Dust and Other Stories Read online

  DUST

  AND OTHER STORIES

  WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA

  WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA

  Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

  For a full list of titles in this series, see pages 265–66.

  DUST

  AND OTHER STORIES

  YI T’AEJUN

  TRANSLATED BY JANET POOLE

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

  Dust and Other Stories is published under the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).

  This publication has been supported by the Richard W. Weatherhead Publication Fund of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  English translation © 2018 Janet Poole

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54634-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Yi, T’ae-jun, 1904–1956. | Poole, Janet, translator.

  Title: Dust and other stories / Yi T’aejun ; translated by Janet Poole.

  Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Series: Weatherhead books on Asia | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017037821 | ISBN 9780231185806 (cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231185813 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

  Classification: LCC PL991.9.T3 A2 2018 | DDC 895.73/4—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037821

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Chang Jae Lee

  Cover image: Construction Site Dreg 03, 2012 © Jung Jihyun

  FOR MY MOTHER, WHO LOVES STORIES

  CONTENTS

  TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

  Omongnyŏ

  Mr. Son, of Great Wealth

  The Rainy Season

  The Broker’s Office

  The Frozen River P’ae

  A Tale of Rabbits

  The Hunt

  Evening Sun

  Unconditioned

  Before and After Liberation: A Writer’s Notes

  Tiger Grandma

  Dust

  GLOSSARY

  TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This translation was initially undertaken with the help of a grant from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. I was greatly encouraged when the project was selected for a Banff International Literary Translation Centre Residency Fellowship at the Banff Centre for the Arts. I would like to thank the then directors Katherine Silver and Hugh Hazelton for their encouragement and for introducing me to such an inspiring group of translators. In particular, Russell Valentino was kind enough to offer helpful suggestions during the Banff sessions.

  I know that I am the most fortunate translator in the world to be able to call upon Hwang Jongyon and Jiyoung Suh whenever I am perplexed by Yi T’aejun’s prose and colonial references. I cannot thank them enough. In the final months of preparing this manuscript Bae Gaehwa generously shared with me invaluable resources on Yi T’aejun’s original publications. I am also grateful for the suggestions I received from Amanda Goodman and two reviewers for Columbia University Press. Finally my deepest thanks go to Jennifer Crewe and Christine Dunbar at Columbia University Press for their continued support of Korean literature in translation.

  TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

  In August of 1946 Yi T’aejun (1904–?) boarded a Soviet army plane in Pyongyang, circled over the city that had recently become his new home, and flew north, across the border with the Soviet Union and over the tall buildings of Vladivostok, before landing in a small town on the outskirts of that city, where his delegation from the Soviet-occupied zone of northern Korea was to be placed in quarantine for five to six days before journeying on to the capital of the Soviet empire, Moscow. Yi was taking part in a two-month-long tour of the Soviet Union, organized by the Pyongyang-based Korea-Soviet Union Cultural Association. Over a period of two months, the delegation of farmers, laborers, scholars, artists, and politicians was to be based in Moscow, with side trips to Leningrad to the west, and Armenia and Georgia to the south, returning to Moscow via Stalingrad, before finally making its way home to Pyongyang via the Trans-Siberian railroad. Later that year, Yi published the diary he kept during his journey. The book was titled Record of a Journey to the Soviet Union, and photographs inserted at its front record the journey of the delegation from a newly liberated land: pictures of the group inside the Kremlin, exiting from a government building in Armenia, and at a farewell reception; an article from the Moscow Cultural Newspaper with a photograph of Yi T’aejun, the writer Yi Kiyŏng, feminist activist and journalist Hŏ Chŏngsuk, and other members of the delegation meeting with Russian writers; Lenin’s mausoleum and a scene of the night sky lit up during the first September 3 celebration of victory on the Pacific front by the side of the Moscow River. Ordinary snapshots of neatly suited dignitaries standing in line for the obligatory group shot are juxtaposed with the sturdy stone of the Red Square walls and the dazzling lights of the celebrating capital city. The novelty for this group of being received as representatives of a liberated nation should not be forgotten. During their stay, several members of the group purchased newly printed maps of the world, on which Korea and Japan were now depicted as separate nations. As Yi looks down upon the tiny country of Korea, dwarfed by the enormous breadth of the Soviet Union, he is enthralled by it being depicted there in its very own color.

  In the preface to his diary, Yi suggests the significance of this trip, timed to coincide with the first anniversary of Japan’s defeat in war and Korea’s release from a colonial occupation lasting more than three decades:

  As someone who had barely been freed from a long life of slavery to old things in an old world, on this trip to the Soviet Union I was like a bird flying through the sky for the first time, having been freed from a cage. Those few months were truly enchanting. Everything old and bad connected to humans had disappeared; it was a new world with a new culture, new customs, and the new daily lives of new people. Moreover, although it was new by the day, the Soviet Union was moving forward without end, just like a great river flows toward the eternally stable ocean.1

  The repetition of the word “new” is striking; it portrays Liberation with a sense of joyous rupture, which turns everything that came before and all that is expected afterward into the old and the new. The new world here lies foremost at the heart of the Soviet empire. For Yi, a former Japanese imperial subject who had previously only traveled back and forth between metropolitan Japan and its Korean colony, Liberation allowed travel into new worlds in the most literal of senses. In the few brief years before he was sent into internal exile in the emergent Democratic People’s Republic, Yi took part in official trips to the Soviet Union and to China.

  But these journeys were preceded by a shorter journey that would prove life changing: his decision to move from his longtime home in Seoul, by this time occupied by the United States, to Pyongyang in the summer of 1946. At the time, he would not have known this journey would prove irreversible: that four years later a civil war would erupt that still has seen no armistice more than sixty years on, and that his many works would, as a result, be banned south of the thirty-eighth parallel until 1988, erasing him from the pages of written history in South Korea. Neither would he have realized that he, along with so many of the artists and writers who chose to move from the South to the North at this time, would fall from f
avor so quickly as power consolidated around Kim Il Sung in the mid-1950s, leaving his work equally unpublished north of the thirty-eighth parallel and his final whereabouts and date of death unknown.

  In 1946 the journey to the Soviet Union was a journey to a new world that seemed full of hope and promise. Yi describes life there as one of culture, leisure, and pleasurable labor. Perhaps what he saw, however, was not so much the reality of Soviet life, hard enough to grasp in any event within the confines of an official tour, but the life he dreamed of for himself, which contrasted sharply with his current life in the chaotic midst of a forcibly divided country and the aftermath of colonial occupation by an empire at war. This dream life sought stability at the same time that it thrived on the excitement of the new. In Yi’s preface, too, this sense of newness is, in this supposedly foundational moment, not singular but accompanied by a notion of eternity. Yi’s description of his time in the Soviet Union brings to mind Baudelaire’s famous definition of the modern in “The Painter of Modern Life”: where the modern is composed of two sides, so to speak, the contingent or ephemeral and the eternal, as if to be truly “modern” it is not enough to be merely new.2 This suggests that Yi’s move to what was to become North Korea is best understood as a search for the authentically new, a search that had characterized his entire literary career.

  By the 1930s Yi had already earned a reputation as a dedicated writer, editor, and teacher. One of colonial Korea’s foremost writers of fiction and anecdotal essays, Yi left behind a voluminous oeuvre. As an editor, Yi curated arts pages for national newspapers and cofounded a literary journal that championed Korean-language literature after the vernacular press had been shut down by the colonial authorities in 1940. As a teacher, he wrote several popular writing guides and taught at schools. He was a founding member in 1933 of the Group of Nine (Kuinhoe), a short-lived but famous grouping of modernist poets and fiction writers who had shocked colonial society with their commitment to experimentation with literary form and the Korean language at a time when writing was more properly understood to be an instrument for national and socialist revolution.3 Yi was always conversant with the new, even when the new was what seemed most old. For he was also an antiquarian, a collector and lover of old things in an age that was just beginning to recognize what was being lost in the rampant drive to modernization.

  Yi’s stories record that sense of loss at the same time that they explore the new spaces and experiences of colonial Korea: its capital city, Seoul, where Yi lived; provincial cities, such as Pyongyang and Kyŏngju, that were undergoing the first wave of imperial tourism; and destitute rural villages, which provoked an intense sense of nostalgia in the urbanite Yi. The materiality of these spaces is less his focus, however, than the sentiments they inspire and the mental life of his urbane protagonists, especially his oft-used alter ego, Hyŏn. Yi’s stories revolve less around plot than around mental contemplation and the processes of thinking, reflecting an intellectual response to the changing urban environment that characterized modernisms around the world. Those stories that focus on rural, lower-class, or female characters equally eschew the drama of narrative incident to reflect Yi’s urban male gaze, which seeks in these characters’ naïveté, morality, and especially their colorful language, the simplicity and authenticity of a different world and a different life. Indeed, the centrality of female characters and old men to Yi’s stories suggests they provided integral forms through which he explored the rapid changes in contemporary life. The critic Yu Chongho once characterized Yi T’aejun’s stories as a “dictionary to humankind.”4 Yi believed in character as the focus of the short story form, and we can see this lifelong interest clearly in the stories selected here: from Yi’s very first published short story from 1925, which describes the canny but destitute temptress Omongnyŏ, to characters from his later works, such as the indomitable Tiger Grandma, who stars in his tale of the nationwide literacy campaign launched in North Korea soon after the end of colonial rule. Whether depicting the inner thoughts of a sensitive writer or the often humorous antics of figures struggling to cope with modern life, Yi’s short stories were considered among the best of his time. He was acknowledged as an accomplished writer, whose attention to style and the texture of language—especially in the frequent dialogues featuring different dialects and representations of class—brought him the admiration of readers, colleagues, and students alike.

