The representation of the enemy in North and South Korean literature from the Korean War

The communist enemy during the war

When war broke out, the pre-war images of the communist enemy were regurgitated and extended to the other enemy: North Korea. When the North Korean enemy appears in stories, the ideological differences between the two sides are again stressed. ‘A Dark Night’ (1952a), written by Pak Yŏngjun (1911–1976), deals with the ideological differences between two brothers. Captain Im can hardly believe his eyes when he discovers his younger brother Kyŏngjae among the captured North Korean prisoners of war (POWs). His brother had been forcefully drafted when the North Korean army occupied Seoul. Im is very happy to see him and a tearful reunion ensues. Kyŏngjae tells of his attempts to escape and asks about the well-being of their parents.

The next day, Im wants to get his brother released, but hears that Kyŏngjae had resisted fiercely and had even killed a soldier when being captured. Im feels ashamed and cannot fathom what had possessed his brother at the time. He would like to meet his brother again to ask him directly. He seeks comfort from his superior who tells him: ‘Meet him if you want, but don’t feel too disappointed. [ … ] It doesn’t matter how strong your brotherly bond is. When your ideologies are different there is nothing that can be done about it’ (Pak, 1952a: 26).

When they meet again, and Kyŏngjae is unable to explain to his brother why of all prisoners only he had resisted until the end, his demeanour changes completely. His eyes change into those of a ‘poisonous snake’, and this makes Im realize that his brother is a communist after all. ‘You have become a true communist who does not care for parents, brothers or the minjok!’ (Pak, 1952a: 27). Im leaves the prison crying, after which he again meets his superior who tells him:

We live in unhappy times. The dehumanizing communist ideology is a cruel gift. [ … ] It is better to love your fellow soldiers. This will be the same as loving the minjok. Isn’t that a greater love than personal attachment? (Pak, 1952a: 27)

These words encourage Im to forget about his brother, and from that point on, he decides to put all his efforts into fighting for his country. Soon afterwards, during a battle, he sees two escaped prisoners running his way, one of whom is his brother. He hesitates for a second, but then shoots them both.

The story stresses that, even when two people have grown up as brothers, differences in ideology cannot be overcome. What changed Im’s brother is not clearly explained, but it can be assumed that it is communist ideology. As in the pre-war period, communism is depicted as an evil that eradicates the minjok and leads to inhumane behaviour. A similar depiction also appears in another story by Pak Yŏngjun, ‘Partisan’ (1952b). Here, the narrator joins the communist cause out of youthful naivety but soon discovers its oppressive nature. As a partisan, he fights heroically against the South Korean army and even earns medals for his deeds. When the tide of war changes in favour of the United Nations army, however, his devotion starts to waver. Around this time, he also falls in love with a fellow comrade. From then on, his love for humanity returns, something that is suppressed by communism, and he realizes,

How could I not feel moved by the grief of my countrymen, who have the same face, and clothes and speak the same language as I do? Communism prides itself on having as its goal to negate everything, but I believe they will never be able to cut out the sweet feeling of love that makes humans noble. (Pak, 1952b: 138)

The character Pak employs in this story has first-hand experience living in North Korea, and his statements therefore carry a greater air of authority. Communist ideology eradicates people’s feelings using methods such as peer pressure and self-criticism sessions, allowing them to commit hideous crimes even against their own countrymen. ‘Whenever there was free time we held self-criticism sessions. This is the most powerful weapon communism has to turn men into machines’ (Pak, 1952b: 135). This debasement of human feelings is stressed elsewhere when the narrator remarks that

Communism dissolves all types of people into one organism. It doesn’t matter how precious, or how great a person is, individual thoughts cannot survive. The organism is absolute. And within this absolute being, whose principle it is to ignore all things, a great delusion is created. (Pak, 1952b: 134)

Pak aims to convince the reader, using metaphors like the one above, that everyone in North Korea is enslaved by the system. There are, however, figures within that society who exercise absolute power over the people. For instance, elsewhere in the story, the narrator remarks,

