmstars Retrospective Catalogue (Seoul: Korean Film Archive, 1998), 7. Ho writes that, during the crucial period of nation rebuilding, Kim embodied the poor, everyman of postwar Korea better than any other actor of his generation.

25. Im, History of South Korea’s Fifty Years, 210. It is ironic that the 1950s also saw the rapid growth of the big South Korean conglomerates (chaebôl). Many started out during the colonial period as members of the landlord class, but during the Rhee Syngman regime they were awarded unfair advantages over smaller businesses, in the form of large loans from the newly established Industrial Bank. 26. Suwôndaek means “a woman from Suwôn,” which is not extraordinary given her social position and Korea’s cultural norm at the time. 27. Yu Chi-na, et al., “Shinp’a and Korean Melodrama,” in What Is Melodrama: From “Madame Freedom” to “Contact” [Melodûramaran muôtshin’ga: ‘chayu puin’esû ‘chôpsok’kk’aji] (Seoul: Minûmsa, 1999), 16–21. Since he was not a critically acclaimed director, I could not find any significant material on Kang Tae-jin. But he was one of many prolific film directors who made popular movies during the Golden Age of South Korean cinema. Shinp’a originated in Japan during the Meiji Era, roughly between 1887 and 1896. It was at first an innovative challenge to the Kabuki tradition, but popularity soon corrupted it, and by the time it arrived in colonial Korea in the 1910s, it was associated with lowbrow stories of love triangles and macabre crime stories. Thereafter, it had a tremendous influence on Korean melodrama tradition. 28. The actor in the leading role of The Coachman, was one of the legendary actors of the Golden Age of Korean cinema. In 1960, a year before he starred in The Coachman, he had already made another film with the same director, Kang Tae-jin, entitled Pak sôbang [Mr. Park]. Mr. Park was a successful example of a “new wave” melodrama, one of the topgrossing films of 1960, and, indeed, one of the decade’s most popular films. Kim Sûng-ho’s role in Mr. Park was essentially revived numerous times during his film career, because his natural acting style and physicality matched well with the benign but slightly bumbling patriarch type of the middle, or more often, lower middle class. 29. Modern Korean History Study Group, Modern Korean History II, 84–85. The historian Ch’ang-hyôn Chông persuasively argues that the hegemonic ideology of postwar Korea was largely a product of American policy, whose goal was to further the American interest in South Korea through anticommunist, pro-American propaganda. The postwar education system, which the United States strongly influenced, was the most significant and effective tool for disseminating propaganda. Chông also cites specific examples of U.S.-funded overseas study programs, such as the Smith-Mundt Program, which in the 1960s expanded into the FulbrightHayes Program. 30. Of the foreign films screened in South Korean theaters in 1959, 78.8 percent were from the United States/Hollywood. See Im, History of South Korea’s Fifty Years, 230, and Chu Yusin, ed., Hang’guk yônghwawa kûndaesông [Korean Cinema and Modernity] (Seoul: Sodo), 127–29. 31. Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 255. “American influence in the South had reached new heights by 1950. . . Americans kept the government, the army, the economy, the railroads, the airports, the mines, and the factories going, supplying money, electricity, expertise, and psychological succor. . . . ‘America is the dream-land’ to thousands if not millions of

