Kang Kyung-ae (20 April 1906 – 26 April 1944) was a feminist Korean writer, novelist and poet.
1. Life
Kang Kyung-ae was born in Songhwa, Hwanghae Province. She is also known by her pen name Kang Gama. She was the daughter of a servant and lost her father at the age of five. She moved to Changyeon when her mother remarried a man with three children. All of these circumstances resulted in substantial unhappiness. Kang enrolled in a Catholic boarding school with the help of her brother-in-law. She was later expelled for orchestrating and participating in a sit-in against the school's strict policies and a particularly cruel dorm mistress. She met a college student who was visiting from Tokyo, moved to Seoul with him, and began an affair. When the affair ended, she moved back to her family home in Hwanghae Province.
In 1931 Kang published her first story, "Pageum" (파금 The Broken Mandolin), in the Chosun Ilbo, and moved to Manchuria with her new husband, a divorced communist. She lived as a housewife in Yongjin and devoted herself to her writing. This period lasted seven years, after which Kang ceased writing fiction altogether. This was partly due to the fact that she became the managing editor of the Manchurian Chosun Ilbo. On April 26, 1944, one month after her mother died, Kang died at her home in Hwanghae Province.
2. Writing
Kang is often mentioned by literary critics as one of the foremost female writers of the colonial period. Different from other prominent female authors of the time, such as Na Hye-sok and Heo Jong-suk, she focused solely on fiction and essay writing and did not branch out into other forms of artistic expression such as painting. She produced works focusing on the Korean underclass often based on her experiences with extremely poor Koreans in Manchuria, where many of her works are set. These include "Pageum," "Chaejeon" (채전 Vegetable Garden), "Chukgujeon" (축구전 Football Game), and "Moja" (모자 Mother and Child). She also wrote proto-feminist works focusing on women’s oppression including "Eomeoni wa ttal" (어머니와 딸 Mothers and Daughters). Most of her works are anti-love/anti-family, in which only women who cut their ties with failed relationships can achieve freedom.
Her only novel, Ingan munje (인간문제 From Wonso Pond), widely considered to be her best work, deals with a multiplicity of class and gender issues. According to author Min Jin Lee, "From Wŏnso Pond is an astonishing achievement of a young author whose life and work ended far too soon. Here, we have two girls and two boys, four hearts and two roads. From a colonized Korea, Kang sets the stage for the tragic birth of two rival nations. John Dos Passos and George Orwell may have had a Korean sister yet." [1]
Reference
[1] https://www.feministpress.org/books-a-m/9r6m9lk7aypw8app5nda72h3o0y6z8
