“I Am a Wanderer”: Paek Sinae (1908–1939) and Writing Travel

Abstract

Paek Sinae (1908–39) was a modern woman writer whose career was cut short by an early death. She lived in the era of New Women, but unlike most of her peer woman writers, Paek had little formal education or connections to the literary establishment (mundan). This background, combined with her modest output of fictional works, resulted in Paek Sinae being seen by critics during her lifetime and scholars long after her death as a provincial writer, thus affording her only limited recognition. This article challenges such dismissals and seeks an approach that would allow a more comprehensive appreciation of Paek Sinae and woman writers more broadly. First, the article looks closely at Paek's life based in her hometown away from the social center of Kyŏngsŏng (present-day Seoul) and considers how geographical and linguistic aspects of Paek's locale were misunderstood by critics. Next, with a focus on Paek's travels and her travelogues, cosmofeminism and global-local connections are examined as a key to understanding the complexities of being a modern woman writer in Paek's day. At the same time, by putting a spotlight on the “lesser” literary genre of the travelogue, this article also gestures toward a more inclusive approach to research on woman writers whose aesthetic or literary qualities were often judged only by their works of fiction (sosŏl) or poetry, while other important works like autobiographical or sociopolitical essays tended to be overlooked. Paek Sinae's life and work add breadth to the already complex definition of New Women and early feminism, and through her example, this article urges a more comprehensive consideration of works by Korean women writers in the early twentieth century.

Paek Sinae, a Homebound Wanderer

Let us travel to the year 1936, to Seoul, then called Keijō or Kyŏngsŏng, in Japanese-occupied Korea. The scene is the editorial office of the renowned monthly journal Samch’ŏlli, where seven woman writers—Pak Hwasŏng (1904–88), Chang Tŏkcho (1914–2003), Mo Yunsuk (1909–90), No Ch’ŏnmyŏng (1911–57), Ch'oe Chŏnghŭi (1906–90), Yi Sŏnhŭi (1911–?), and Paek Sinae (1908–39)—have been invited to discuss the literature of their time. Paek was less well known than some of those gathered, but she had won a prestigious literary competition sponsored by Chosŏn ilbo in 1929, and her name made steady appearances in anthologies of woman writers in the later 1930s and in interviews and surveys by reputable newspapers and magazines such as Chogwang. In this rare appearance in a group discussion organized by Samch’ŏlli, however, Paek spoke very little, and in response to a question regarding the marginalization of woman writers and imposing on them the label “womanly trend” (yŏryu), her answer was notably reserved: “Rather than making demands [to the mundan and its male writers to stop gender discrimination],” she said, “woman writers themselves should not be wrapped up in immediate fame but should first strive to be serious and be steady in their pursuits” (Paek Sinae 2005: 646). Compared to Paek, even the best-known woman writers who participated in the roundtable had an acute sense of their marginalization and the lack of appreciation for their work. Take, for example, Pak Hwasŏng, who pleaded, “Please stop asking [us] to write ‘womanly’ work or write on things only women can write . . . why is it that men [are not required to] write only what men can write?” (Paek Sinae 2005: 645). Although the caution in Paek's voice makes sense given the need to be circumspect in articulating demands for women's rights in Korea,¹ it nonetheless surprises given her consistent engagement with women's issues in her writings and her role as representative in several local and national socialist women's groups. “My Mother” (Na ŭi ŏmŏni, 1929), “Koreans” (Kkŏrei, 1934; revised, 1937), “Destitute” (Chŏkpin, 1934), and “Memoir of a Mad Woman” (Kwangin sugi, 1938), to name just a few works, speak passionately against social injustice and highlight the tragic fate of Korean women. Why didn't Paek voice this frustration when given a chance to speak her mind in like-minded company, as others there chose to do? How do we square her words at this roundtable with her image as one of Korea's early feminist writers?

What seems odd as a lone anecdote becomes more understandable in the context of her works and in view of a life that fundamentally set her apart from her peers.² Although she was acquainted with writers gathered at the editorial office of Samch’ŏlli—Paek rented No Ch’ŏnmyŏng's house briefly in 1939—she was the only one not based in the colonial capital. Other participants, by contrast, studied, lived, and worked in Kyŏngsŏng, and their strong ties to the mundan, the institutionalized world of literature, were formed through frequent interactions with male writers who were editors and publishers at the major publishing venues such as newspapers and magazines. Except for Paek Sinae and Pak Hwasŏng, the other five worked for newspapers and magazines at least briefly; Ch'oe Chŏnghŭi, life and work partner to the editor-in-chief of Samch’ŏlli Kim Tonghwan (1901–?), had a more distinctive role in this magazine. They were also connected through missionary and public schools for women such as Ewha, Paehwa, and Sookmyung. Paek, by contrast, was mostly homeschooled and her writing was self-taught through reading, which set her apart from peer woman writers of her generation. But rather than singling Paek out as an outlier or anomaly, this article recognizes her as adding another layer in the complex history of modern womanhood in Korea. That is, Paek Sinae showcases an elite modern woman based outside the colonial capital who also benefited from modern amenities, including translated books and periodicals, that enabled connections beyond her hometown and home country. Her being a woman was crucial to these circumstances. In the case of male elites, whether they hailed from Seoul or elsewhere, families and communities sent them to schools, but such opportunities to leave town were relatively rare for girls. Although Paek's nouveau riche father recognized his only daughter's intelligence, he didn't see value in educating her in the school system. The steadiest education she received was from a tutor—a close relative—in elementary Chinese classics. But Paek Sinae also had a privileged life that allowed train and taxi rides and modern amenities including access to Japanese newspapers, Russian and European literary works, and travels to Russia, Japan, and China. Within the circle of New Women, “women's issues,” including women's education, sexism and physical appearance within the male-dominant society, and the oppression women had to endure at home in married life, were frequently discussed and published as sociopolitical debates in periodicals. Paek experienced these problems as well, but she discussed them only in her fictional works, not at the roundtable or through direct social critique.³ Compared to those in close orbit around the literary establishment, Paek's engagement with the world as a woman writer was less inhibited by expectations and norms. Her life thus tells a different story of a woman becoming modern.