Koreans.” (British Foreign Office, FO317, piece no. 84053, Holt to FO, May 1, 1950). 32. Chungmoo Choi et al., Post-Colonial Classics of Korean Cinema Film Festival Catalogue (Irvine, Calif.: Korean Film Festival Committee at UCI, 1998), 5. In her essay introducing the film, Choi describes The Coachman as follows: “[Picture] a man in a dyed military jacket over traditional pants with ankle ties and flat rubber shoes delivering goods on his horse-drawn carriage through the city that is strewn with buildings of Korean, Japanese, and Western architectural styles.” 33. Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 303. 34. Kim Soyoung, Ss’inema, t’ek’ûno munhwaûi p’urûn kk’ot [Cinema, The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology] (Seoul: Yôlhwadang, 1996), 111. Kim writes in her study of Madame Freedom (Chayu puin, Han Hyông-mo, dir., 1955), that the society’s resentment and anxiety about postwar Korea’s sudden sexual chaos and freedom are projected onto the figure of a young woman, who goes out of the domestic sphere for the first time and tastes freedom, sexual and otherwise. 35. Kim Soyoung, Cinema, The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology, 115–16. 36. Yu was born in 1925 in Hwanghae Province in the northern part of Korea to a wealthy family. He came to the South for education in 1946. His socioeconomic background therefore that of the protagonist in The Stray Bullet. See Lee Young Il’s Lectures on Korean Film History [Hang’guk yônghwasa gang’ûirok] (Seoul: Sodo, 2002), especially 88, 90–97, 194– 96. 37. The film was a sound film that was forty-seven minutes long, which was considered a great achievement, given the lack of systematic film education, technical knowledge, and equipment at the time. Kim Hwa, Korean Film History [Saerossûn hang’guk yônghwa chônsa] (Seoul: Tain midiô, 2003), 244–50. 38. Kim Hwa, Korean Film History, 250. During this period, Yu wrote a script for Ch’wehuûi yuhok (The Last Temptation, Chông Ch’ang’hwa, dir., 1953) that featured a psychiatrist, reflecting his interest in Freudian psychoanalytic theories. 39. YuHyôn-mok, “Memoir 14,” Cine 21 [Ss’ine 21]. Feb. 2, 2001. www.cine21.com/Magazine/mag_pub_view.php?mm=005002006&mag_id=585 (accessed Jul. 18, 2006) 40. Eunsun Cho considers The Stray Bullet to be fractured, due to its mimicry of noir and gangster movies in the Hollywood style, and reads the character Yông-ho and the film’s stylization as essentially embodying Homi Bhabha’s notion of “cultural hybridity.” Although Cho otherwise presents a compelling argument about the male characters’ scopophobia (fear of the gaze), I would argue that she dismisses too easily the fractured quality of the film’s “realism,” which functions as a crucial filmic and narrative tool for storytelling. See Abelmann and McHugh, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama, 99–116. 41. Lee Young Il, History of Korean Cinema [Hang’guk yônghwa chônsa] (Seoul: Sodo, 2004), 255. 42. Lee, History of Korean Cinema, 321–23. 43. Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 303. A far higher percentage of the population

attended college in Korea than in England, for example. By 1965, one of every 280 Koreans was in college, compared to one in 425 in England. This high rate of secondary education led to general sociopolitical awareness and critical thinking in the Korean population. 44. See Association for the Study of Korean Spiritual Culture, vol. 7., 295–99. 45. Yu’s memoir is a biased account of his working life as a film director and must be understood as such. In it, he addresses the political message of The Stray Bullet, which gives the impression that he is a very politically involved filmmaker. In fact, he is an apolitical, experimental artist whose works often became mired in controversy. What is interesting is not the question whether he is a political director, but rather his desire to be seen as one, which clearly illustrates the politically charged atmosphere of Cold War–era South Korea. 46. This timeline is significant because Park Chung Hee’s administration—which established itself in the next year, 1962—was no more lenient than Rhee’s in its absolute anticom-munist stance. The administration changed the motion picture laws four times between 1962 and 1972 to better control the ideological content of South Korean films. See Im, History of South Korea’s Fifty Years, 424–26. 47. The apparent reasons for such a rapid film production schedule were two-fold. First, film production companies operating in this era were almost guaranteed audience for every movie they produced, and so they produced a great many. Second, because the Korean film industry of the time lacked skilled staff and even equipment, such as sound or lighting engineers and movie cameras, all film directors of this era were under tremendous pressure to produce movies as quickly and as cheaply as possible. 48. Ha Chông-il (Ha Jeong-il), Pundan chabonjuûi sidaeûi minjok munhaksaron [Essays on the History of Korean National Literature in the Period of Division Capitalism] (Seoul: Somyông ch’ulp’an, 2002), 187–206. Ha borrows this concept of “no longer” from Georg Lukacs, Solzhenitsyn (New York: MIT Press, 1971), 7–26. 49. Unlike the film version, the original short story was not censored. One might conjecture that literature was not censored as harshly as films during the 1950s. In addition, the censorship of the film version was due partly to the unfortunate timing of the re-edited film’s release, which came after the military coup led by Park Chung Hee. 50. The anticommunist paranoia of the era was clearly reflected in the censorship that the film underwent. The censors believed that the mother’s repeated “Let’s go!” indicated the film’s pro-North Korean politics, and that it pointed to the character’s desire to go back to North Korea. The film was banned partly because this element of its narrative was considered friendly to North Korea and its communist propaganda. 51. Kim, Cinema, the Blue Flower in the Land of Technology, 131. The social and psychological space of a military base town is a clear example of a liminal space. A base town serves as a kind of demi-monde centered on Korean women’s prostitution to American soldiers stationed in Korea. The Americans’ presence is itself embarrassing and shameful for Koreans to acknowledge, and as such, a base town does not truly belong in Korea or America. Rather, it stands isolated, tenuously connected to both countries, a symbol of the unequal power relations between the two.

