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Memory and Epiphany
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17837 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1990 |
2,877 Words |
| Author
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J. Martin Holman
J Martin Holman is a professor in East Asian studies at
Vanderbilt University. He is the editor and translator of
Shadows of a Sound and The Book of Masks, collections of
Hwang Sun Won's later stories by Korean author Yun Heung Gil.
His other translations include The Old Capital and Palm-of-
the-Hand Stories by Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari
Kawabata. He taught Japanese and Korean literature at
Wakayama University near Osaka, Japan. |
"Hwang Sun-wŏn? He's the one who wrote 'Cloudburst.'"
You can ask almost any Korean about Hwang and hear this reply. Hwang's affecting story of first love and the impending loss of innocence has been a central feature of Korean literature textbooks for so many years that his name is synonymous with this work. And while it is not necessarily his most successfully realized story, "Cloudburst" has perhaps done more to color Korean middle school students' perceptions of youthful romance than any other work of literature. But this single story, although presenting some of Hwang's most persistent thematic concerns, hardly suggests the breadth and depth of Hwang's many years of writing.
This month Hwang Sun-wŏn celebrates his seventy-fifth birthday. His literary career began in the early 1930s when he published his first poem in a newspaper in Pyongyang (the capital of what is now North Korea) at the age of sixteen. In the years since, Hwang has distinguished himself as a poet, a novelist and the roundly praised master of the Korean short story. His six decades' of output spans the turmoil of twentieth-century Korea and includes two volumes of poetry, seven novels, and eight collections of short stories.
Born under colonial rule
When Hwang was born in 1915, Korea had been under Japanese control for five years. For centuries Korea had been ruled by native kings (albeit in tributary relationship to China) but in the late nineteenth century, the five hundred-year-old Yi dynasty, Korea's last ruling house, began to feel the pressure of encroachment by Western forces. At the same time Japan was positioning itself to annex Korea - a move to beat Western nations at their own game. By 1910 the Japanese had acquired enough influence to exert control over Korea, thus beginning what would be thirty-five years of occupation. In this period Korea's economy was transformed to make it a supplier of agricultural products, raw materials, and manpower to feed the Japanese and their war effort.
Under colonial rule, Korean children were educated in Japanese schools as part of an effort to assimilate Korea into expanding Japanese empire. Attempts to turn Koreans into the expanding Japanese empire. Attempts to turn Koreans into imperial subjects were often harsh and took many forms. Koreans were required to take Japanese names. Men were conscripted into labor corps and the Japanese army, and such “subversives" as the compilers of a Korean-language
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