Now, before I move to the 20th century, I would like you all to read three very powerful short stories which will help facilitate our discussion about gender, modernity, and colonial Korea. Hyeon Jin-geon's realist fiction, "A Lucky Day" examines the everyday life of a poor rickshaw puller and his sick wife. Kim Dong-In's story, "Potatoes", examines the plight of a poor woman under Japanese colonialism. And finally, Yi Sang's "Wings" looks at the psyche of an emasculated male intellectual. Well, what'd you think? "Wings" seems more allegorical than the other two. All three authors examine the complex transformations and processes of industrialization and urbanization against the backdrop of an agrarian society in colonial Korea and its impact on Korean men and women. At one level, modernity under Japanese colonialism sought to destabilize long-standing gender arrangements in Korean society, throwing into question the status of traditional forms of morality, and claims of authority as women increasingly entered the contested public spaces, crossing the thresholds of the home. Certainly, Japanese colonialism, with its attendant distortions, imposed a particular modernity on Korean men and women. One unique facet was the utilization of state power to bring about changes in people's work habits, living patterns, moral conduct, and world view. One can clearly sense the material changes in all three stories. Yet, these qualitative and quantitative changes however, did not automatically make Korean men and women into mere passive recipients of modernity. There were a variety of competing versions among a diverse group of people in the colony over what constituted a modern Korean woman. The emergence of the modern culture industry created a space for debate and discussion, as magazines and newspapers offered a wide range of competing identities to its readers. For example, the financially independent working woman, the successful wife and mother, or the healthy woman, and so forth. The rhetoric in the press and novels were full of references to the new. Neologisms, like, the new woman, or new family, filled the headlines. How best to represent women in their new roles in society became a contentious matter as the state, social critics and reformers of all persuasions from traditionalists to moralists, socialists, capitalists, and even women writers, sought to describe and document her with unprecedented attention, opening up a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible interventions. The emergence of new female prototypes from the ‘yokong’, or female factory worker, to the ‘shinyosung’, or new woman, was an uneven, painful, and controversial process that generated conflicts between traditional Confucian patriarchy and modern models of womanhood. At one end of this new modern space were the new women. They were the first generation of educated women, who were mainly educated in protestant missionary schools who challenged the traditional Confucian patriarchal system with their radical mentality, defiant personal appearance and dress, and ideas for female emancipation through their writings to negotiate a new vision for Korean women. Many had returned from their sojourn in Japan and the West, where they had spent years studying and observing new values. And now they sought self-expression and independence in their own cities. They were hardly the docile or self-sacrificing women that Korean intellectuals had envisioned would lead the nation into the new era of progress and national reform. To minimize the threat of the new women, nationalist reformers sought to create new ideologies of womanhood that would appeal to her modern sensibilities, yet would contain her within traditional gender boundaries. At the same time, they could ill afford to leave this visible group out of the reform process. And the construction of new gender roles and identity would invariably involve resistance, negotiation, and compromises. Yet, if appeals to the modern and the new could be appropriated and articulated anew by certain disenfranchised groups, it also came at the expense of others. The accelerated pace of industrialization and urbanization that accompanied Japan's colonization of the peninsula had a profound impact upon rural women, as you can see in Kim Dong-in's <Potatoes>. The emergence of the female worker in the public sphere evoked immense anxieties in Korean society, for she posed a threat to the strict gender boundaries. Despite the new rules that these women assumed and the new sexual division of labor, this did not reduce or change their domestic responsibilities and chores. In fact, they now carried the double burden of work and family. Moreover, in the earlier proto-industrial context, the term ‘yokong’ simply described women who worked. In the colonial period, the term assumed a new valence from ‘women's work’, a combination of the Chinese character ‘women’ and ‘work’, to one that signified a new category. The word ‘kong’ no longer referred to ‘work’, but ‘kongjang’ or ‘the factory’. In other words, they had been transformed from, women who worked, into women factory workers. What I would like you to do now is to reflect again on the three stories, and think about the relationships between Korean women and men under Japanese colonialism and modernity. Does one sense a kind of solidarity between ‘Bokyo’ and let's say a new educated woman? What about the rickshaw puller, an emasculated male intellectual in <Wings>? Do they share similar concerns? From a nationalist perspective, how would one characterize the four characters? Were they all involved in the cause of national liberation? What I would like to emphasize here is that what distinguished Korean women's experiences is that they could not be divorced from the colonial context in a growing nationalist movement. I want you to now watch a short music video based on a true story of a Korean female pilot, Park Kyongwon, who in the early 1930s aspired to become Asia's first Amelia Earhart. Before hoping to embark on a trans-Pacific flight, she wanted to fulfill her lifelong dream of flying from Japan to her homeland. Tragically, she dies in an accident when her plane veers off into the mountains. Should we label her as a collaborator for her decision to place personal ambition over national interest? Or embrace her as a trailblazer and a modern woman?