52. Kim, Cinema, the Blue Flower in the Land of Technology, 131. 53. The film does not explain why Ch’ôl-ho was so poor, since he had a white collar job as an accountant. According to the director’s memoir, the Berlin Film Festival judges could not understand this situation, and Yu cites it as one of the reasons the film did not receive an award. In general, however, it was received very enthusiastically. 54. Kim Hak-su, Off-Screen History of Korean Cinema I [Sûkûrin pakûi hang’guk yônghwasa I] (Seoul: Inmulgwa sasangsa, 2002), 197. 55. Ha, Essays on the History of Korean National Literature in the Period of Division Capitalism, 219. 56. Seungsook Moon, “Begetting the Nation: The Androcentric Discourse of National History and Tradition in South Korea,” in Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, ed. Chungmoo Choi and Elaine H. Kim (New York: Routledge, 1998), 36. 57. Moon, “Begetting the Nation,” 36. 58. Choi, Post-Colonial Classics of Korean Cinema Film Festival Catalogue, 8. Choi oberves that the name of the village itself suggests that “its residents have been liberated from the grips of the ‘evil’ Communist North. In the film the name of this shantytown is utilized as a shorthand for the Cold War ideology that had been naturalized in the consciousness of the South Korean people. Liberation Village actually existed behind the 8th U.S. Army Headquarters in the Yongsan area of Seoul within view of the U.S. military authorities.” 59. More than his older brother, Yông-ho seems to represent the new “lost” generation. The critic Ha Chông-il reads the literature of the 1960s as a “narrative of reflection,” regardless of the authors’ political leanings in the very politicized postwar era. In Ha’s view, authors most wanted to reflect on the modernization of South Korea. See Ha, Essays on the History of Korean National Literature in the Period of Division Capitalism, 238. 60. In the essay “Yanggongju as an Allegory of the Nation” in Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, Hyun Sook Kim’s says, “Historically, the term yanggongju has referred to Korean women who engage in sexual labor for foreign soldiers. . . . Used derogatorily, it means ‘Yankee whore,’ ‘Yankee wife,’ ‘UN lady,’ and/or ‘Western princess.’ This epithet . . . relegates Korean women working in militarized prostitution with foreign men to the lowest status within the hierarchy of prostitution. Since the end of the Korean War, this category has been extended to include Korean women who marry American servicemen (pejoratively called ‘GI Brides’). In postwar Korea, the epithet . . . has become synonymous with ‘GI Brides,’ so that Korean women in interracial marriages are also viewed as yanggongju.” See Kim in Dangerous Women, 178. 61. In her reading of The Stray Bullet, Eunsun Cho posits that instead of scopophilia (the desire to look, usually at the female body, a concept that she borrows from Laura Mulvey’s famous 1975 article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18, the male characters have scopophobia (the fear of looking) due to their colonized and emasculated subject position. Cho sees this as a symptom of masculinity in crisis. While I agree with her assessment that the male characters’ refusal to look stems from some kind of pain, I think this pain is metaphysical and existential, rather than phobic in nature. See