With this background in mind, Paek Sinae's comment at Samch’ŏlli suggests the complexity of the historical moment and of the situation facing Korean women: where does one draw the line between traditional and modern, progressive and conservative, socialist and non-socialist (nationalist), and local and cosmopolitan in the life of a woman when all of these were constantly shifting their definitions and boundaries, and when opportunities for women's education and careers were scarce and unevenly available? How might we properly assess a woman writer for whom venues for publication were more limited due to a relative lack of social and career networks and an early death? As a way to answer these questions, this article focuses on Paek Sinae's life trajectory and her travel writings. Not only does travel writing provide a connection between the local and the global in describing international travels to Russia and China, but consideration of what is often regarded and thus downplayed as a lesser genre in literature (i.e., not poetry or fiction) is crucial in assessing woman writers, as we will discuss in more detail later. By focusing on Paek Sinae's locality in her life and works, this article offers a nuanced reconsideration of labels such as socialist or (proto-, early-) feminist writer. It also provides close readings of travel writings from Paek's two international journeys, which further the discussion of Paek's identity as a woman writer and her local-global connections using the concept of cosmofeminism. Each focus—geographical and linguistic aspects of locale, Paek's feminism as reflected in her works, and close readings of travelogues—is an effort toward a more comprehensive and inclusive understanding of early twentieth-century Korean woman writers and their works.

A Self-Taught Modern Woman Writer

In 1929 Paek joined the rare few women to have won a prestigious literary award, but unlike other writers who had consistent publication records, it was not until 1934 that she started writing short stories. For the short five years from then until her death in 1939, Paek published nineteen short stories and three dozen short essays, including personal vignettes, memoirs, and travelogues.⁴ One element that sets Paek Sinae apart from her better-known modern woman peers is her deep connection to Yŏngch’ŏn in North Kyŏngsang Province, where she was born, raised, and spent most of her life. She also had few ties to anywhere else including, most importantly, the colonial capital, Kyŏngsŏng. Paek traveled extensively, to be sure, but she lived in Yŏngch’ŏn and neighboring agricultural towns like Panyawŏl and Chain, both adjacent to Taegu, without ever being uprooted.⁵ This lifelong connection to a place is even more striking in a colonial era when mobility and urbanization created profound disruptions across gender, age, and social class throughout the peninsula. Peasants lost their farmland and moved to Manchuria; young men and women flocked to industrializing cities like Inch’ŏn for factory labor; students left home to attend high schools and universities in cities or overseas in Japan and beyond; both men and women political activists sought refuge in China, Russia, Japan, or America, with or without their families, to avoid persecution. As before, women had to leave their natal home after marriage, but now marriage took them farther away as their spouses and in-laws were scattered during this great migration.⁶

I argue, however, that Paek Sinae's locality—being able to stay in her hometown and pursue her career in writing—was possible in part because of the arrival and availability of the “global”—its ideas, institutions, tastes and styles, and educational and economic opportunities. With her family wealth accumulated through a modern capitalist economy, she did not have to leave home to experience the new and outside world.⁷ For her, attachment to the bedrock of home was part of what turned her gaze outward beyond the town and even the country. A short interview in the April 1937 issue of the journal Chogwang captures this outward gaze from Panyawŏl, where she was given an orchard and a house to live in with her husband when she was married. Asked “Which among recent Korean literary works impressed you?” Paek answers, “I did not have a chance to read them,” indicating her strong preference for imported Western literature over more easily accessible domestic counterparts. Among foreign literary works, she lists “Chelkash,” by Maxim Gorky, and Crime and Punishment, by Dostoevsky, as two that she read in her youth and reread because they made deep, lasting impressions. She also claimed to read about one thousand pages per month, while implying that she actually read much more; and she denied treasuring any specific book among those she owned.