I have witnessed and experienced the reality of North Korean communist society in which there is a wealthy class centered around high-ranking party members who rule over an oppressed class that leads a more miserable life than laborers in a capitalist society. In North Korea, they are the bourgeoisie who rule over the oppressed classes. (Pak, 1952b: 131)

A distinction is thus drawn between common North Korean civilians and the North Korean politicians in power. An elite group in society forcefully controls an oppressed populace, which is then coerced into fighting for the communist regime. This argument appears in Kim Song’s (1952) novel Living Forever as well, when a captured North Korean soldier appears in the story:

It looks like the enemy’s military police tied his feet, so that he couldn’t retreat at all, and was forced to fight to the death. But in the face of our marines’ relentless attack, the enemy’s defensive lines broke down completely and their military police shot him, so that he couldn’t flee.

‘I wanted to run away and surrender, but because of the military police’s supervision I ended up like this’, said the boy, who dropped down on the ground and started to cry loudly.

By portraying large parts of the North Korean population as victims of the Northern regime, the writers and ideologues in the South kept them included in their view of who belonged to the Korean minjok. Kim Yŏngsu’s (1911–1977) ‘The Prisoner of War that I Caught’ (1952) is a good example of such a portrayal, and deals with a victimized North Korean soldier who could still be part of the nation. In the story, the first-person narrator has just captured a POW and leads him down the hill to the army camp. When he notices that the prisoner is trying to loosen his bonds, he grabs his wrists, only to discover a tattoo with ‘Long live the People’s Republic!’ on it. He flies in a rage, grabs his knife to cut off his wrists and shouts, ‘Because of you People’s Republic bastards the fatherland is in ruins and the minjok has lost its way … When the fatherland is lost and the minjok perishes, will you still shout these words?’ (Kim, 1952: 30). The prisoner begs him not to kill him, and tells him that he was forced to put this tattoo on his wrist because of the immense pressure he was under from his working group and its chairman. The narrator refrains from killing him and instead lectures him that this is exactly what happens under the dictatorship of communism and the fascism of Kim Il Sung.

After delivering the prisoner, he has to stand guard again, and after his duty is over, he decides to return to the prisoner to continue his lecture ‘about Fascism and what Democracy is’. As he walks up to the prisoner asking him whether he has already figured out that he was misled by Kim Il Sung, he notices that the prisoner has bandages around his wrists. The prisoner tells him that he ate the letters out of his wrists and that now he has the feeling that he is alive. Witnessing this, the narrator thinks to himself, ‘I have to fight! I have to fight! Also for the sake of the freedom of mankind’ (Kim, 1952: 34).

The common soldiers or civilians who appear in most wartime stories do not believe in communism at all and are only fighting for the communist regime due to the oppression they have had to endure. This group is in need of liberation at the hands of the South Korean regime.

When the North Korean enemy appears in South Korean stories, the primary focus is on the differences between the communist and democratic ideologies. The writers portray communism as containing an inherent flaw, which leads people to commit barbarous atrocities. Such depictions seek to convince the reader that communism is incompatible with the desires of the Korean minjok. This argument is enhanced by the description of some enemy characters. In Kim Song’s novel Living Forever, for example, the evil protagonist is a North Korean army officer called Chu Mongil, who is described as having ‘the face of a savage, while his voice is like the howl of a bloodsucking vampire from hell’ (Kim, 1976: 172). This description of his physical features suggests that the communist ideology, with its inherent ruthlessness, is inscribed in the body, like race.

The face of the Chinese enemy

True racialization of the enemy is evident when Chinese soldiers are portrayed. In Yu Chuhyŏn’s (1921–1982) ‘Woman’s Song’ (1952), the Chinese soldiers who appear are depicted as less than human. One of the characters has a deformed nose because of a bullet that had pierced it, while another is nicknamed Stumpy. These bodily defects suggest that they are closer to animals than human beings, and these attributes are emphasized by their behaviour. The Chinese commander’s mental faculties, for instance, are described as follows: ‘there was no wisdom to be found in him, just as in an animal’ (Yu, 1952: 72).