Abelmann and McHugh, 100–105. 62. After his teeth are pulled, Ch’ôl-ho passes out in a taxi from massive loss of blood. His masochistic decision, the bloody mouth, and his hysterical “swooning” offer fertile ground for psychoanalytic interpretation. 63. The coachman’s son lectures his younger sister for wearing fancy (read: Western) dresses that do not belong to her, and warns her that her head is as empty as her borrowed handbag. 64. It is not an accident that this humiliating episode for Myông-suk takes place in the most public of spaces, in front of a famous hotel in downtown Seoul. Recently, there have been many suggestive studies of women’s place in South Korean melodrama of the 1950s and 1960s. Park Hyôn-sôn, for example, writes that although many films from the sixties show various female characters who leave home to find work, love, and public identity as an individual, the films ultimately reveal the oppressive truth of the women’s alienation and unhappy membership within their family and the state. These relationships, Park adds, make a double demand of loyalty to tradition and feudalistic gender ideology, along with modern productivity. See Park, “From a Secret Room to the Streets? The Space in the 1960s’ Korean Cinema and Femininity,” in Korean Cinema and Modernity, ed. Chu Yu-sin, 145–70. See also Kim’s discussion of women’s subjectivity in the Golden Age era films in Abelmann and McHugh, eds., 185–200. 65. Kim, Cinema, the Blue Flower in the Land of Technology, 110–11. 66. This phenomenon was limited to the cities. Historians point out that the schism between the city and the country was especially pronounced in postwar South Korea. See Association for the Study of Korean Spiritual Culture, vol. 7, 299. 67. Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 7. 68. Modleski, Feminism Without Women, 7. 69. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). Cited in Feminism Without Women, 9. 70. For instance, the relationships between Myông-suk and her lover, Yông-ho and his lover, and finally, the protagonist and his wife, are all destroyed. 71. : Wayne State University Press, 2005), especially pp. 1–15.

Conclusion

To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often to destroy all communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something real even as everything melts. — Marshall Berman1

It seems almost an anachronism today to speak of modernity’s arrival. However, Korea’s particular socio-political circumstances and histories of the last hundred plus years have led to the development of its unique and complex cultural and literary landscape, and one that begs the question of modernity in Korean context. In this book I have tried to read this cultural landscape through the lens of modernity, a kind of originary moment with an enduring influence. This originary moment, however, is not singular but rather repeats or returns, and each time with a different variation of the same theme. In the period spanning from the 1920s to the 1960s that I study in this book, modernity as such is an ever-morphing concept and practice, both in the imaginary arena of literature and film and the very “real” arena of people’s lives. Each chapter, which examines a specific decade, evolves around key events, figures and texts. The arrival of modernity evident in the literature of the 1920s and 1930s coincides with Korea’s experience of colonialism. The writings of this era reveal the intellectuals’ struggle with modernity that’s been introduced by the colonial master. The crisis of consciousness in the revolutionary changes in culture, inevitably felt by all those who go through the transformation of becoming modern, exacerbates the collective trauma of losing the national sovereignty. I read this process of becoming modern while being colonized as a profoundly paradoxical predicament, and analyze the literature from this era through the figure of the New Woman and the novel concept of romance, hypermasculinity of the colonial subject and the railroads in the colony as far more meaningful than just a new mode of transportation. The intellectuals’ paradoxical experience and their ambivalent attitude towards colonial modernity, introduced through Japan and lived in the context of colonialism and hence an insidious kind of modernity, leads to a kind of split loyalty to both Korea and (the modern culture of) Japan; in the end, they are put in a psychological quagmire by this cultural double-identification and caught in a Gramscian interregnum. The self-loathing and self-questioning of those who penned confessional writings during the 1945–1948 period, or the so-called space of decolonization, further testify to the complex, contradictory nature of being a colonial intellectual, who had an added burden of being public intellectuals. Korea’s decolonization gives birth to a genre of literature that I call confessional literature, through which some of the most prominent writers of the time remember and repent