A basic character portrait emerges in these interviews. She had access to Western and Russian literature at an early age but paid less attention to Korean literature by her fellow writers; and she was a voracious reader but also more of a consumer of books than a bibliophile or a collector; she valued the story, not the object. Several other short question-and-answer interviews affirm Paek's love of foreign literature. In an interview published fourteen months later in the same magazine, Paek—whose bedtime reading at the time was the Maxims, by de La Rochelfoucauld—revealed that the most impressive character in literature for her was Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (Paek Sinae 2005: 620).⁸ She had admitted her love for Dostoevsky in Tokyo ten years earlier, in fact, when she described herself as a “Dostoevsky-wannabe.” She also said she was currently reading poetry by Heine and Byron (621).⁹ It is unclear how she obtained these works by European and Russian authors, but we know that bookstores in Taegu carried Japanese books and magazines, and on her trips to the city Paek would pick these up.¹⁰ It is also clear that she was fluent enough in the Japanese language to play a title role in a stage play during her time in Japan, and she seemed to have familiarity with the Russian and Chinese languages.¹¹ As to literary preferences, she does not name a single Korean or Japanese writer as being on her reading list: for Paek Sinae, “literature” was European and Russian, and her sense of the world was powered from well beyond the boundaries of Korea and the Japanese empire.

Socialism was one of the connections that colonial Korea had to the broader outside, not only as a shared political ideology but also as a network and imagined comradeship among socialist and communist groups in Japan, China, and Russia. After her twenty-month career as an elementary school teacher, Paek apparently chose social activism over her teaching career and for several years expanded her reach beyond local socialist organizations. She engaged occasionally with socialist women's groups based in Seoul, including working as an organizer for a meeting of the Kyŏngsŏng yŏja ch’ŏngnyŏn tongmaeng (Kyŏngsŏng Young Women's League) in 1926. She also replaced her older brother in a leadership role in Yŏngch’ŏn after his incarceration.¹² Biographical details like these, along with her focus on abject poverty among Korean people in works such as “Kkŏrei” and “Chŏkpin,” led literary scholars to consider her a socialist writer.¹³ However, Paek started her writing career after her official activities with socialist groups had ceased, and she left very little evidence of her ideological leanings beyond a few of her fictional works. Rather than using the label socialist writer, then, a focus on empathy—a common denominator in both her fiction and nonfiction—seems a more productive way to approach her work and life. Viewing her attraction to socialism as an extension of compassion rather than an ideological stance, one can discern the motivation for her ill-planned sailing to Vladivostok in 1926. Russia, for Paek, was the country of Dostoevsky and Maxim Gorky, great writers who wrote compassionate works about poverty-stricken people. It was also the country of socialism, which for many Koreans, including Paek Sinae, was synonymous with the solidarity of one ideal cosmopolitan brotherhood against imperial oppression.

Taking these various threads of Paek's life together—her access to resources, her penchant for foreign literature, her sympathy for socialism, and her capacity to travel—it seems simplistic to see her corpus as straightforwardly bound or defined by locality, as critics Kim Munjip and Paek Ch’ŏl suggest in noting her use of vocabulary specific to the Taegu and Yŏngch’ŏn area and also her attention to the poverty among peasants that she witnessed in neighboring towns. The claim seems particularly tenuous when based on just a few of Paek's works rather than on a corpus that, in addition to fiction, includes essays, travelogues, interviews, and short biographical pieces. Given that variety, it seems more plausible that Paek's use of local dialects and story settings were strategic mechanisms for achieving verisimilitude in describing poverty among peasants. In other words, the usual presumptions that correlate locality and language easily miss her outward gaze, foreign sympathies, and complex identity and drives, as well as the way in which all of these were energized by attachment to the bedrock of her own small corner of Korea. Although nuanced models are needed for understanding any woman writer living through the turbulence, complexities, and uncertainties of modernizing Korea in the 1920s and 1930s, this is especially true of an unusual, nonconformist figure like Paek Sinae.

Although her works were anthologized in Hyŏndae chosŏn yŏryu chakka sŏnjip (Selected works of contemporary Korean woman writers, 1937) and Yŏryu tanp'yŏn kŏljak chip (Masterpiece short stories by woman writers, 1939), one imagines Paek rising to much greater fame if she had based herself in Seoul and looked for work as a journalist, as most of her peers did. Ch'oe Chŏnghŭi, for example, graduated from Ewha and worked as a reporter and editor for newspapers and magazines. Kang Kyŏngae was a representative socialist woman writer who, like Paek, had relatively little exposure to the mainstream mundan but had studied at two different women's schools, including a missionary school in Pyongyang, and lived and worked in Seoul for several years during which time she engaged in literary debates with prominent male literary critics. Na Hyesŏk and Kim Iryŏp were twelve years older than Paek, but even they had a proper modern education through Chinmyŏng and Ewha, respectively. Paek, in other words, did not follow the more common life trajectory of her fellow woman writers but in her own way was very much a citizen of the modern world who enjoyed commodities and a lifestyle that had become available in a globalized and industrializing Korea under Japan's rule. In Paek Sinae—the taxi- and train-riding avid reader of Russian and European literature, explorer of Chinese classics, and subscriber to Japanese newspapers—we observe an expanded base for cultural and intellectual activities during the 1920 and 1930s, one that reached even into the small agricultural town where Paek spent most of her life.

