The Underground Village
Translated by Anton Hur
About
Kang Kyeong-ae wrote during the Japanese occupation of Korea, and her fiction is remarkable for what it refused to accept: colonialism, patriarchy, and the ethnic nationalism that other writers offered as resistance. Her stories follow the lives of people — especially women — crushed between occupation and tradition, with no movement that fully represents their interests. Written between 1906 and 1944, these stories capture a Korea that is both oppressed from outside and oppressive from within, where the struggle for liberation coexists with struggles the liberation movement itself refuses to acknowledge. Fiction from the margins of the margins — written by a woman who saw that freedom meant nothing if it didn't include everyone.