The bestial nature of many of the Chinese characters gives them a constant craving to rape Korean women even when faced with mortal danger. When a village is bombed by UN aircraft, and many of the Chinese soldiers are dying, the Chinese commander cannot control his sexual urges any longer and tries to rape Yŏngi’s mother. Suddenly, he discovers Yŏngi, who had remained hidden in the kitchen, at which point he turns into ‘a devil, who had the bloodshot eyes of a starving wolf seeing a young lamb’ (Yu, 1952: 79). This same motif can be seen in Pak Yŏnhŭi’s (1918–1990) ‘Weapons and Mankind’ (1953). Here, the protagonist finds a mortally wounded Korean girl wearing a Chinese uniform after a fierce battle. Not far away from her, he finds the naked body of a Chinese soldier who, at the time of the attack, was raping the young girl. In Chŏng Pisŏk’s ‘A New Pledge’ (1952), letters are sent by Yŏngae to her older brother in the army to report on the circumstances in the village after the Chinese arrive. The certainty that the Chinese soldiers will rape her leads Yŏngae to decide to commit suicide just before the village is captured by the UN army.

These images of vulnerable young women being raped by the Chinese enemy, or by North Korean army officers as in Kim Song’s novel, were meant to evoke hatred in the reader, and also hinted at the threat that the enemy posed to ‘Korean purity’. With its nationalistic rhetoric based on the perception of a pure bloodline that can be traced throughout the centuries of Korea’s history, the rape of a Korean woman can be interpreted as a direct attack on the identity of the Korean nation. ²

Internal enemies

Just as in the aftermath of the Yŏsu rebellion, there were still elements within the South Korean society that, according to Korean writers, did not act in the nation’s best interests. Specifically, these were people who amassed their own personal wealth without caring for others around them. One event from the Korean War that caused quite an uproar, which was discussed in several literary works, was the so-called Territorial Army Incident, which occurred right after a law was brought into effect on 21 December 1950 to establish a volunteer reserve corps. When the UN army was repulsed at the beginning of 1951, this corps was forced to retreat alongside the army. Several executives of the Ministry of Defence used the ensuing confusion to pocket a huge amount of money intended for the reserve corps. As a result, thousands of young men died from starvation, while countless others fell ill. Following a parliamentary enquiry, it was established that 2.4 billion wŏn and more than nine million kilos of grain had been embezzled. Four people were put to death for these crimes (Yi, 1984: 184). ³

The importance of this incident is reflected in Kim Song’s Living Forever, in which several paragraphs devoted to the patriotism and love for the fatherland of the volunteer corps soldiers are contrasted with a description of the evil committed by their own superiors:

It is deplorable that there are those among the so-called politicians who train young men and tell them to go to the front line of the fatherland while they are only dreaming of their own prosperity. Those people are only paying lip service to loving their own country, for in fact they are twentieth-century Satans who embezzle billions in state funds and drink the blood of thousands of young men … For the sake of the future of our country, those evil traitors should all be purged. (Kim, 1976: 164)

According to Kim Song, people who only think of enriching themselves should also be expunged from the Korean nation, and are just as bad as the communists. This becomes clear in another passage in the novel, when the main character, Hyŏngch’il, finds out, while working for a refugee relief centre, that his boss is systematically withholding goods that are meant for the displaced:

People like Chief Oh, who just hang a sign above the door reading ‘Refugee Relief Centre’ and then keep four or five percent themselves. The hatred that this aroused in Hyŏngch’il towards these worm-eaten beings was the same as his hatred towards the communist party. When Hyŏngch’il thought of the next generation and the future of the minjok it was a deeply deplorable insult to the minjok. (Kim, 1976: 90)

Hyŏngch’il also laments elsewhere that there are people who profit from the misery of others:

We are all suffering because of the war. This is our common fate, but can you imagine people living like aristocrats, without fighting? They made millions thanks to the war. Can you imagine such rich people among the merchants, politicians and bureaucrats? (Kim, 1976: 183)

The people criticized here are those who selfishly try to amass wealth for themselves, even at the cost of other people’s lives.

In some stories, such characters within South Korean society are conspicuous because of their behaviour. In Ch’oe Inuk’s (1920–1972) ‘The First Sergeant I Saw One Day’ (1953), this is visualized by an arrogant sergeant who takes up two seats in an overcrowded bus. He sits there reading a Japanese magazine and smoking Western cigarettes, wearing golden rings on his fingers and carrying a suitcase filled with record albums. His predilection for foreign products illustrates to the reader that the character is not working in the interests of the Korean nation. Such attitudes can also be found in ‘The Immortals’ (1953) written by Kim Song. A soldier on leave from front-line duty returns to his family, only to see that they are completely immersed in their own Westernized lifestyle. His older brother has an extramarital affair with the protagonist’s fiancée, while his sister has become a prostitute for the Americans and only speaks in English. They have no interest in the ongoing war, and, disillusioned, the protagonist immediately returns to the front.

The strategies that South Korean writers adopted to depict the enemy within parallel the way the internal enemy was portrayed by Japan during the Second World War. Japanese intellectuals and propagandists argued at the time that ‘Western’ influences ranging from luxury goods to popular cultural fashions, such as jazz and Hollywood movies, needed to be expunged from society. These things were dangerous since they could weaken the population’s support for the war effort and might even lead to the nation’s collapse. Therefore, as John Dower (1986) notes, ‘the single most corrupting feature of Western thought was identified as being preoccupation with the self, or the individual, as opposed to the larger collectivity’ (p. 228).

Characters who try to enrich themselves or get higher up in society are usually portrayed as trying to flatter the Americans by all means necessary. ‘Human Type 0’ (1953) by Muyŏng Yi (1908–1960) deals with this issue. A wife writes a letter to her husband in which she tells him that she is fed up with his egoistic behaviour and is divorcing him. She describes several episodes in her life with him that show what kind of a person he is. For example, when they were engaged, he had bought some caramel candies for her and the young boy selling them had mistakenly given him too much change. However, instead of telling the boy of his error, he kept the extra money for himself, feeling happy about this fortunate event. Another time, on their honeymoon to Kyŏngju, they had managed to find a seat in an overcrowded train. However, when an elderly couple sat down on the floor next to them, he refused to move his luggage that he had stored on the seats.

In an attempt to become a civil servant, he had organized numerous parties for Japanese officials. These efforts all came to naught when the Japanese were defeated, which angered the husband very much. Soon enough, the Americans came, and since they needed English translators, the husband saw new chances for himself again. In order to get a better position, he brushed all morals aside by speaking ill of the Korean minjok, telling the Americans that every Korean ‘is a liar, swindler or profiteer’ and accusing his superior of being a communist (Yi, 1975: 294). Furthermore, in order to receive a scholarship to study in America, the husband accused his competitor of donating a large amount of money to the communist party. The woman says of these episodes,

I have come to know you as a husband who doesn’t care about the school, his colleagues or loyalty in order to get a tuition fee waiver for a year, as someone who deplored Korea’s liberation because of a civil service position, who out of vanity drives a jeep, smokes Western cigarettes and chews gum, and who not only defiles the honor of the minjok for a mere can of food, but also defiles the 5000 year old blood purity of the whole minjok. (Yi, 1975: 294)

This harsh criticism directed at individualist or egoist elements within South Korean society betrays the influence of total war ideology. In this philosophy, the complete mobilization and support of all elements in society is regarded as a paramount prerequisite to win a war. Failure to keep morale high among the general population could lead to defeat, a situation that was thought to have happened in Germany in the First World War. ⁴ In the minds of the writers, if war was to be won, there was no room for egoism or individualism, which could be equalled to betraying one’s own nation.

Wartime images of the American enemy

In accordance with the pre-war paradigm, the arch-enemy in wartime stories is America. Invectives levelled against the Americans are either animalistic, such as ‘wild beasts’, ‘(crazy) dogs’, ‘packs of wolves’ and ‘jackals’, or of a demonic kind, such as ‘hungry ghosts’, or ‘devils’. More commonly, however, the Americans are simply described as ‘those bastards’ or ‘American bastards’.

When war broke out, Han Sŏrya (1951) revisited the idea of America’s goal of eradicating and colonizing the Korean people in his short story ‘Jackals’, which is set during the colonial period. Sugil, a young boy who lives with his mother at a missionary’s home, finds a rubber ball and starts playing with it. One day, when he is playing with the other children of the village, Simon, the missionary’s son, recognizes the ball as his own and beats Sugil severely. The missionary, having witnessed the scene from a distance admonishes his son for sullying his hands by touching a Korean. Sugil is in bad shape, and his mother is desperate. On the advice of the missionary’s wife, he is admitted to the church hospital. Here, the missionary and his wife plot with the hospital director to kill him by injecting him with germs.

The next day, Sugil’s mother tries to gain access to her son but is refused by the nurses, who tell her Sugil has a contagious disease, and therefore, no one is allowed to see him. She returns home where the following day a man from the hospital brings her the news of Sugil’s death. She realizes that this must surely be the doing of those jackals (the missionary family and the hospital director) and runs to the hospital where she receives her son’s ashes. She returns to the missionary’s home and tries to get even by demanding the life of Simon. She tries to kill them but is finally apprehended by Japanese police officers and dragged away. As she walks away, she swears that someday she will get her retribution.

The American missionary and his family in the story are presented as the forerunners of American imperialism. Their work in Korea will help to achieve America’s goal of colonizing Korea, and is directly mentioned right after the missionary and his wife have convinced the hospital director to administer the deadly germs to Sugil, when the missionary cries out that with this act ‘the day when America will rule the world comes nearer’ (Han, 1951: 24). Besides this, the appearance in this and several other North Korean wartime stories of Japanese characters who are actively helping or colluding with the Americans is used to underline the image that the Americans are of the same nature as the Japanese, and reinforces the anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist paradigm that was set up during the Liberation Period.

The focus of much of the wartime literature is on the Americans’ cruelty towards the Korean population. In Yi Pungmyŏng’s (1910–1988) story ‘Devils’ (1951) ‘old man Pak’ is harassed by South Korean intelligence officers Hŏ Manse and Ku Maengho, together with an American named Jack and a Japanese called Yoshida. They question him about the whereabouts of his sons, who both hold high positions in communist organizations. They taunt him, and soon the American urges him to open a ‘present’ that they brought for him in a box. When Pak opens the box, he discovers that it contains the head of his eldest son. As they leave, they burn down Pak’s house and catch his wife and grandchild as they flee the burning building. The next day, the whole village is summoned. Hŏ Manse tells them that they will see ‘a good spectacle’. At that moment, they see Pak crawling on his hands and knees, carrying the dead body of his grandchild on his back, with the heads of his wife and eldest son hanging around his neck. This scene provokes a violent response from the villagers. They kill the enemies, and old man Pak decides to join the partisan army.

Descriptions of American cruelty in North Korean stories aim to evoke feelings of hatred towards the enemy in the reader by concentrating on the defencelessness of the civilian population, especially the women. This technique is also seen in Hyŏn Tŏk’s (1909–unknown) ‘Revenge’ (1951). Soldier Kim is searching for the hometown of his comrade-in-arms Pak, who had died in his arms. Arriving at a village, he discovers that its inhabitants have been massacred. When he reaches the next town, he asks people for details about the event. A young boy, who is the sole survivor, tells him that just before the Americans came, all men became partisans, leaving only women, children and old men in the village. For 20 days, the soldiers raped the women, stole food and even indiscriminately killed babies when they cried. Then, just before the People’s Army arrived, the Americans drove the surviving villagers into a deep pit in a cave and threw in grenades to kill them off. The boy was the only survivor. Hearing this story, soldier Kim swears to take revenge for all these evil deeds.

This thirst for revenge, which stems from American atrocities, is then transformed into a willingness to fight. Such a transformation can be observed in Hwang Kŏn’s (1919–1991) novel Happiness (1953). Here, the main character’s fighting spirit stems from the fact that she lost her whole family when the Americans bombed her village. What is interesting about stories of this type is that they show that the inspiration of the fictional characters to fight stems not from the communist ideology or the love and guidance of Kim Il Sung, but from the evocation of intense hatred brought about by the enemy’s barbarity.

Besides the massacres and killings, the Americans also are described as possessing a seemingly endless sexual lust for Korean women, whom they constantly attempt to rape. This is comparable to the way the Chinese enemy was described in South Korean stories during the war. Ch’oe Myŏngik’s (1902–1972) ‘The Train Driver’ (1951) is an example of a story in which a girl gets raped by an American. Hyŏnjun is captured and put to work driving a locomotive. One night, he witnesses an American supervisor setting fire to the village in which he is being held. Hyŏnjun is prevented from going outside by a South Korean member of parliament (MP) who just lets the American have his way. Looking through the window, he sees the American rape and then murder a young Korean woman. Two days later, Hyŏnjun is ordered to drive a train filled with army personnel and ammunition to another town. He speeds up the train, and although he is shot by the American, he manages to remain conscious long enough to derail the train at a bridge, destroying it completely and killing everyone on it.

Just as the Chinese soldiers are depicted for their sexual lust and animalistic nature in South Korean stories, the American’s bestiality appears most explicitly in this story when the scene of the girl’s rape and murder is described. The American soldier suddenly changes into an animal and at that moment is said to be ‘crying out exactly like a wild beast’ and a ‘two-legged animal’ (Ch’oe, 1951: 14–15). The American is also described as ‘a hideous creature, such as Hyŏnjun never before had seen in his life’.

In the story ‘Devils’, the sexual lust of the Americans is hinted at in a scene where the villagers are gathered, and the young women are forced to stand at the front for inspection:

‘Show your faces!’, shouted Hŏ Manse in his loudest voice, since he would never want to offend Jack. ‘Good! Very Good!’ Whenever Jack let out these words, Ku Maengho would write down that girl’s name and address in a notebook. (Yi, 1951: 61)

South Korean traitors and victims

In ‘Devils’, the South Korean characters are depicted merely as servants who cater to all the Americans’ needs. The same can be observed in ‘The Train Driver’, as the South Korean MP does nothing to prevent the American from burning the village or raping and murdering the Korean girl. South Korean characters do not appear often in the stories, however, putting the focus almost exclusively on the Americans as the enemy. South Korean characters hardly make an appearance, and when they do, they are depicted as lethargic sidekicks to the Americans, only too willing to let the Americans have their own way. This is made clear by the derogatory nicknames assigned to two South Korean guards by North Korean POWs in Kim Yŏngsŏk’s ‘Roar of Anger’ (1956), in which the guards are referred to as ‘shepherd’ and ‘bulldog’ to stress that they are merely American ‘running dogs’.

Just as in the South Korean wartime stories, North Korean literature makes a strong distinction between South Koreans in powerful positions and the normal population. This is done almost exclusively by describing the experiences of the ordinary citizens, all of whom are portrayed as awaiting liberation at the hands of the People’s Army. An example of this can be found in ‘Honey’ (1951) written by Kim Namch’ŏn (1911–1953), in which a soldier tells of the reason why he is still able to fight at the front. He tells of his experience in August 1950 near the Naktong front line. With the narrator disguised as a South Korean soldier and his squad as a group of farmers, they tried to get information about the number of enemy troops. On their way back from the front line, an enemy division ambushed their position. Covering the retreat for his comrades, the narrator held off the attack but was wounded. He crawled to the yard of an 80-year-old grandmother who discovered him. He told her that he was a communist soldier, and she took care of him. He was on the verge of dying and kept losing consciousness, but the grandmother sustained him by feeding him honey until a few days later his comrades found him. The old woman told him that she had lost both her son and her grandson, who used to call at her house, where she would give him honey too. She told the soldier to get well soon so that he would be able to fight again. The story ends with the narrator’s remark that ‘the grandmother is still waiting for her grandson to pass by her house’ (Kim, 1951: 45).

The grandmother wishes the narrator to get well soon so that he and the other communist soldiers can liberate the country. When civilians are depicted who have been left behind in enemy territory, they all, without fail, have sons either fighting as partisans or in the North Korean army, just as in ‘Devils’. In the story ‘Revenge’, it is mentioned that all men had become partisans just before the Americans arrived. These instances all reinforce the image that the general population is siding with the communist ideology.

The issue of collaboration

Despite the apparently harmonic and coherent struggle against a ruthless enemy, internal enemies similar to those present in South Korean literature can be found in North Korean stories as well. A speech delivered by Kim Il Sung, on 1 February 1952, criticizes peasants and bureaucrats who are selfishly trying to amass wealth, instead of working for the war effort:

Among the peasantry there are both progressive peasants and backward ones who look only after their own well-being without caring about the interests of the state. [ … ] State revenue has dropped sharply as against peacetime, since we have been barred from peaceful construction for 19 months now. [ … ] Nevertheless, some people do not take into account such grave circumstances but behave selfishly to preserve the same living conditions as in peacetime. Government functionaries, unable to endure hardships and ideologically corrupt, often commit irregularities and violate financial discipline: they conduct trade hand in glove with profiteers, pilfer and sell off state goods. (Kim, 1978: 284, 287)

Hwang Kŏn’s novel Happiness contains a chapter in which the issue of selfishness and collaboration is dealt with. One of the main characters of the story, Chŏngim, is surprised when her husband appears at the hospital where she is working. To her knowledge, he had been fighting as a guerrilla in the south, and she had not heard from him since he left. He tells her that he was captured by the Americans, and severely tortured. He was offered the choice between life and death, and the stark reality brought many thoughts to the forefront of his mind. If he died now, he would not live to see Korea’s reunification nor would he see the fruits of his struggle, or see his wife and daughter again. Therefore, he chose to live by collaborating reluctantly with the Americans. He would give them trivial or misleading information, while searching at the same time for a way to escape.

After hearing her husband’s story, Chŏngim is furious and tells him to turn himself in to the intelligence agency, and that she will not be his wife anymore until he has been tried in court. He leaves to give himself up, but Chŏngim is not able to stop thinking about him. She regards him now as an enemy but at the same time cannot completely ignore the fact that he also was her husband, and will now face the people’s court. Eventually she decides that since it is wartime, she needs to be strong, and must hate him even more. A few weeks later, during the retreat in September 1950, she suddenly meets her husband again and sees that he is wearing a brand new army uniform. He tells her that he has been cleared of any misconduct and has volunteered to be a partisan again. Chŏngim is very proud of him, and her husband thanks her for rebuking him.

The anger of the main character derives from her husband’s decision to choose his own survival over the greater good of the country. This selfish decision even led him to work against the country by collaborating with the enemy. It is interesting to note a difference here in the way subversive elements within North Korean society are dealt with in comparison to South Korean stories. In the latter, such elements are described as an affront to the Korean minjok, who should be excluded, but in North Korean literature, it is possible for the characters to mend their ways and become a part of the war effort again.

Something similar can be seen in Ǒm Hŭngsŏp’s (1906–1987) ‘Crossing the Hill Once More’ (1953). Yunsu has returned home and is keen to know what has happened to his village. When he asks about the family of ‘fatso Ch’oe’, his mother tells him that during the retreat, some of Ch’oe’s family members, especially his eldest son, had helped the American enemy by rounding up villagers to be executed. This angers Yunsu, but does not come as a surprise to him. Ch’oe’s eldest son had fled to the south right after liberation in fear of being killed as a pro-Japanese traitor since he had helped the Japanese as a town clerk to conscript young men from the village. When Yunsu and some others volunteer to remove unexploded bombs from the fields, the wife of ‘fatso Ch’oe’ also asks for their help. At first, a surge of anger wells up in Yunsu because of the family’s wartime and colonial collaboration, but he controls himself and tells her, ‘Don’t worry! I will remove it [the bomb], so that you can farm your land well again once more’ (Hwang, 1953: 77).

In this story, the act of collaboration by some family members does not necessarily mean that they are ostracized from village life or North Korean society altogether. These stories show that the opportunity is there for the characters to atone for their actions or thoughts, after which they can be included in society and the minjok again. It is no coincidence that this attitude of forgiveness towards collaborators followed the party directives on how to deal with the numerous acts of collusion that had occurred during the UN army’s occupation of North Korea (Scalapino and Lee, 1972: 410–413).