Kang Kyong-ae, author of “Salt” and “Darkness” is known for her melodramatic realism within her testimonial stories about Korean peasant life, violation of women’s rights, advocating for social realism and detailing the psychological aftereffects from incidents Koreans faced by both Japanese imperialists and Chinese Imperial Communist Army. Despite the oppression and censoring of political propaganda from Japanese and Chinese governments, she was still able to get her stories out through undertones of melodramatic realism, making it significant to this timeframe and women literature in general. In this article, I will be comparing Kang Kyong-ae’s work to other another colonial period Korean Literaturist, Myong-hui Cho’s Naktong River and …show more content…
To briefly summarize, Naktong River is analyzing the class conflicts and land being confiscated, as Korea was started to be exposed to a broader socialist world history. It also looks at the development of independent movements, organizations, unions and socialism while being taken away from their homeland. In Salt, it analyzes the consequences of Koreans being forced to migrate to Manchuria, and looking at Pong-yom’s mother’s struggle to survive with her family and battling against herself and the hatred against communists. Over time, she soon realizes that the Communists are not the bad guys, but rather the good …show more content…
Within Naktong River, the poem describes the river as the “Bosom of life [and that] I have nursed on this bosom” for generations. Cho further draws upon the image of life within the land and dependence on it was “a pack of wolves arrived out of nowhere to tear at the teats and steal the milk [...] There was no choice but to leave, to embark upon a life of wandering”. Cho is discussing the timeframe in which Japanese imperialism taking over Korea, ripping the land from underneath their feet, and the beginning of forced mass migration to Kando region in Manchuria,