Transnational readings of Chang Hyŏkju

Chang Hyŏkju rose to fame in 1932 with his debut Japanese-language novel Gakidō (Hell of Hungry Ghosts) in the magazine Kaizō (Reconstruction). Set against the context of an agricultural Korea confronting a capitalistic Japan, the story follows the collective rebellion of a group of farmers against their foreman because he refuses to pay a recent widower his due wages. Chang later repudiated the proletarian standpoint of his early works and became notorious as a colonial writer. Samuel Perry argues that Chang invoked the idiom of proletarian literature with the shrewd ambition ‘to shape a new perspective on colonial Koreans’.Footnote ¹² Naturally, the more Chang was lauded in Japanese literary circles, the more controversial he became in Korea, to the point of moving to Tokyo in 1936. Chang’s legacy in scholarship reflects his tendentious infamy. John Treat’s meditation on Chang Hyŏkju’s post-war life in Japan encapsulates the general view on the author. Chang is sweepingly categorized as the ‘least savory of all pro-Japanese writers’ with many faults—womanizer, social climber, thin-skinned, having a chip on his shoulder—and worst of all, playing the role of the ‘clown’, for which he was ‘essentially obliterated from the history of modern Korean literature’.Footnote ¹³ As hyperbolic as these statements may seem, they underscore the fraught ethics of post-colonial attempts to rehabilitate polemical figures such as Chang Hyŏkju.

Scholarship on Chang’s reception in Taiwan exemplifies the challenge. In a 2011 article, Wang Hui-chen compares four of Taiwan’s most well-known, colonial-era writers to Chang Hyŏkju: Yang Kui, Lü Heruo, Long Yingzong 龍瑛宗, and Zhang Wenhuan 張文環. Wang shows how Chang had had an impact on each of them through either direct correspondence or his publications. For instance, Lü Heruo is said to have styled his penname after Chang: he took ‘he’ 赫 from ‘hyŏk’ (same character) and ‘ruo’ 若 because it meant young in Japanese, since he was younger than Chang.Footnote ¹⁴ Wang argues that Taiwan’s intellectuals saw Chang’s popularity in the metropole as a model for success that local writers could aspire to. Critics in Taiwan at the time also wrote in terms of comparing local writers to Chang.Footnote ¹⁵

Rather than focus on the individuals influenced by Chang Hyŏkju, scholar Ma Taixiang turns to psychology to understand Chang’s societal impact. Ma argues that Chang’s fame in Taiwan surpassed the level of literary fad to become an emotional burden that weighed on the collective psyche of Taiwanese intellectuals, what he calls the ‘Chang Complex’. Ma cites Carl Jung to define a complex as ‘a hidden set of aggregate emotions triggered by consistent stressors’.Footnote ¹⁶ Chang Hyŏkju’s success therefore became ‘a benchmark at the back of [Taiwanese writers’] minds to control and adjust their own direction of progress’.Footnote ¹⁷ Ma maintains, however, that the benchmark remained largely unattainable. Simply put, it exposed their creative dilemma of how to write in Japanese about the colonial situation authentically.

Shanghai’s intelligentsia, on the other hand, faced no such quandary. Chang’s writing appeared on the mainland primarily through the efforts of Hu Feng, who not only translated Chang’s stories but also Taiwanese works. According to Liu Shu-qin’s 2016 study on Yang Kui’s translated ‘Newspaper Man’, the three months Hu Feng spent in a Tokyo jail after being arrested for leftist activities made him a valuable resource among progressive intellectuals upon his return to Shanghai in 1933.Footnote ¹⁸ They began to introduce literature by so-called ‘small, weak nations’ (ruoxiao minzu), such as the second volume of World Knowledge, in which Hu Feng included ‘Newspaper Man’ and Chang Hyŏkju’s ‘Mountain Spirit’. Liu illustrates how Hu Feng repeatedly placed Chang Hyŏkju’s and Taiwanese writers’ works side by side to invoke the urgent plight of colonized peoples, arguing that he purposely chose writers who wrote in the languages of colonizers and had then been translated into Japanese.Footnote ¹⁹ Moreover, in the preface to Mountain Spirit, he encourages readers to ‘relate the pain expressed in these foreign (waiguo) works to what they see happening in China’.Footnote ²⁰ Hu Feng regarded Korea and Taiwan as subjects of the foreign colonial apparatus of Japan. Unlike Taiwan’s writers, translation allowed Hu Feng and other Chinese intellectuals to see Chang Hyŏkju not as a competitor but as a distant spokesperson for his country.

The overarching theme of scholarship on Chang Hyŏkju is that his works were politicized to different ends depending on the socio-political conditions of the place. Lee Dong-mae and Wang Yŏmryŏ, for example, situate what they term the ‘Chang Hyŏkju phenomenon’ in the interstices between ‘colonization, anti-colonial resistance, and international proletarian solidarity’.Footnote ²¹ Their study illustrates how both Japan and China classified Chang’s works as ‘world literature’ based on conflicting definitions of proletarianism.Footnote ²² The Japanese conceptualization of world literature, for instance, was commensurate with an expansive, multicultural empire. In this age of NaiSen ittai (Japan and Korea as One Body), Chang’s proletarianism was seen as putting a Korean spin on one of Japan’s ubiquitous literary genres. His ability to understand and recreate this medium proved in the eyes of many Japanese intellectuals that their civilizing efforts were bearing fruit. By contrast, as national salvation movements in China sprang up after the 1931 Manchurian Incident, conceptions of proletarianism evolved to indicate not only the working class but all oppressed peoples around the world subject to empire.Footnote ²³ Hence the perception of Chang Hyŏkju’s works as exemplifying literature from the ‘small, weak nation’ of Korea.