Writing Travel

A focus on travel narrative in discussing Paek Sinae is, in part, a move to break free of conventional critiques that assess writers only in terms of mainstream genres, mainly modern poetry (si) and fictional works (sosŏl). Such critiques are designed to fail atypical women writers by privileging the typical—its norms, rules, institutions, and judgments—in advance. Triangulating onto mainstream categories of fiction and poetry, Susan Lanser observes, “Historically women writers have chosen more frequently than men, private forms of narration—the letter, the diary, the memoir addressed to a single individual because women's public discourse may be contaminated by internal or external censorship” (1986: 353). Similarly, the “open letter” with anonymous addressee was a frequently selected format for both essays and fictional works by Korean woman writers in the 1920s and 1930s (Lee 2015: 90–95). Addressing such oversight by unearthing forgotten and previously slighted works by woman writers has been a project among feminist literary scholars in recent decades, exemplified in research by Yi Sanggyŏng.¹⁴ Our turn to travelogues contributes to this general aim.

As it was elsewhere in the world, travel writing in Korea was considered a functional rather than aesthetic genre, occupying the peripheries of the literary establishment. It was also among the most vibrant narrative genres in the early twentieth century, one practiced by elite writers as well as everyday travelers, male and female, young and old, and in old and new forms. Consider the example of kihaeng kasa. These travel narratives composed in verse in the vernacular continued to be written and published by both male and female writers well into the 1940s; indeed, women's travel kasa are still written in the twenty-first century, although by a much smaller pool of writers. Traditional travel writing coexisted with travelogues published in colonial-era newspapers and magazines, and its entertainment and educational value only increased during this period. Across its various forms, travel writing counted among the most popular segments in modern periodicals as a genre showcasing the expanding reach of colonial Koreans.

Theories on the travelogue genre sprang from postcolonial studies, and since they are based mainly on European travelers to their colonies, they offer limited insight into travels by Korean women writers and Korean travelogues from the colonial era in general.¹⁵ In her research on travelogues published through the magazine Samch’ŏlli, Hong Sunae notes that after 1937, the magazine increased the number of travelogues in each issue, and many of them concerned travels to China, especially cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Nanjing, which were under Japanese siege. There was a clear sense of travelogue as a propaganda tool to serve Japan's imperial expansion, and naturally, a focus on the Japanese army's presence and its alleged “peacekeeping role” featured prominently in many of these works (Hong Sunae 2014: 281–84).¹⁶ This resulted in a boom time for travel and travel literature, with many mimicking an imperial perspective in trying to educate people with information or advocate for the colonizer's policies. Korean woman writers such as Na Hyesŏk, who like male elites assumed a sense of public mission, wrote travelogues that were rich in information and framed as objective science. Some wrote letters for publication in newspapers during their trips, and this, too, reflects their self-awareness as public figures and leaders of society, not just for women but for all Koreans.

Relative to these trends, the two travelogues by Paek Sinae analyzed next evince similarities but also some notable distinctions. Paek spent most of her life near the geographical area where women's kihaeng kasa were popular, and her father resisted her getting a Western-style education, with the result that her elementary education was more traditional. As a contemporary of kasa writer Cho Aeyŏng (1911–2001),¹⁷ Paek would have been familiar with the naebang kasa (women's kasa) tradition that was particularly strong in the Kyŏngsang region.¹⁸ Despite this strong presence of tradition and traditional forms in her near experience, Paek nonetheless chose to write only in modern Western forms. That choice, however, does not point to a sense of shared mission with her fellow modern Korean woman travelers. Unlike conventional images of woman writers in the West whose independence is symbolized by a room of one's own, the early generation of modern Korean woman writers were more typically on the road, acutely aware of their role as leaders for their fellow women and men of Korea. In this way, leaving home and traveling became one of the hallmarks of modern women in Korea. But while Paek had her sense of pride as a woman writer, she was also much less didactic compared to some of her fellow New Women. Paek Sinae and her travelogues thus continue to stand as cautions against generalization and categorization of modern Korean women writers.

Qingdao: Empathetic Traveler

Paek Sinae traveled to Qingdao and Shanghai in the fall of 1938, and her travelogue describing her stay in Qingdao, where she remained about twenty days, was published just a month before her death in June of 1939. The travelogue opens with a section titled “I Am a Wanderer” (Na nŭn pangnanga), where Paek reminisces about her childhood fantasy of freely roaming the streets of foreign cities. In both her travelogues, Paek presents her childhood self as a naïve and imaginative girl who fantasized about “foreign lands”—mainly Europe and Russia—and contrasts that image with her current state as a mature adult threatened by a fatal illness. Her retrospective gaze is also nostalgic for her younger, passion-filled days; the person who emerges in the calm recollections of “My Trip to Qingdao” is deeply empathetic toward Chinese and Koreans without overt condemnation of Japan. Paek had separated from her husband in the spring of 1938 and suffered from severe health issues that led to her hospitalization in September. Perhaps because of this worsening health condition and the end of her marriage, Paek is much more sober and contemplative in her recollection of Qingdao than she is in some of her novels, which show the rawness and cruelty of poverty in a naturalistic fashion. This subdued and sober mode also emerges in what she says in the subversive space between the lines, and between the double oppressions of an overbearing, pro-Japanese father and the censorious, surveilling Japanese regime:¹⁹

The message is cryptic even with the disambiguation “of the Japanese Imperial Army,” but one is struck by Paek's overt surprise and delight at the chance to visit an area “devastated by bullets and swords.” Given the stated need for secrecy (“I won't tell here”), the trip's timing (on the heels of Japanese military aggression in Manchuria), and consistency with themes in her other writings, one assumes her joy was not about celebrating a Japanese victory but the chance to bear witness to the invasion's aftermath. As any compelling travelogue might, hers is flavored with exotic and romantic elements, whose purpose was no doubt literary but may also have helped distract censors from her veiled commentary on the political situation of China and its people under Japan.

