Land of Exile

Author: Jo Jungrae (1943–)

summary

Ch’on Mansok was born as a poor boy serving the Ch’oe family and had felt intense resentment toward his oppression since his childhood. He joins the People’s Liberation Army in his youth in hopes of reclaiming power and punishing his oppressors; his wife, Chomnye, leads the Alliance of Democratic Women. Unbeknownst to him, Chomnye has an affair with the PLA commander. He kills both of them when he catches them having sex, and thus has to flee his hometown. His parents and son are killed for his actions after the Ch’oe family regains power. He becomes a manual laborer. When he is fifty, he meets Sunim, who is around thirty. They have a son together, and he does his best to provide for his family. However, after taking a job further away from home, he comes back to find that his wife had run away with a younger guy. He becomes homeless, gives up his son, and dies unknown under the bridge in his hometown after finding out his one benefactor, Mr. Hwang, had died ten years past.

notes

• Class struggles and resentment
  • Righteous indignation
  • Personal anger
    • Anger and rebellion as a privilege
    • Anger as a tool
• Misunderstood intentions
  • Crab incident
    • Expectation to hold one’s tongue
• Acts of violence
  • War
  • Killing wife and commander
  • Beating the Ch’oe (Cheong in original) kids
    • Getting hit first
    • Receiving verbal abuse for being a commoner
    • His father getting beat up for his son’s mistakes
  • Verbal abuse toward wife
• Sexuality as a reclamation of power
  • Pure speculation
  • Could also be blackmail or coercion
• Irony of unknown corpse — he is forgotten, just like many in the war
  • Unable to escape cycle of war
• Gap between ideals of vengeance and justice and reality
  • Eye-for-an-eye justice
  • Where is the line drawn? When do you stop?
    • Cyclic violence
• Rebellion against meek father and society

lecture (2025-04-15)

• Fragmented narrative
  • Moving back and forth between present and past
    • Blurred lines
  • Impact of past
  • How present can color/bring up memories
• Timeline
  • Born in Japanese occupation of Korea (Ch’oe yangban power, collaborators) 1926
  • Crab catching incident, age 12, 1938
  • Family allowed back in home, age 16, 1942
  • Married at 21, 1947
  • Beginning of Korean War at 24, 1950
  • Korean War 1950
  • Joins the People’s Army
  • Joins the South Korean Army (ROK forces)
  • Marries Sumin (33) at 49, 1975
  • Death at 54, c. 1980
• Anger, nature or nurture?
• Generations of oppression
  • Yangban: old systems of power during Joseon period
    • Work from Japanese
  • Mansok may have come from old slave classes
  • Rigid social structures
    • → Appeals of Communist ideas
• Transactional marriages
• Generational trauma
• Power breeding violence
• Violence and instability go hand in hand

thoughts

• Mansok’s hatred toward women makes me uncomfortable
• Spitting up blood — tuberculosis?