According to Ma Taixiang, Hu Feng’s reading of Chang, as well as mainland scholars’ study of Chang Hyŏkju’s reception in China more recently, has been based on a historical misreading (wu-du) that ‘conflates the colonial experience with leftist ideology’.Footnote ²⁴ That is to say that Hu Feng’s reappropriation of Chang’s proletarianism overlooked—perhaps wilfully—his complicity in essentializing Korean identity and culture for imperial audiences, not unlikely given Liu Shu-qin’s assertion that Hu Feng was not in contact with Yang Kui or Chang Hyŏkju.Footnote ²⁵ Liu also notes that Mountain Spirit was received much more widely than Chang’s originals, validating Melissa Wender’s assertion that one of Chang’s earliest aims in choosing Japanese as his medium was to reach broader audiences and have a better chance at being translated.Footnote ²⁶

Whereas Ma sees a ‘misreading‘, I see his analytical framework at play again: What is Hu Feng’s interpretation if not the collective psychological projection of a people threatened by imperial assault? The local conditions of place, especially in terms of ethnic and cultural presence, are key to understanding the differences between Manchukuo and Shanghai or Taiwan. How did Manchukuo’s Chinese writers view Chang Hyŏkju? Perhaps one of the most illustrative examples of the Chang Hyŏkju phenomenon at work in Manchukuo is the 1939 Chinese translation of the play script The Tale of Chunhyang (Ch’unhyang zhuan).

The Tale of Chunhyang and the Yiwenzhi Coterie

One autumn night, as the writers Gu Ding 古丁, Xin Jia 辛嘉, and Wai Wen 外文sat smoking and drinking tea by the Songhua River in Jilin, they began to discuss potential translation projects.Footnote ²⁷ Wai Wen (1913–1966) thus begins his account of how he had come across a bookshop while travelling and bought a copy of Chang Hyŏkju’s version of the play The Tale of Ch’unhyang to translate, ‘so that Manchuria’s theatre circles (Manzhou jütan) could discuss it’.Footnote ²⁸

What Wai Wen does not divulge is the controversy this particular play had caused with its debut. In 1938, the leftist, avant-garde Japanese writer Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–1977) commissioned Chang Hyŏkju to write a version of The Tale of Ch’unhyang to be performed in Tokyo.Footnote ²⁹ Murayama then staged The Tale of Ch’unhyang to be an avant-garde hybrid of kabuki, p’ansori (a form of traditional Korean musical performance), and modern (Western) theatre.Footnote ³⁰ A Japanese woman played the male lead, as cross-dressing drama troupes had become trendy in Tokyo at that time.Footnote ³¹ Although Chang Hyŏkju is credited as the author, the play underwent major revision by Murayama, who even used large excerpts from a version by another Korean writer, Yu Ch’ijin (1905–1974).Footnote ³² The performance opened in the spring of 1938 to positive reviews by Japanese critics and audiences alike. Murayama himself praised it as the first Korean drama to be performed in Japan and hoped that it would introduce Japanese people to Korean culture.Footnote ³³

Wai Wen would have been aware of the publicity that The Tale of Ch’unhyang had garnered in Japan during the year between its debut and the publication of his Chinese translation in Manchukuo on 18 June 1939. Wai Wen professes at the end of his afterword:

Wai Wen erroneously implies that The Tale of Ch’unhyang originated in Japan. This despite including a translated excerpt of Chang Hyŏkju’s own introduction to the play, which states:

That The Tale of Ch’unhyang was a beloved Korean classic appears to have been a non-issue for Wai Wen. After all, it had already been presented as a successful case of Korea’s integration into Japan. Yet even though the play was a success, Chang Hyŏkju’s adaptation of the ‘spirit of the Korean people’ for a Japanese audience had also incensed Korean critics, which ultimately resulted in his ostracization from Korean literary circles and subsequent relocation to Tokyo.Footnote ³⁶

Wai Wen, on the contrary, gives no indication in his afterword that he was aware of Chang’s diminishing reputation among Korean intellectuals as ‘an undeserving crony of the Japanese’.Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, the ‘Koreanness’ inflected upon Chang and Murayama’s avant-garde version was apparently lost on Wai Wen.Footnote ³⁸ His afterword suggests that he acted in accordance with what he believed was the purpose of translation: to integrate a foreign work into the cultural fabric of one’s own environment. The potential benefit of absorbing such a hit play into Manchukuo’s cultural scene would be an enriched platform and, presumably, equal prestige for Wai Wen as that which Murayama had received.