Her gaze returns frequently to two things in this essay: the scenery and cityscape of Qingdao and the people who had recently fallen under Japanese rule. The coastal city of Qingdao had been under German occupation from 1898 until 1914, then reverted to Chinese control until shortly before Paek's visit in 1938, when Japan took over the city as it expanded the war into mainland China. Qingdao, with its beautiful coastal scenery and European-style buildings, is also a cosmopolitan city comprising various nationalities and ethnicities. The trip and place offered anonymity and freedom for Paek Sinae, who from a young age had nurtured the soul of a vagabond. Her constant physical pain, meanwhile, seemed to make her more attuned to suffering among the Chinese people. The result, captured in descriptions of beauty and exoticism made poignant by the political situation, was an empathy powered both by her own internal condition and by her resonant appreciation for a place recently occupied by Japan.

Paek's awareness of a moment defined by imperial expansion and colonial suffering, and her sense of purpose in witnessing their manifestation in China, is the overarching theme and mood of this travelogue. A reflection at the breakfast table on the steamboat from Inch’ŏn to Qingdao captures the sensitivity to others that such awareness depended on: “I was also happy to see peace and tenderness shown in faces and voices at the breakfast table. Whether we are from a warmer climate or from a cold [country] we have all entrusted our lives to the destiny of this boat in the open ocean day and night. How can there be any reason for quarrel?” (Paek Sinae 2005: 550). The scene that follows, where Paek encounters Korean girls in “peculiar western attire” with names like Midori and Haruko, then recognizes the political reality of colonial occupation, but even here she stresses shared identity. While Paek understands the class structure embedded in the difference between her own first-class cabin and the third-class cabins housing girls sold into prostitution, she nonetheless confirms their common destiny as Koreans in “turning my gaze toward the east sky to the land that gave birth to and raised these girls” (551).

Her empathetic gaze becomes especially pronounced in describing Chinese people on the streets of Qingdao. Paek's default “foreign” is European, using the word oeguk only for Western buildings and people. When China is presented in her works, even as comments on less than perfect hygiene observed on backstreets or the shabby dirty clothes that some Chinese person wears, one finds something closer to kinship, an impulse to reach out with understanding. In the following description of a rickshaw puller, Paek seems to invert the view of typical travelers from empires who fabricate “the primitive body as a body of pleasure” (Campbell 2002: 272)²⁰ and instead turns the thin legs of the rickshaw puller into a secret for Chinese success in holding out under Japanese invasion. Paek's assumed perspective, in other words, is not that of a traveler but of an ally to the local, one that turns a body of pleasure into a body of pain, but one whose strained and tortured form also embodies resistance to imperial takeover:

Kim Chaeyong reads this paragraph as a prime example of how Paek positioned herself and her writing at the height of Japanese colonial expansion, where her seemingly critical stance toward the lean and frail Chinese people was an indirect way (in order to elude Japanese censors) of observing how the Chinese avoided a total loss against Japan by cleverly retreating and waiting for future gain. In thus assessing the historical context and Paek's covert narrative strategy to minimize Japanese censorship, Kim argues that even without a significant presence in the central literary scene or a massive corpus of works to her name, Paek deserves credit in literary history as a rare writer who transgressed ethno-national boundaries and displayed what he calls “global” (chigujŏk) imagination in her writings. Kim notes, moreover, that Paek bypasses the debate on “womanly” literature (yŏryu munhak) entirely by not engaging herself in dilettantism like Pak Hwasŏng (1904–88) or Ch'oe Chŏnghŭi (1912–90) did (Kim Chaeyong 2018: 245–56).

This observation, in turn, suggests the complicated place that a woman from a colony occupies within the global context: Paek empathized deeply with Chinese people as fellow colonized subjects but saw them as both forward (e.g., the Western architecture and Germans and Russians strolling the city streets in Qingdao) and backward (e.g., the lack of hygiene and poverty of the lower class) compared to the people of her own country of Korea. She viewed the scene from her elite status as someone who could speak a bit of Russian and Chinese; as one familiar with modern amenities such as cars, hotels, and cruise ships; and as a woman whose clothes and appearance (and thus gender) diminished the focus on her identity as a Korean. These complexities helped Paek read the world and her situation with nuance and care in this travelogue. While she appreciates the vestiges of Western imperial rule in Qingdao as manifested in the architecture and cosmopolitan demographics of the city, such encounters have a double aspect: in resonating with romantic imaginings from both her youth and the present, they help mask her critical stance toward the Japanese invasion of the city; and they serve as a contrast to people who are oppressed under the global, imperial, colonial dynamics to which she bears witness. Her seemingly nonjudgmental stance thus manifests as a strong yet subtle embrace of fellow human beings who suffer together in the era of imperial expansion.

