Reading and translating towards decoloniality: critique of the Korean ethnonation in Kwŏn Chŏng-saeng’s Mongsil ŏnni

ABSTRACT

Kwŏn Chŏng-saeng’s South Korean youth novel Mongsil ŏnni (My Sister Mongsil, 1984) is a story about a young girl’s survival through the chaos of post-liberation Korea and the Korean War. It challenges the post-1945 South Korean ethnonationalist master-narrative through Mongsil’s encounters with an abandoned half-black baby and the yanggongju (lit. “Western princess”). The novel makes visible these populations who have been excluded in the imagination of the minjok, the homogenous ethnonation. By focusing on their presence in the novel, this paper highlights South Korea’s place in the global Cold War order and illuminates the continuing coloniality in ethnicized and racialized nation-building. Through translation, Mongsil ŏnni also serves as a counter-narrative to the hegemonic historical narratives beyond the linguistic and geographical borders of Korea, adding to the understanding of the Korean War as a transnational event that occurred within the global structure of the Cold War. This paper argues that Mongsil ŏnni contributes to decoloniality by challenging the master-narrative of the minjok in post-1945 Korea, and in presenting this reading of the novel in English, it shows how translating literature contributes to the global pursuit of decoloniality by bringing overlooked historical issues into the parameters of visibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Kwŏn Chŏng-saeng
• Korean children’s literature
• translation and decoloniality
• counter-narrative
• ethnonation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Since its initial publication as a full-length novel, Mongsil ŏnni has been reprinted several times and has sold over one million copies. The novel has also been adapted for television in 1990. In 2004, the novel was adapted as a play by the theater company Mosinŭn saramdŭl (shortened name Modli). Kwŏn did not receive any payment for the script, and instead asked the theater company to make a donation to help the children of North Korea. Most recently, the story was adapted as an independent film in 2009, directed by Yi Chi-sang.

2. Sung-Jin Kim (2008) uses the term “hanguk chŏnjaeng sam pujak” in examining the three novels about the Korean War written by Kwŏn.

3. Although Lee’s article is useful as it was the only article discussing Mongsil ŏnni in relation to translation theory, I found a significant problem with it. Lee mentions that there is no existing English translation of the novel, but at the same time, she uses examples of some English translations of different parts of the book. However, Lee does not cite or mention where the English versions come from, and often the English version is just given in juxtaposition to the corresponding Korean lines or quotes, again without mentioning the source.

4. All translations are mine.

5. Min Kwangsik, the Minister of Education in 1973, commented on the prostituted in the camptowns: “The sincerity of girls who have contributed (with their c – ts) to their fatherland’s economic development is indeed praiseworthy” (as quoted in K. Moon 1997, 43).

6. A similar rhetoric was used by the Japanese government in establishing a postwar prostitution system during the occupation. According to Molasky (1999, 105), “The RAA [Recreation and Amusement Association] was to serve as a ‘female flood wall’ (onna no bōhaten), channeling this foreign male desire into designated (lower-class) female bodies, thereby protecting the pure women of Japan’s middle- and upper-classes.”

7. One primary example of such distorted paradigm is “colonial modernity.” In this decolonial pursuit of “epistemological reconstitution,” the “delinking” of “coloniality” with “modernity” according to Walter Mignolo (2007).

8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ([1988] 2010) conceptualized “epistemic violence” in her seminal work “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to highlight how oppressed groups are prevented from speaking and being heard.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Youn Soo Kim Goldstein

Youn Soo Kim Goldstein is Ambrose Amos Shaw Assistant Professor of Localization and Translation in the Department of Foreign Languages at Weber State University. She received her PhD in Translation Studies from Binghamton University, State University of New York in 2019. Her research interests include literary translation, Korean literature, decoloniality, and microcosmic narratives.