Wai Wen most likely drew from Chang Hyŏkju because he knew of him through the Chinese translations of the mid-1930s along with his reputation in the Japanese literary sphere, not to mention a few local translations. Aside from Mountain Spirit, Chang Hyŏkju’s short stories had appeared in Manchuria on four other occasions: Hu Feng’s translation of ‘Love Story’ (Lian’ai de gushi) serialized in Datong bao 19-28 November 1936; Yi Fu’s translation of the essay ‘Modern Korean Writers’ (Xiandai Chaoxian zuojia) published in Manzhou bao 16 April 1937; the short story ‘Mountain Dog’ (Shan’gou) published in the journal Mingming in December 1937, also translated by Yi Fu; and Chi Fu’s translation of Li Zhisan in Dawn, serialized from February 1937 to July 1941. Moreover, years before Hu Feng’s translations, the first Chinese translation of a Chang Hyŏkju story had appeared in Beiping and, in fact, had a Manchuria connection. Wang Di 王笛 (aka Feng Housheng 冯厚生 1913–?), who had translated ‘The Deported’ (Bei quzhu de renmen) in 1933, was originally from Liaoning province and worked in Beiping with Duanmu Hongliang 端木蕻良 (1912–1996) and other exiled Dongbei writers. Wang’s ‘The Deported’ and other translations appeared in Literary Magazine (wenxue zazhi) with the help of another Dongbei writer, Gu Ding (1914–1964), who Wai Wen mentions repeatedly in his afterword.Footnote ³⁹

The Tale of Ch’unhyang illustrates the similarities between the Manchukuo literary scene and the Shanghai and Taiwan cases. Wai Wen’s aims were not dissimilar from Hu Feng’s; he too endeavoured to translate foreign works for local Chinese audiences. Xie Qiong explains that the high regard for Mountain Spirit among Chinese intellectuals in Manchukuo was due to Hu Feng’s reputation as a proponent of liberating ‘small and weak nations’ from imperialism.Footnote ⁴⁰ That the first Chang Hyŏkju story appeared in Beiping through the efforts of the exiled Dongbei writers group at the height of the National Salvation movement in 1933, however, suggests that the inspiration between Manchuria and Hu Feng was somewhat circular. Despite the pervasive nationalist sentiments of the time, Wai Wen does not express this as a reason for engaging with Chang’s Ch’unhyang. Judging from Wai Wen’s afterword, he saw the translation in relation to the Japanese literary sphere, much like Taiwan’s Yang Kui or Lü Heruo. Only, where the Taiwanese authors aimed to follow in the footsteps of Chang Hyŏkju, Wai Wen all but overlooks Chang’s role as the author of the play. Wai Wen shows next to no interest in either using Chang as a spokesperson for Korean oppression or for competing with him in accessing the Japanese literary platform. How then to understand Chang’s influence?

We must look to local literary trends in Manchukuo. The Tale of Ch’unhyang appeared amid a competitive debate between the pseudo-state’s Chinese writers. I believe this debate serves as the crux for how to view not only Chang Hyŏkju’s reception in Manchukuo but, indeed, all the Chinese translations of Korean literature in the nominal nation-state. The debate was represented by the two leading Chinese literary coteries in Manchukuo at the time: the Arts and Literature 艺文志 (hereafter Yiwenzhi) and the Literary Selections文选刊行会 (hereafter Wenxuan). The debate centred on how best to represent Manchuria and its people within literature. Outwardly, such a task neatly lent itself to the Manchukuo state-building project.Footnote ⁴¹ Underlying this aim, another pressing concern was how their literature should relate to that of central China. Formally speaking, the matter revolved around the function of realism; thematically, it boiled down to representing the lower classes.

The same Gu Ding that had helped get Chang Hyŏkju’s first Chinese translation published in Beiping had returned to Manchukuo by the mid-1930s, whereupon he began the first Chinese-language publication (Mingming) to re-emerge after the reorganization of the cultural departments in the regime.Footnote ⁴² The debate first surfaced with the 1937 publication of a short story by Yi Chi called ‘Shanding Flower’ (Shanding hua) in the third issue of Mingming.Footnote ⁴³ The writer Liang Shanding read the piece, which is about the struggles of two seasonal farmhands, and praised it as a representative work of native-place literature. Gu Ding then criticized Liang’s views by arguing that writing native-place literature was just an act to suit the trends in central China.Footnote ⁴⁴ Embedded within these perspectives is, of course, anxiety around attracting Japanese censors for left-leaning activism. But deeper still is the idea that, as intellectuals, they should pursue the May Fourth dictate to educate society and develop the national character. The only problem was that Manchukuo was not China and, as a new nation-state with multiple prominent ethnicities, technically had not one but many choices from which to determine the national character.

After the financial failure of Mingming, Gu Ding and his friends (one of whom was Wai Wen) established the journal Yiwenzhi through which Gu advocated a ‘directionless direction’ (meiyou fangxiang de fangxiang) or a ‘write and print’ (xie yu yin) mentality.Footnote ⁴⁵ Gu Ding maintained that writers in Manchuria should avoid adhering to ‘-isms’ and instead focus on producing as much writing as possible. Ying Xiong notes that Yiwenzhi writers thereafter devoted themselves to ‘the ideal of writing and publishing/printing free from any clear political line’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Their semblance of neutrality presumably allowed them the freedom ‘to write, to translate, to re-build the literary output, and to fill in the blanks in the literary history of Manchuria’, but this stance can likewise be read as a cover for their working relationship with Japanese authorities.Footnote ⁴⁷

Where Gu Ding and the Yiwenzhi advocated an organic influx of themes, content, and modern writing techniques—often via translation—Wenxuan writers promoted the idea that literature should describe the realities of life for the lower classes who comprised the majority of the local population. Wang Qiuying 王秋英, along with his friend and financial backer Chen Yin 陈因formed the Wenxuan kanxing hui in late 1939.Footnote ⁴⁸ The group’s affiliate, the Wencong (Literary Collective), included such writers as Liang Shanding, and the married couple Wu Ying 吴瑛 and Wu Lang 吴郎.Footnote ⁴⁹ Significantly, neither side of the debate denied the need to represent Manchuria. Rather, the argument hinged on what kind of representation best reflected the interests of these self-appointed cultural and national spokespeople, the intellectuals themselves.

What did Yiwenzhi and Wenxuan writers aim to convey about their respective communities by interacting with Korean texts? The evidence of interaction between Chinese and Korean intellectuals prior to 1937 is extremely limited. Indeed, the object of analysis for this article is the handful of instances when Chinese writers in Manchukuo either translated or otherwise engaged with Korean literary works. These works include: a collection of Korean short stories translated into Chinese; a critique of that collection; two fictional texts translated into Chinese; and one commentary about Korean literature translated into Chinese. (See Table 1.)

Table 1.

Instances of Chinese engagement with Korean texts in Manchukuo

Table 1 Long description

The table details instances of Chinese engagement with Korean texts in Manchukuo, highlighting the types of works, translators, authors, publication details, and Japanese mediation. Key data points include 'The Tale of Ch’unhyang', a play script translated by Wai Wen, a Chinese in Manchuria, from a Korean author in Japan, published in 1939 with Japanese mediation. Another example is an essay by Yi Tae-u, translated by Gong Ming, a Chinese in Manchuria, published in 1940, with likely Japanese mediation. A collection of Korean short stories involved seven Chinese translators and eight Korean authors, with all translations mediated by Japan. The table also includes critiques and essays with varying levels of Japanese mediation, indicating a complex cultural exchange influenced by geopolitical factors.

The first three texts in Table 1 were affiliated with the Yiwenzhi group. Noticeably, these same works were mediated through the Japanese language. They were not direct translations from Korean. The latter three texts in the table appear to correspond to a shift in the impetus for Chinese intellectuals interacting with Korean works. ‘Brief Comments on Korean Literature’, ‘Kitchen Girl’, and ‘Korean Literature in Manchuria’ were likely translated directly from Korean into Chinese, not Japanese to Chinese like their Yiwenzhi counterparts. Ko’s ‘Korean Literature in Manchuria’ may have even been written in Chinese since Ko had been a longtime resident in Manchuria. Furthermore, the last two texts in Table 1 were published in Xin Manzhou, which was edited by Wu Ying and Wu Lang, the aforementioned affiliates of the Wenxuan group.

The rest of this article is devoted to understanding what happened between the publication of Wai Wen’s The Tale of Ch’unhyang and Ko Ch’ae-gi’s ‘Korean Literature in Manchuria’. The choice to translate The Tale of Ch’unhyang not only reveals Wai Wen’s ignorance of Korean culture but, even worse, his blind attempt to participate in two contradictory trends. His fault lies in overlooking the unique social status that local Koreans held. In Manchuria, where Koreans had been residing and making a home for themselves since the mid-nineteenth century, the beloved Ch’unhyang could not (through a Chinese lens no less) represent both the oppressed Korean class and the colonial fascination with Koreanness. In the land beyond Changbai Mountain, the symbol of Chang Hyŏkju as an authority on Korean literature and identity stood on shaky ground.

A Wenxuan response

As stated in the introduction to this article, Wang He edited A Selection of Korean Short Stories in July 1941.Footnote ⁵¹ The origin of A Selection is linked to an affiliate of the Yiwenzhi group, the Zuofeng collective (Zuofeng kanxinghui), a literary group that formed in Fengtian (Shenyang) in 1939.Footnote ⁵² Zuofeng had published a special translation edition of their eponymous quarterly journal in 1940, which contained 27 short stories from all over the world translated into Chinese by writers in Manchuria.Footnote ⁵³ The three Korean works featured in Zuofeng were included the following year in A Selection: ‘Rust-Coloured Hills’ by Kim Tong-in (translated by Gu Xin); ‘Pig’ by Yi Hyo-sŏk (translated by Gu Xin); and ‘Honest Jia’ by Yi Kwang-su (translated by Wang Jue). The translators Gu Xin, Wang Jue, and Yi Fu (who also translated Chang Hyŏkju’s ‘Mountain Dog’) were among Zuofeng’s members. (See Table 2 for the background of each of the eight stories.)

Table 2.

The publication and translation history of the individual works in A Selection of Korean Short Stories

Table 2 Long description

The table provides information on the translation and publication history of selected Korean short stories, including their original Korean and Japanese publication dates. It highlights the works of authors like Kim Dong-in, Chang Hyŏkju, and Yi Kwang-su, translated by Chinese translators such as Gu Xin and Chi Fu. Notably, 'Rust-Coloured Hills' by Kim Dong-in was published in Korean in 1932 and later in Japanese in 1940, while 'Honest Jia' by Yi Kwang-su was first published in Korean in 1923 and in Japanese in 1940. Some stories, like 'Mountain Dog' and 'Moon Girl,' lack original Korean publication dates, indicating possible direct translations from Japanese editions. The table shows a trend of Korean literature being translated and published in Japanese during the late 1930s and early 1940s, reflecting cultural exchanges during that period.