Siberia: The Land of Dostoevsky

Along with “My trip to Qingdao,” “Record from My Wandering across Siberia” (Na ŭi Siberia pangnang ki; here “Record from Siberia”) was written on her sickbed in early 1939 and was published in April, two months before her death.²¹ The twelve-year gap between the time of travel and the travelogue defies the ordinary conventions of travelogues according to which “the journey and the writing about it are inseparable projects—they presuppose each other and create each other's significance” (Pratt 1994: 217). She had already published two fictional versions of the trip (her two versions of “Kkŏrei”),²² and it is unclear if Paek had an ambition to write about the trip at the time when she headed to Russia since her literary debut came three years later, a moment that began what she later described as an unplanned career.

While this travelogue defies the norms of travel writing as described by Mary Louise Pratt, it nonetheless benefits from her distinction between two categories of travelogue pertaining to English travelers in the era of European expansion. In one, “subjectivity and perspectivism” anchors “the textual authority,” while for the other “impersonal knowledge is what counts”; what makes “all this detached and detachable information relevant is the imperial agenda itself.” For the latter, “everything is conveyed as information,” whereas the former presents the scene “as experience” (Pratt 1994: 203–4). Paek's “Record from Siberia” shares features with Pratt's eighteenth-century “experiential” travelogues, which, according to Pratt, tend to be “extremely novelistic” in presenting the subject-author as the central character of a drama (Pratt 1994: 210). Pratt's distinctions are both based on travelers from the empire, but we see a spectrum between an information and experience focus in various travelogues written by Korean travelers who, depending on the situation, range from internalized imperial perspective to that of marginalized colonial subject. One example is a well-known travelogue by Na Hyesŏk, in which Na functions largely as a conduit of information, a pair of supposedly objective eyes that interject some social commentary but rarely present Na herself as central or portray scenes in dramatic fashion. Paek Sinae's “Record from Siberia” reads almost like melodrama by comparison, and if we take the two versions of “Kkŏrei” (1934, substantially revised in 1937) into consideration, we see the boundaries of the experiential travelogue being further expanded toward fiction. The 1934 version, published in New Women (Sinyŏsong) and Paek's first attempt to write down her journey to Siberia, is told in first-person perspective and reads like autobiographical fiction. When it was revised for inclusion in the Anthology of Contemporary Korean Women Writers (Hyŏndae chosŏn yŏryu munhak sŏnjip) in 1937, the new version adopted a third-person perspective and tells the story of Suni, a young woman protagonist from a peasant family. In “Record from Siberia,” written two years after the fully fictionalized version of her journey was already published, the story Paek wants to tell is not about the trip but about the discovery of herself—her rebirth as a cosmopolitan being, as an adult and as a woman.

At the age of nineteen, Paek hopped aboard a cargo ship in Wŏnsan without proper documents. As she disembarked in Vladivostok, she was apprehended by the GPU, the Russian State Police, and incarcerated for a month. On her way to be deported across the border, the Russian military police who was escorting her dropped her off at a Korean household in Siberia for a month or so until she could obtain a passport under a false identity. The account ends with Paek entering Vladivostok a second time with little money, clearly making this an unfinished travelogue with the rest of the trip and her return to Korea missing. We don't know whether Paek intended to continue;²³ she often uses open endings for her fictional works. What is more evident is that this travelogue doubles as a memoir describing Paek's own rite of passage.

This reading comes into better focus when we compare the beginning and ending. In the opening we see an innocent young girl cocooned in love, attention, teasing, and the comforting structures of her family home:

The ending presents a stark contrast:

By reading the opening and closing paragraphs together, one hears Paek describing the moment when a girl became a woman. Preceding this moment, Paek explains how she was able to smuggle herself onto a boat by charming a young sailor with her tears and then avoid deportation by exploiting the feelings that a Russian soldier had for her. But in Vladivostok, no one pays her any attention, however long she stands on a street corner and no matter how far she walks along the city streets. It is the moment when the dreams and illusions of childhood give way to the harsh reality of Russia. In this moment of bracing self-reliance, her future crystallizes in a superimposition of place—Siberia—and her arrival at adulthood, austere and unforgiving in its newness, stark in its unfamiliarity. Siberia, in other words, is a rite of passage story for a girl, universal among all women yet also utterly unique and isolating and untranslatable as subjective experience. How appropriate, perhaps, that the story ends where the rite ends and the daunting future begins: with a young woman, possessing a new identity card, standing at a strange city corner on her own, crossroads leading off in multiple unknown directions heralding a new era for Paek Sinae and, by extension, for her generation of Korean women. Viewed in the context of emergent modernity, the journey, place, and ending seem to declare that the comforting, familiar structures of home and family are no longer every grown-up woman's destination.