their colonial collaboration. More often than not, the writers narrate their collaboration and the circumstances surrounding it through fiction, using a kind of literary mask to recollect their recent past. Themes and images of shame and self-loathing fill the confessional literature, but the most interesting aspect of these writings is the self-awareness and positioning of the male intellectual/writer. Their professed sense of shame and self-hate not only stems from the memory of the collaboration itself, but in a more significant and poignant way, from their recognition that by committing the act of collaboration, they have failed to fulfill their unspoken but naturally assumed role as male elites, and as the pillars of not only the intellectual and cultural communities, but also moral leaders of their country. This is due to the fact that the Confucian worldview and hierarchy are still very much in place at this time, and yet their position as colonial intellectuals also demands the impossible—namely being both modern and colonial subjects when autonomy, a crucial condition to being modern, was not available to the colonized. One cannot be modern and colonial at the same time. Such intense love-hate relationship with modernity that was introduced by outside forces continues and turns to an antagonistic confrontation in the postwar fiction, which associates woman and a new femininity with the troubling yet fascinating modernity. The Korean War and the rigid ideological opposition amongst compatriots were especially devastating for a country slowly emerging out of its nightmare of the recent colonial past. For some, it was perhaps even more destabilizing than colonization, because the war and the ensuing cultural chaos threw a harsh light on Korea’s many fractures, while the anti-colonial sentiments and movements solidified the idea of the nation for its people and served to unite them under a clear goal of overcoming the colonial master. In the postwar years the major source of modern culture and modern consumer goods was the West, and America in particular. The socio-cultural atmosphere reflected in the fiction of the late 1950s was the result of South Korea’s overmilitarization that led to its military culture and ideals of patriotic masculinity that penetrated into the level of the quotidian. The most notable aspects of the literature from this period are its existentialist philosophy and its vehemently misogynistic tendencies. The narratives from this era show how the ideological battles and internal ruptures of postwar South Korean society betray a sense of crisis surrounding the issues of the divided, ideologically defined nation, its social chaos, and the foreign/Western male presence that threatened the native masculinity. This sense of crisis manifests as misogynistic and existentialist narratives that erase woman’s voice and agency, while objectifying her variously as an infant, a diseased body, or an abject, unknowable Other through oversexualization, thus betraying the nature of Korean woman’s victimization as gendered, displaced, and intertwined with the issues of the nation. Finally, the last chapter examines yet another arrival of modernity in Korea through two very different films from the fateful year of 1961, which signaled the end of the liberal atmosphere following the April 19th Revolution and year one for South Korea’s state-driven modernization and nation rebuilding project. The films show that both popular (director Kang Tae-jin) and self-consciously intellectual (director Yu Hyôn-mok) cultural producers regard the West/America and modernity associated with it with a wary, and often critical eye. The

triumph of the new patriarchy in The Coachman and a reliance on the young patriarch’s own morality in The Stray Bullet stand out in a stark relief against the backdrop of an incredibly hostile environment. The two films visualize these triumphs either as a melodramatic reunion of the family once torn asunder by harsh circumstances or as a more subtle moral victory that stubbornly refuses an inclusion into the hypocritical and immoral society. Different as they are, they both suggest an alternative or corrective cultural measure that could possibly check the tides of the cultural behemoth called the West that was greatly changing and influencing the postwar Korean culture, and even more alarmingly, doing so with an enthusiastic participation and consumption of South Koreans themselves. Although the two films present vastly different pictures of masculinity as well—or rather, masculinities—they also still share in common a male-centered worldview that either erases, silences, or coopts female characters, reigning them back into the folds of the family and the terra firma of domesticity. As we saw in the postwar fiction, women are associated with the disconcerting aspects of modernity and Westernization, this time visually. Again we see the native culture’s uneasy response to the postwar social, moral and economic chaos and to the overwhelming U.S. military and cultural presence in the country. This cultural unease manifests as the films reaffirm patriarchy, constructing a modern masculine national subject, or privilege male suffering at the expense of the women’s experience, betraying Korea’s deep ambivalence towards modernity and the West. If we were to conceptualize arrivals of modernity in Korea as a narrative, it has yet to come to its final moment. At the end of this provisional conclusion we are left to contemplate Marshall Berman’s sentiments in the passage quoted earlier, also echoed in the first chapter of this book; that the experience of modernity is fundamentally contradictory, that it exhilarates, frightens, creates, destroys, and confuses us. It is as much a set of gift and invention we enjoy as it is a trauma that we must overcome. The dramatic changes over the past century in South Korea’s culture and economic rise in the world are awe-inspiring. At the same time, we should also be aware of the underside of this surface, and regard and assess certain cultural traditions, norms and patterns that continue down the many decades, that may shape-shift but essentially remain the same, much to the detriment of not just its liminal members and outsiders, but of every member of that society. NOTE 1. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) 14.

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About the Author

Kelly Yoojeong Jeong received her PhD from UCLA’s Department of Comparative Literature. Her teaching and research areas of interest include Korean literature, Korean cinema, and cultural studies. Of particular interests are the intersections of the discourses of the nation and the practices of gender and power. She is assistant professor of Korean Studies in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside.