From Wonso Pond

About

In 1930s colonial Korea, three lives intersect around Wonso Pond: a young woman fleeing rural poverty, a laborer radicalized by factory conditions, and an intellectual paralyzed between idealism and inaction. Their intertwined stories become a portrait of an entire society under occupation — the crushing weight of colonialism experienced not as abstract history but as daily hunger, exhaustion, and impossible choices. Kang Kyŏng-ae, a pioneering feminist writer of the Korean left, published this novel in 1934. It was the first complete work by a woman before the Korean War to appear in English translation, and its depiction of class, gender, and colonial exploitation remains startlingly immediate. A revolutionary novel in every sense — one that insisted, nearly a century ago, that the story of Korea's suffering belonged to the workers and women who endured it most.