Reading Paek's “Record from Siberia” not only as a travelogue but also as the author's only and last intended memoir, whose recollections culminate with the epiphany that Paek is no longer a child, may help explain why labeling Paek at all—whether as feminist, socialist, or leftist—is so difficult. Several aspects of Paek's life nonetheless make the socialist label tempting. In the 1920s, she had direct and indirect ties to various local and national socialist groups, including the Chosŏn Yŏsŏng Tongu hoe (Korean Women's Alliance), Kyŏngsŏng yŏja ch’ŏngnyŏn tongmaeng (Kyŏngsŏng Young Women's League), Yŏngch’ŏn ch’ŏngnyŏng tongmaeng (Yŏngch’ŏn Youth League), Sin'ganhoe (New Korea Society), and Kŭnuhoe (Friends of the Rose of Sharon). These ties have fed the assumption that her trip to Siberia had a socialist mission, which then colors how one sees other aspects of Paek's life. For example, Vladimir Tikhonov states that Paek was captured and tortured by colonial police for socialist-related activity and that this left Paek with broken health and permanent infertility (Tikhonov 2016: 63).²⁴ “Sosŏlga Paek Sinae kŭ insaeng kwa munhak,” a documentary television show aired in Korea in 1990, likewise sees her infertility and divorce as a consequence of her arrest by Russians (Kong 1990). The two versions of “Kkŏrei,” too, have been combed through for evidence of a socialist agenda, and the subject matter—poverty, Koreans uprooted from their home, struggles at the border—is at least consistent with viewing Paek as a socialist writer. The opening scene of the 1937 version introduces Suni and her family in the middle of a trip north to retrieve the remains of Suni's father, who left home earlier to find land and opportunity but met with a tragic end instead. Both versions, in showing the fate of a poor peasant family, bear the hallmarks of a socialist and realist work.

But things are less straightforward upon closer inspection. The text of “Record from Siberia,” the supposedly socialist travelogue that provided the raw material for “Kkŏrei,” was lost for decades because it appeared in a relatively obscure newspaper Kokumin shinpō (K. Kungmin sinbo), a Japanese-language newspaper published in Korea. When it was finally rediscovered, instead of confirming Paek Sinae's socialist activism beyond the border in Russia, the work’s intense focus on her private self as a young woman filled with idealism and romantic imaginings only made the categorization of Paek muddier. And in choosing complete silence on why she went to Russia, including whether she was sent there by a leftist association (as suspected by some critics), she thereby refuses to be pegged to an ideology. In the beginning of this article, we witnessed her curious response to a question regarding “womanly writing” (yŏryu munhak). In suggesting that women writers needed first of all to focus on producing good works and not on pursuing fame, Paek might be heard as saying “be true, find your real self, don't submit to the judgments of others.” So it is, perhaps, that Paek chooses to be a “wanderer” as conveyed in the opening sentence of “Record from Siberia”—someone who travels, observes, and writes according to her intellectual curiosity and convictions, unperturbed by any desire for worldly recognition.

Compared to “My Travel to Qingdao,” “Record from Siberia” is full of suspense and dynamism. The intense inward focus of Paek Sinae at age nineteen is juxtaposed with the gaze of present-day Paek Sinae at the age of thirty-one, whose complete disinterest in describing the scenery or providing information on the places she visits omits an essential element of a conventional travelogue. The action hero is her younger self, and the scenery and place—Siberia, Vladivostok—becomes a backdrop for her adventure. For Koreans at the time, Russia was a version of Europe closer to hand than other Western European countries, and the broad popularity of Russian literature around the globe (the “Silver Age”) had reached Korea via Japan. For left-leaning intellectuals, Russia was also a land of revolutionaries, and for Paek Sinae this included not just the Bolsheviks but also rebellious spirits like Dostoevsky, who narrowly escaped execution for his involvement in anti-Tsarist activity. Northeast Russia, where Paek was headed, had become a major diaspora community for Koreans in the early twentieth century; some of the most high-profile Korean independence activists lived in exile there.²⁵ Unlike Paek's sense of camaraderie toward Chinese people, Russia as a place and Russians as a people were exotic and foreign, an object of fantasy and romantic imagination. Even the hardships she faced during the trip were tinted with romanticism and a dose of melodrama, up until the last scene where she arrives in Vladivostok with no one offering help.

The moment Paek Sinae is awakened to her adulthood is also when her gender stops working in her favor for travel. Up to that point being a girl was an asset—a kind of advantage that allowed a young Paek Sinae to capitalize on the attraction felt by a young sailor and on a police officer's sympathy, allowing her to finish the journey to Vladivostok, but that advantage had evaporated by the time she arrived at her destination. “Record from Siberia” stops there, and in the 1937 version of “Kkŏrei,” the ensuing itinerary is told through the protagonist, Suni. In it we see Suni opening her eyes to the fate of Koreans who became migrants and refugees looking for opportunities to survive on foreign soil—hence the title “Koreans” or “Korean people” in Russian.²⁶

