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Memory and Epiphany
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17837 |
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BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1990 |
2,877 Words |
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J. Martin Holman
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"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 dictionary were imprisoned and tortured for their nationalist activities. Koreans soon chafed at the Japanese yoke: the March First Independence Movement of 1919 exhibited the breadth of their resistance. Hwang's father participated in this peaceful demonstration of discontent with Japanese rule, and was subsequently jailed for eighteen months by the authorities. The movement failed to dislodge the Japanese, but it provided a rallying point for Korean nationalism that is still recalled today,
Following an education in Japanese schools in his native land, Hwang went to Japan, where he took a degree in English literature at Waseda University in Tokyo in 1939. There he was exposed to the active literary world of the 1930s. Young Japanese writers were experimenting with foreign concepts and molding Japanese literary forms in response to their readings in French, Russian, English, and other
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