Four months after A Selection of Korean Short Stories was released, a fellow of the Wenxuan group, Chen Yin, published a series of critiques on Wang He’s collection.Footnote ⁵⁴ Chen’s articles appeared over three instalments in the newspaper Shengjing shibao in October 1941. ‘Brief Comments on Korean Literature’ (Chaoxian wenxue lüeping) is a crucial lens into the reception of Korean-language texts within the Chinese intellectual circle of Manchukuo for two prominent reasons. First, Chen Yin openly disliked five of the eight short stories Wang He had curated. Second, Chen Yin rebutted nearly every claim that Wang He made about the necessity and value of the collection. Such strong criticism not only indicates different literary tastes but also lays bare their contrary aims for local literature.

Chen reserves his most biting critique for Kim Dong-in’s story, ‘Rust-Coloured Hills’, the first piece in A Selection and the one with the most nationalistic undertones.Footnote ⁵⁵ ‘Rust-Coloured Hills’ follows a Korean doctor temporarily living in Manchuria, who witnesses the beating and death of a local Korean vagrant by Chinese landlords. Chen Yin decries the tired ‘crossing the Yalu River’ trope (usually having been employed by Korean writers to denote their unpalatable presence to local Chinese people). In his words, ‘the two minzu (Chinese and Koreans) have shared circumstances that make it strange to approve of a work about fratricide’.Footnote ⁵⁶ If Chinese and Korean people were ‘brothers’, then why would readers in Manchuria want to read about a Chinese character killing a Korean one? In Chen’s view, the desire to convey nationalist sentiment could not override the actual content of a literary piece.

Chen Yin’s argument about fratricide directly refutes Wang He’s afterword to A Selection where he claims (emphasis added):

Wang He leans on history and geographical proximity to assert an open, friendly demeanour toward the Korean people and their literary tradition. Yet in the same breath, he denies any knowledge about Korea, despite being ‘blood brothers’. Moreover, Wang endorses an elitist mentality wherein acquiring knowledge of and participating in Western modernity remains paramount, while Korea stays conveniently outside of ‘our’ scope.

Chen Yin’s perspective on the relationship of his readers to Koreans wholly contrasts with Wang He’s. He expands the term Chaoxian to Chaoxian minzu, which suggests that Chen felt it necessary to be more precise than Wang He in speaking of Korean people:

Chen Yin dislodges the Korean cultural identity from the Korean peninsula and replants it locally. Korea was not just a neighbouring country; they lived together with ‘us’ in Manchuria. Chen Yin’s candidness thus contradicts Wang He’s spuriousness.

Chen impresses upon his readers that stories such as ‘Rust-Coloured Hills’ were commissioned ten years before (early 1930s) to provoke poor relations between Chinese and Korean people. Chen is presumably referring to the Wanbaoshan Incident, which happened on 1 July 1931.Footnote ⁵⁹ The events in the story, he contends, could not happen in real life when one group ‘were protected as dual citizens’, referring to the Japanese policy in Manchuria that gave Koreans protectorate status based on being subjects of colonial Korea.Footnote ⁶⁰ Local readers would have been able to make this connection. Chen also may have been aware that Kim Dong-in had published ‘Rust-Coloured Hills’ within a year of Wanbaoshan in April 1932.Footnote ⁶¹

Chen considered the literary merit of ‘Rust-Coloured Hills’ to be outdated and a poor substitute for nationalist sentiments. ‘[The story] is a cheap trick within a weak and narrow sphere of nationalism. The author failed’, he states plainly.Footnote ⁶² Aside from ‘Rust-Coloured Hills’, Chen Yin likewise finds the plot lines and narrative techniques of ‘Mountain Dog’, ‘Pig’, ‘Moon Girl’, and ‘Honest Jia’ similarly old-fashioned and mediocre.Footnote ⁶³ However, the other three stories in the collection, ‘Li Zhisan’, ‘Fu Nanyi’, and especially ‘Crows’, receive praise from Chen for ‘illuminating human nature’ and ‘treading the path that predecessors could not cross’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Interestingly, Chen Yin begins his commentary with the two stories by Chang Hyŏk-ju, straying from the order in which they appear in A Selection. He names previous instances when Chang was translated into Chinese, including Wai Wen’s The Tale of Ch’unhyang and, predictably, Hu Feng’s Mountain Spirit. Chen likens Chang Hyŏk-ju’s ‘Li Zhisan’ to a stage play because of its brevity and humour. Chen believes the story to be very witty with an air of gloominess and interprets it as a parable about the declining class. In contrast, the embedded narrative used in ‘Mountain Dog’, is ‘worn out’ (chenfu) and ‘clumsy’ (benchu). The subject matter itself is also outdated, according to Chen. ‘To write a piece about dying for love in these modern times (even though the character goes to prison, isn’t prison just about the same as dying?), the author’s worldview must be very narrow! This is a very old piece!’Footnote ⁶⁵ Clearly, Chen did not hold blind admiration for Chang Hyŏkju.

Chen’s passion and respect for the art of storytelling suggests that he believed translation must conform to the literary values of the target audience. To uphold a high literary standard in Manchuria, Chen Yin posits that audiences of translated works—in this case, Chinese readers—must first decide what suits their ideals. Wenxuan intellectuals wanted literature to reflect the native place, which necessarily meant exposing the dark side of Manchukuo. Chen valued certain works over others in A Selection because they conveyed cynicism and a contempt for class discrimination; they also employed modern literary techniques, such as interior monologue and subtle symbolism. He saw these traits as essential to Manchurian literature.

The essays by Chen Yin and Wang He express cross-purposes. Not only do they convey different attitudes towards Korean people in general, their views diverge on the point of Korean writers’ potential influence in Manchuria. Chen offered frank criticism of Chang’s artistry, whereas other Chinese intellectuals treated him as a spokesperson for Korean literature. Consider the following passage where Wang He quotes Chang Hyŏkju:

Not unlike Wai Wen, Wang He treats Chang Hyŏkju as a leading authority on the peninsula’s literature. He takes Chang at his word in saying that Korean literary works had not entered the world stage.

Conversely, Chen Yin wastes no time in pointing out that what little Wang He and others knew about Korean literature had actually come from Hu Feng and Mountain Spirit.Footnote ⁶⁷ Wang He appears to have modelled A Selection on Hu Feng’s collection. Even their publication processes were similar. Recall that Mountain Spirit had been the culmination of Hu Feng’s own translations of Chang Hyŏkju’s and Yang Kui’s stories in the journal World Knowledge in 1935, while A Selection had originally stemmed from Zuofeng in 1940. Both journals had a focus on translation for the purpose of developing solidarity between the proletariat of the world. One cannot help but wonder, however, why Wang He and other Yiwenzhi writers, unlike Hu Feng, overlooked Taiwanese writers to focus solely on Koreans.

Xie Qiong argues that Wang He had no common theme with which he curated the works in A Selection of Korean Short Stories except that they had all been written in Korean.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet that is inaccurate because he chose the only works by Korean writers that had already appeared in Chinese in Manchuria, three of which had come from his previous venture, Zuofeng. Furthermore, as Chen Yin deftly notes, none of the stories in A Selection had been translated from Korean but, rather, from Japanese.

The scholarship on Zuofeng and A Selection make a causal link whereby translation proceeds from ethnic nationalism. Kim Chang-sŏn asserts that translation became the means for Chinese intellectuals to conform to state policies while veiling their central aim of developing an ‘enlightened nationalist consciousness’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Kim’s notion of ‘colonial duality’, contradictions common to Korean colonial literature enabled Chinese translators and readers to relate to each other’s nationalist sentiments. As a result, their writing aligned with the ideals of building a Manchukuo nation-state but simultaneously expressed dissent that was meant to awaken nationalist sensibility.Footnote ⁷⁰ A parallel can be seen here in Ma Taixiang’s argument that Taiwanese writers faced a dilemma about participating in the Japanese literary sphere while not romanticizing colonial life. But Ma also makes clear that the Taiwanese writers did not see Chang Hyŏkju’s content as ethno-nationalist in nature; that was a misinterpretation by mainland Chinese writers.Footnote ⁷¹

Regarding Mountain Spirit, Lee and Wang contend that Hu Feng had a political mission, not a literary one.Footnote ⁷² In a similar vein, Xie Qiong argues that translating foreign literary texts ‘circuitously and indirectly denounced the loss of livelihood and political rights that Chinese people faced under the Manchukuo colonial system’.Footnote ⁷³ In my view, however, seeing literary practices as a covert means of protesting the broader political system or environment contradicts the nature of public writing, especially in the post-May Fourth era. Even assuming that a piece of fiction, translated or otherwise, is circuitous in the sense of plot and narrative, it is still received by a population with shared knowledge about how to read and interpret such a rhetorical form. And then there is the matter of power. Historically, translation has been seen in East Asian contexts as a critical tool for gaining and legitimizing political as well as cultural power in the path toward modernization.Footnote ⁷⁴ Because Manchuria lay at the crossroads of that progression, translation in the region cannot be seen as subtle or indirect. In other words, translation is not passive, even if it might appear to be covert.

Wang He’s decision to reprint the eight stories demonstrates that they had already been integrated into the Yiwenzhi canon, if not the wider Manchurian literary sphere. Where Xie and Kim believe that Chinese intellectuals chose Korean texts as the most poignant show of resistance to Japanese occupation, I argue that Wang He’s A Selection is better viewed as an example of Yiwenzhi writers appropriating Korean writing as a statement of their literary aspirations for Manchuria and Manchukuo. Underlying the argument that translating foreign-language works stemmed primarily from ethnic nationalism is the premise that intellectuals within an ethnic group held uniform views on the utility of literature for articulating a national community. But there is evidence in the essays by Wang He and Chen Yin to suggest otherwise. They did not wholly agree on the role literature should have in imagining Manchuria’s future. Their mutual use of the term goutong (communicate; intercommunication) highlights their divergent views. Wang only uses the word once, directly after lamenting the lack of understanding between China and Korea:

Wang He argues that the collection communicates brotherhood between China and Korea due to their similar circumstances of Japanese colonial rule. For Wang, the significance of literature is ‘that it can discernibly unearth and express, from every angle, the ideologies existing in our inner lives’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Wang presents an idealistic vision in which Chinese readers of A Selection will almost instantly be on intimate terms with Korean writing. Implicit here is the idea that the eight works faithfully represented a broad cross-section of Korean society and culture (and that it would be unchanging, despite the stories being written within a 20-year period between 1923–1941). Wang himself viewed his role as a mediator for a homogeneous Chinese readership, as evidenced in his quotations from Hu Feng’s Mountain Spirit. Yet Wang’s vision of a Chinese ‘we’ is imprecise at best.

Chen Yin apparently takes issue with Wang on the utility of goutong because, where Wang only uses it once, Chen Yin proceeds to use it five times in the first section of ‘Brief Comments’ alone. Chen first reworks Wang He’s statements about the closeness between China and Korea to say that ‘since communication (goutong) with Koreans is barely even indifferent, what we need now is to communicate (goutong) our philosophy (yisi)’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In modifying Wang’s phrasing, Chen challenges him about the value of translating simply for the sake of translating (that highly esteemed Yiwenzhi creed). Chen asserts that ‘literature is the oldest tool for expressing ideas (yisi)’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The repeated use of yisi also suggests that Chen was more concerned with the intentions and mentality behind a translation than a clichéd and stereotypical notion of culture and ethnicity.

Chen Yin continually challenges Wang by recycling his wording. Another such instance revolves around the term mangran (to be at a loss) and its derivative intensifier mangmangran (to be at a complete loss). Wang rather hyperbolically states: ‘we are at a complete loss (mangmang ran) concerning Korea. We know nothing about it’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Chen Yin counters: ‘We know Japanese literature and even northern European literature, what of being at a loss (mangran) about Korean literature?’Footnote ⁸⁰ Chen’s echo of mangran reins in Wang’s hyperbole. In other words, if there existed a deep interest in writing from other societies, then not engaging with Korean literature was inexcusable. Translating Korean literature first necessitated that Chinese writers address their own prejudices towards Koreans and, in effect, non-Western literature. Chen Yin thus intimates that the so-called philosophy (yisi) behind A Selection rang hollow. Chen reveals further contempt when he states: ‘We know Korean literature is written in Korean and Japanese … and the works in A Selection of Korean Short Stories were all translated from Japanese; many were penned by authors who write in Japanese …’Footnote ⁸¹ Chen reproaches Wang for glossing over this important detail in his romantic vision of Chinese and Korean brotherhood.

One final point where Wang and Chen disagreed starts in Wang’s last sentence, where he charges with characteristic zeal: ‘We hope they can soon introduce our literature to Korea!’Footnote ⁸² This inscrutable remark contradicts the earlier references Wang made to Chang Hyŏkju who, we might recall, had referenced the popularity of China’s May Fourth literature in Korea. How could ‘our’ (i.e. Chinese) writing be introduced to a country that was already familiar with Chinese literature? Clearly, he could not have been referring to literature from China as a whole. Going by this statement, Wang He intended for his readers to feel a sense of ownership towards Chinese works produced in Manchuria specifically, especially translations by local translators.

Yet, as a member of Wang’s target audience, Chen Yin refuses to concede to his rival faction. Instead, Chen makes his own suggestion. For his final and most significant point, Chen again recasts Wang He’s words with the following:

Chen’s suggestion bears repeating. In October 1941, amid a heated debate on whether Manchuria’s literature should consist of native-place writing or imported ideas, Chen Yin argued that the voices of Koreans living in the area mattered because they, too, represented Manchuria.

The Wenxuan influence

Less than a month after Chen’s critique appeared, a Korean intellectual, Ko Ch’ae-gi, introduced his friend and fellow writer, An Sugil, to the Chinese editors of the magazine Xin Manzhou (new Manchuria), the couple Wu Lang and Wu Ying. According to An’s memoir, Wu Lang requested a story from him personally.Footnote ⁸⁴ An’s original ‘pu-ŏngnyŏ’ (Kitchen Girl) was first serialized in the Mansŏn ilbo from 13-15 February 1940.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Chinese translation of ‘Kitchen Girl’ (Fu yi nü) was then published in the November 1941 special issue of Xin Manzhou that featured works from local Korean, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese writers. The translator of ‘Kitchen Girl’ is not named. But considering the personal meeting between An Sugil and the Xin Manzhou editors, and the fact that An and Ko were both proficient in Chinese after having lived in Manchuria for most of their lives, I conjecture that ‘Kitchen Girl’ was most likely translated by Ko Ch’ae-gi or An Sugil himself, perhaps with the help of Wu Lang or Wu Ying. The story centres on an ugly young woman with an upturned nose who was born in the kitchen, hence her name.Footnote ⁸⁶ She lives a life of misfortune and depravity. Eventually, Kitchen Girl takes for her lover a farmhand who implores her to escape with him to Manchuria. She declines the offer and, shortly thereafter, dies from illness.

As far we know, ‘Kitchen Girl’ is the only short story by a Korean living in Manchuria to be translated into Chinese during the Manchukuo period. The inclusion of ‘Kitchen Girl’ in Xin Manzhou can be seen as a key moment for Chinese writers interacting with Korean writing, especially in the context of the Yiwenzhi–Wenxuan debate. In effect, the Wenxuan took strides to gain allies among local Korean writers with regard to the representation of Manchuria in literature.

Apart from Xin Manzhou being a Wenxuan-affiliated publication, other factors also likely contributed to the publication of ‘Kitchen Girl’. Kim Chang-sŏn argues that ‘Kitchen Girl’ conformed to Wu Ying’s editorial emphasis on women’s issues, exemplified by the fact that the other three stories in the November 1941 issue also featured female protagonists and portrayed the tough lives of women.Footnote ⁸⁷ Xie Qiong explains that An Sugil went against the trend popular among Korean writers to depict migration or land cultivation and instead selected a story that portrayed a downtrodden girl who lived on the peninsula.Footnote ⁸⁸ Too much emphasis on Korean migration into Manchuria, Xie believes, might have incited Chinese readers’ negative views of their neighbors. Kim similarly posits that An Sugil wanted to showcase Korean writing rather than Korean sentiment towards life in Manchuria.Footnote ⁸⁹

It is certainly possible that the editors of Xin Manzhou or An himself could not fully come to terms with an outright display of Korean affinity with Manchuria. But that should not dissuade us from interpreting ‘Kitchen Girl’ as representative of the native-place ideal. Because the story revolves around a poor Korean woman, it maintains the aesthetic of depicting a harsh reality, despite the fairytale-like narrative and the girl’s satirically misshaped nose. For realist writers, the intersections of class and social identity worked in tandem with representing local life.

The publication of ‘Kitchen Girl’ and ‘Korean Literature in Manchuria’ conceivably originated from Chen Yin’s ideas about the utility of Korean literature. Ko Ch’ae-gi states in his article: ‘The only reason there is a question about whether or not Manchuria has Korean literature is simply that someone has yet to introduce it’.Footnote ⁹⁰ It is reasonable to conclude that Chen Yin’s call to local Korean writers consequently led Ko to do the introducing himself. After all, he did facilitate An Sugil’s meeting with Wu Lang. Ko’s subsequent essay provided a definitive statement that Korean literature was alive and well in Manchuria.

In early 1942, Ko Ch’ae-gi published ‘Korean Literature in Manchuria’ (zai Man Xianxi wenxue) to familiarize the Chinese readers of Xin Manzhou with local Korean literary history.Footnote ⁹¹ In it, Ko argues first and foremost that the future of the Korean language lay in the writing produced locally because of the policies that outlawed it on the peninsula. The body of the article then focuses on the Bukhyang 北乡 (northern country) literary group that had been founded by An Sugil in the mid-1930s.Footnote ⁹² Ko goes on to name Park Song-chun, Hyŏn Kyŏng-chun, Kim Chin-su, and An Sugil as the ‘core’ writers. By describing their journal, also called Bukhyang, and even quoting from its mission statement, Ko not only shows that Korean-language literature had already existed in Manchuria for several years but also that its main ideology aligned perfectly with Wenxuan ideals.

Despite similar ideas around the purpose of literature, the translation of Korean into Chinese entailed negotiating the power dynamics of the region. For example, Chen Yin’s invitation to local Korean writers implied circumventing Japanese as a medium, surely a necessary step for Koreans to regain a sense of literary autonomy. Yet in Xin Manzhou, their works would appear in Chinese, a kind of interdependence that would, for the foreseeable future, be impossible to escape. Ko Ch’ae-gi crystallizes this power dynamic through the prism of language. Though restrained for his Chinese readers, his logic reflects the general sentiments of Manchuria’s Korean community:

Ko saw that the colonial prohibitions against the Korean language on the peninsula had provided an opportunity, however grim, for the continuation of Korean literary traditions in Manchuria. He further hints that languages other than Japanese in Manchukuo—namely Chinese—would eventually face oppression as well. Ko seems to presume readers’ apathy towards Korea and Korean, but he capitalizes on events in recent memory to predict a similar fate for Chinese. Ko thereby appeals to Chinese intellectuals to be more open to cooperating with their Korean counterparts. He goes so far as to say that the Korean language was the key to authentically representing Manchuria through literature. Korean thinkers like Ko thus saw that Manchukuo nation-building discourses enabled cross-cultural interaction that could both build up local literary platforms and constrain the cultural reach of the Japanese at the same time.

Ko took a risk by declaring his and other Koreans’ willingness to collaborate with Chinese intellectuals. Unfortunately, his is the last Korean text that we know of to appear in Chinese publications during the Manchukuo era. From 1942 until 1945, censorship became too constricting for Chinese intellectuals to continue translating widely. Whether or not Ko’s article was flagged by authorities is unknown, but it surely would not have been in the Japanese authorities’ interest for Korean and Chinese intellectuals to start working together. The act of translating local Korean writing into Chinese radically challenged Japanese notions of racial harmony within the imperial context. Ko Ch’ae-gi’s writing and personal connections, though perhaps short-lived, brought together the otherwise disparate Chinese and Korean intellectual communities in Manchukuo.

What might have happened if Ko’s work had inspired more such collaborations? Although we cannot know, what is impressive is the depth and nuance we gain by looking at the lesser-known figures in Manchuria, such as Wai Wen, Wang He, Chen Yin, and Ko Ch’ae-gi. These examples indicate a dynamic literary sphere, with the Yiwenzhi and Wenxuan debate its surviving testament. Scholarship readily accepts that writers aimed to create meaningful, artful discourse while negotiating within a political space where authorities demanded a national literature. More difficult to acknowledge is when writers pushed the boundaries of their own comfort and creativity, such as the Wenxuan approach to local Korean literature, in order to carve out a unique space within difficult socio-political circumstances.