One illuminating concept for viewing Paek's complicated feminism and oeuvre is Susan Stanford Friedman's feminist cosmopolitanism, for which she coins the term cosmofeminism. Drawing on Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Friedman describes cosmofeminism as “gender-based resistance to state violence and advocacy of cosmopolitan peace.” Although Paek's “cosmofeminism” appears under different circumstances—colony and empire—from that of the two works Friedman uses, Paek's stance and worldview are consistent with Friedman's definition of cosmofeminism as “not the universalist point of a global sisterhood but rather the potential political stance chosen by all those who have been marginalized by the state, including outsiders by religion, race, and class, as well as gender and sexuality” (Friedman 2013: 27). With the state apparatus of colonial-imperial Japan as the backdrop, Paek's trip to Siberia opened her eyes to the reality of a poverty-stricken people without a country. Her trip to Qingdao aimed to bear witness to imperial power in other parts of the globe.²⁷ For a woman of the colony doubly bound by the state and patriarchy, reading and imagining beyond the walls of her family and the domestic border, and traveling and writing, could be understood as Paek Sinae's chosen and performed apolitical act of resistance—as her cosmofeminism (Friedman 2013: 44). Once we grasp the cosmopolitanism at the heart of Paek's feminism, we can better understand her elusive stance at the Samch’ŏlli roundtable discussion. Paek's beliefs—on being a woman and on being an empathetic human being—come from her life experiences of encountering poverty-stricken old women in a nearby village and being incarcerated in the same jail cell with Korean and Chinese people who were forced to leave home in search of a better life. Even while we refer to this foundational outlook as Paek Sinae's feminism and socialism, it is worth adding that labels would not have mattered much for Paek herself.

Locating Paek Sinae

By using Paek Sinae as a case study, I have argued for a new perspective on colonial women writers and a reconsideration of stereotypes and categories. In seeking a more comprehensive consideration of works by a writer like Paek, who was distanced from the hegemonic power and institutionalized literary network of the mundan, we have here broken away from a focus on fiction, the genre generally elevated by male writers and critics as representative of the modern era.

Even while they earned her moderate fame and recognition, Paek Sinae's writings were often criticized as provincial and quaint, littered with colloquial words and expressions from her hometown in Kyŏngsang province.²⁸ Her homeschooling in rudimentary Chinese classics is reflected in made-up Sino-Korean words in her works, which critics view as a lack of sophistication.²⁹ I find these to be biased assessments that mainly served to reaffirm the existing hegemony and conventions of the mundan at the time. Taking Paek Sinae's works as a whole, including her short stories, travelogues, and personal vignettes, one starts to see a much more versatile writer than is usually appreciated, one for whom colloquialisms were strategic devices that were deployed tactfully rather than universally or unreflectively. Paek also figures among those women writers during the colonial era who, despite the stereotypes and demands imposed on them to write in a “feminine” way, nonetheless incorporated socio-ideological critique into their works. Three of her best-known works—“Koreans” (Kkŏrei), “Destitute” (Chŏkpin), and “Carnivore” (Sigin, 1936)—exemplify stories about the struggles of poor Korean peasant families written with a naturalist-realist rawness reminiscent of Kang Kyŏngae's “Salt” (1934), which was hailed as a paragon of socialist realism by a colonial woman writer. Paek shows remarkable mastery in these stories dealing with people in dire situations. She also covered a wide range of other subjects, including the hypocrisy of a materialistic middle class (“A Woman” [Il yŏin, 1938]); stern criticism of an educated man deserting his wife, told from the voice of the mentally ill wife (“Memoir of a Mad Woman” [Kwangin sugi, 1938]); an honest dentist misunderstood as sanctimonious (“Chŏng Hyŏnsu,” 1936); tragic love stories in various settings, including “Rainbow Bridge” (Ch'aesaek kyo, 1934), “Little Poison Woman” (So tokpu, 1938), and “An Evening Glow” (Arŭmdaun noŭl, 1939); and even an unfinished mystery-romance set in Tokyo featuring a wealthy young couple, a sister, and a mysterious Spanish-Japanese girl named Laura (“Dark-Haired Beauty” [Ŭihok ŭi hŭngmo, 1935]).

Yet her local (Yŏngch’ŏn) and ethno-national (Korean) identities were not themselves mere devices or deployments but firmaments that shaped her, motivated her, gave her perspective, defined and maintained her distance and distinction from the mundan and its institutions, generated empathy for the oppressed in faraway places living in the looming shadow of war, and drove her to travel to those places and write about her experiences. As Kim Chaeyong (2018) observes, where the majority of Korean intellectuals representing the establishment faced a crisis of ethnic and national identity, especially toward the end of the 1930s with the expansion of Japanese imperialism and war, Paek's particular manifestation of the local cultivated a sense of common cause in other towns and cities and even across national borders. At the same time, amid the newness and wonders beyond the near horizons of her hometown and country, she never lost sight of the place that grounded her; her works, varied as they were, never displayed a blurring of boundaries between her own, locally stamped Korean identity and any other, whether Japanese, Russian, Chinese, or other. She thus transcends dilemmas faced by those who held fast to nationalism (the ethnic Korean state) and to pan-East-Asianism (solidarity among East Asians against the West) as her locality itself becomes a firm basis for her openness to a much broader world that encompasses Korea, China, Japan, Russia, Europe, and beyond.

This paper was written with support from the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2019-R47). I thank AKS for their generous support. I am also grateful for two anonymous reviewers and the editor of SJEAS for their suggestions and comments.

Notes

References