A History of Korea (75 page)

The emergence of a standard Korean vernacular resulted from several sources, including the work of linguists. Also playing a major role were the increasing propagation of common forms of mass culture and entertainment, and a shortening of distances through both communication and transportation technologies. And, notably, the lyric poetry of this era expanded the expressive potential of the Korean language, as shown by the three most renowned poets of the first half of the twentieth century: Kim Sow
l, Han Yongun, and Ch
ng Chiyong. Kim’s best known poem, “Azaleas”—indeed the most famous and probably most popular poem in modern Korea—taps into the powerfully recurring theme in Korean folklore of sorrowful parting and unrequited love. This theme appears in everything from the
Tale of Ch’unhyang
to the semi-official national folk song of “Arirang,” as well as in hit songs of this period such as “Tuman River, Full of Tears.” It also is central to the title poem of Han Yongun’s great collection of lyrics,
Silence of the Beloved
. While revealing himself a passionate nationalist and Buddhist reformer in his activities as educator and essayist, in his verse Han couched his concerns about the contemporary situation in allegories of love, lament, and reconciliation. Ch
ng Chiyong, a Catholic and perhaps the most noteworthy stylist, painted serenely evocative
images of nature and rustic life with breathtaking fluency. That Ch
ng, who worked as an English teacher at a secondary school for the duration of the late colonial period, could consistently find outlets for publishing his poetry in various journals, including those he helped to edit, testified to the flourishing literary culture of this era.

Other forms of mass culture also enjoyed a major boom, helped by advances in technology and commercial development, including a thriving consumerism in the cities. Music and theater performances became popular events, and they featured both foreign and native works. Korean plays and musicals were offered through creative stagings of traditional folk tales as well as new works, and retellings of famous Korean stories not surprisingly became embraced by the early Korean cinema as well, the first “talkie” of which appeared in 1935. And in music a star system of singers emerged in the 1930s, with their most popular hits instantly becoming iconic treasures that remain in the popular consciousness today. These songs enjoyed distribution through the proliferation of phonographs among the upper and middle classes, but it was the advent of the radio that was most responsible for the widespread dissemination of popular music in the colonial period. Radio supplied people with news and education as well as entertainment, infusing the growing listening public in both rural and urban areas with a new sense of connection to each other and to the world at large.

Indeed the radio, specifically the regular live reports from Berlin, played a central role in igniting Koreans’ interest in Son Kij
ng’s great Olympic quest. When the day of the marathon came, Koreans huddled around their radios in the late hours of Saturday, August 9, 1936. Immediately following an update around midnight that Son had joined the lead pack about a third of the way into the race, however, the broadcast, in accordance with its regular schedule, cut off the coverage from Berlin. While the rest of the country had to wait until the next morning for the results, a group of people gathered just outside the
Tonga ilbo
headquarters received updates from a newspaper employee who had managed to establish telephone contact with Tokyo and Berlin. These people
were the first to know when, around 2am, came finally the joyous announcement that, indeed, Son Kij
ng had won the Olympic marathon, and moreover, that another Korean, Nam S
ngnyong, had taken the bronze medal. The following morning the country erupted in celebration, and a pervasive giddiness over this happy occasion would endure for months, even infecting the reporters at the
Tonga ilbo
enough, two weeks later, to alter Son’s photo.

The newspaper workers behind this act were displaying an extreme example of the double duty that Korean reporters generally pursued in the colonial period—as eyewitnesses and chroniclers on the one hand, and as activists, opinion makers, and artists on the other. In fact, a great number of colonial period writers also had worked at one time as newspaper reporters. The line between observer and storyteller tended to blur—along with that between popular and high culture—through this connection and the serialization of novels in newspapers and periodicals. Furthermore, the themes explored by these literary works mostly focused on the here and now, and on daily events—as if, indeed, they were elaborations of newspaper reports. The first great concentration of canonical works in modern Korean literature emerged in the late colonial period and was suffused with the details of everyday life, from the tedious to the tragic.

Many of the most notable authors of novels and short stories won their renown through portrayals of daily, often mundane life in late colonial Korea. Ch’ae Mansik, known primarily for his masterpiece, the novel
Peace Under Heaven
, used his short stories to satirize, critique, and observe bemusedly the often dumbfounding dynamics of modern existence. His short story, “A Ready-Made Life,” for example, depicts the legions of “petit bourgeois intellectuals” who, armed with an education and high tastes but no practical skills, drift about contemporary Seoul in search of jobs and meaning in their lives. The lead character, one such “ready-made life,” rescues himself from his absurd destitution and desperation by returning to simple, indeed traditional, priorities. Another important chronicler of life in Seoul was Pak T’aew
n, author of innovative narratives that at times dispensed with conventions, such as plot, for the sake of chronicling the pedestrian. “A Day in
the Life of the Novelist Kubo” (serialized in 1934), for example, is an autobiographical stroll (“Kubo” was Pak’s pen name) through Seoul relayed through streams of consciousness and snippets of observations, in a narrative style that often changes tenses and narrator in the same paragraph. Scenes of the rapidly modernizing capital city attract the attention of Kubo, who notes the goings on in theaters, restaurants, coffee houses, and that great symbol of high-class urban leisure at the time, the department store. What he finds in the teeming metropolis, however, often leads to alienation and disenchantment. In the splendid Seoul train station, for example, he senses only a throng of lonely individuals: “Although the place is so packed with people that Kubo can’t even find a seat to squeeze into, there’s no human warmth. Without exchanging a word with those sitting next to them, these people are preoccupied with their own business, and should they happen to say anything to each other, it’s only to check the train schedule or something along those lines.” While the extraordinary pace and social impact of changes in the urban landscape are enough to devote an entire novella to the impressions of a curious observer, the novelties of modern life are not necessarily to be celebrated. Indeed, the effects are often lamented and feared.