I am currently reading Kang Kyŏng-ae’s The Underground Village. It is a short story collection. I have read the first couple of stories. However, something in those stories stirred my heart, prompting me to write this article.
Before delving into the stories, it is important to know about Kang Kyŏng-ae. She is a Korean author who focuses on portraying the lives of Koreans, especially women from an impoverished community. Kang’s pro-feminist writings reflect the hardships of women in a colonial and patriarchal world.
The first story is called Manuscript Money. In this story, a woman writes to her friend ‘K’ about earning 200 won from a newspaper for her work. She wishes to buy things for herself like a fur coat, a gold watch, and even dental work, with the money earned. But her husband urges her to spend the money on others, for instance, helping in medical aid for a comrade. The woman goes on to write her friend about the obligation she is bound to, spend money on society and not herself.
The second story is called Salt. In this story, a woman and a man live with their son and daughter. When one of their children asks for a shoe, the woman explains the toil they have to go through, just to feed themselves. The woman loses her husband to the exploitation of labor. Her son disappears, and she is left with her daughter. She lives in Manchuria, as one of the many ethnic Koreans who were displaced during the Japanese occupation of Korea. She knows no one and no place, and she ends up seeking refuge from the very man who exploited her husband. She does domestic chores in his household. She gets sexually exploited by the man and also gets pregnant. But she gets kicked out of the house along with her daughter by the wife and the landlord, after knowing that the son of the woman was killed by the communists. She then gives birth to a girl child. She nurses a baby not of her own, and she makes money from her breast milk. Her daughters spend all their time alone, while the elder daughter goes through a hard time bringing up her baby sister, without her mother. Tragically, she loses both her daughters to illness, and she also loses the right to see the baby she nursed all the while. She has no will to live, but the starvation competes with her zeal to die. She then smuggles salt, merely to live her life, and that also ends badly.
The parallels from the stories are quite interesting. Both stories revolve around how a woman is viewed, her self vs the community, the control of a man over a woman, guilt, loss, and the survival of a woman from an impoverished community.
In Manuscript Money, the woman is made to believe that she is selfish for spending her earned money on herself. She is torn between self-care and community. In salt, the woman has no control over money or even her body. While the male partner dictates how her money should be spent, the landlord in the latter story exploits the woman’s body. The women in both stories feel guilty at the end of the day. In the former, she feels evil for just wanting her own money and wanting to live well. In the latter, the woman feels guilty for just being alive, after the loss of everyone in her family; she survives by instinct and has lost everything.
Kang’s words echo the hold of patriarchy in an already oppressed society. Mere survival of Korean women during the Japanese occupation was made difficult by double oppression. Her stories depict the systems and the values they associate with women. The silent suffering of the women during those times, whose values were in serving others, and whose existence was punishable, was alive in the stories.
I am excited to read the other stories!
Lit Loom 