  Yi produced his best writing in the short literary forms of the anecdotal essay and the short story, in which he seems to have found his own style during the mid-1930s.5 He was also a prolific writer of long serial novels, which appeared in the national newspapers, but he often complained that economic necessity forced him to concentrate too much time on these popular novels; time which he would rather be spending on the work he called “art”—the short story or the dream of an “authentic” novel. In 1930s Korea a contract to serialize a newspaper novel was a major and most welcome source of income for any writer. Yet Yi also valued the short story form for reasons beyond its supposed freedom from the drudgery of commodified labor. He once wrote, “In environments such as Korea, where one encounters a variety of difficulties when trying to handle the general situation either spatially or temporally, it is no exaggeration to say that the most partial and fragmented form of the short story has to be the most appropriate literary form.”6 This is the closest that the rather dilettantish Yi came to acknowledging the constraints upon artistic production under colonial occupation. More often he would claim that art “blooms from the individual alone,” as if that individual him or herself existed in isolation from any social or political situation.7

  One of Yi’s contemporaries, the critic Sŏ Insik (1906–?), provides a helpful context for the individual that was Yi, and especially for the nostalgic sentiment that so permeates his work. For Sŏ, writing in 1940, nostalgia was the sentiment of the age, so pervasive that he even came up with a typology of three nostalgic forms he believed to be significant in late colonial Korean literature.8 The first of these he termed a “feudal” nostalgia, which turned obsessively to the past and old things as a way to avoid the problems of the present. He cited Yi T’aejun’s interest in antiques and practiced archaic writing style in his anecdotal essays as a primary example of this. Sŏ described a second type of nostalgia as “modern” and diagnosed it as a generational phenomenon suffered by those who had come of age in the early twentieth-century rush to enlightenment only to find their options foreclosed by state mobilization as the Second Sino-Japanese War and then the Pacific War took hold. This generation was not nostalgic for a distant past but for its own youth and the possibilities for the future that it had once seemed to hold. Finally, Sŏ isolated a decadent nostalgia, a general dis-ease with the past and the present, as a site for future hope in the way it sought to confront present contradictions rather than seek refuge in a comfortable past.

  There is a way in which Yi T’aejun’s work encompasses all three of Sŏ’s nostalgic forms. Born in 1904, in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War fought partially on Korean soil, Yi belonged to the generation of modern nostalgics whose youth seemed in retrospect to have been a time of possibility and opportunity. This might seem ironic, because Yi was of the first generation of Koreans to receive their education in colonial schools, after the formal declaration of colonial rule in 1910. Yet the extreme rupture brought about by a modernizing colonialism paradoxically produced opportunities for some, while inflicting great violence on others. Yi was not from a particularly elite family, his father having been exiled to the Russian Far East after taking part in an attempted coup in the 1880s. Yi had been orphaned young and moved around the Korean peninsula in a rather nomadic style, before eventually traveling to the heart of the empire, where he managed to complete his education at Tokyo’s elite Waseda University in the 1920s. At that time the imperial capital was the stage for dynamic social activism both in the arts and on the streets as avant-garde artistic movements and a colorful mass culture were taking
hold in Japan’s growing cities. Returning to Korea in the 1930s, Yi was to rise to the forefront of the literary scene in a decade when Korea would also experience a large increase in its urban population as its predominantly agricultural economy began to diversify and writing was to emerge as a profession for a very few. Increasing literacy rates had meant that readership of newspapers soared, and commercial magazines, as opposed to the small coterie journals of the previous decade, emerged and demanded material to fill their pages. Whereas publishing had previously been seen as an act of self-sacrifice for a patriotic cause, by this time writers were beginning to be paid by the printed page, and a small number of them, including Yi T’aejun, could earn a living by writing, editing at newspapers, and teaching in schools.

  The life brought about by such upward mobility bred the very modern fantasy of the past having been simpler and morally pure, at the same time that few seriously wished to turn back the pages of time. In the mid-1930s Yi moved to the neighborhood of Sŏngbuk-dong, then located on the outskirts of the colonial capital. His stories detail daily life in a leisurely neighborhood, where older residents coexisted with up-and-coming young families such as Yi’s, whose wage earners could commute into the inner city on the newly expanded bus lines and tramlines. “Mr. Son, of Great Wealth” is one of several character portraits Yi wrote during this period that gently portray the eccentricities of people living askew to the demands of the modern city. Yi’s favorite characters were uneducated, sweetly naïve, and often old, as in “The Broker’s Office,” which depicts a trio of old men who feel unwelcome in a changing world and alienated from the values of the younger generation. Other stories from this time present the claustrophobic mental life of an intellectual protagonist, who appears to be thinly based upon the author himself. Such stories invariably locate the protagonist’s concerns within the domestic sphere, even when he is wandering, flâneur-like, through the capital’s streets, as in “The Rainy Season,” or attempting to forge a livelihood, as in “A Tale of Rabbits.” While the public life of the city appears increasingly cut off to these colonial subjects, the stories depict a domestic life emerging during this period, which is recognizable to readers today with its economic uncertainties, gentle bickering, and slightly sentimental tone.