Hwang Sun-wŏn - The Descendants of Cain

The Descendants of Cain

Contents

First published 1997 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge

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Copyright 1997 by Suh Ji-moon and Julie Pickering. All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hwang, Sun-wn, 1915

[Kain i Huye. English]

The descendants of Cain / by Hwang Sun-wn ;

translated by Suh Ji-moon and Julie Pickering,

p. cm.(UNESCO collection of representative works)

An East Gate book.

ISBN 0-7656-0136-2 (cloth : alk. paper).ISBN 0-7656-0137-0 (paper : alk. paper)

I. Title.

PL991.29.S9K313 1997

895.733dc21

97-2564

CIP

ISBN 13: 9780765601377 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 9780765601360 (hbk)

Born in 1915 while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule, Hwang Sun-wn published his first poem at age sixteen. He published two collections of poems as a student and received a bachelors degree in English literature from Waseda University in Tokyo. In 1940, a year after graduating and returning to Korea, he published his first collection of short stories. Two years later, Japanese colonial authorities outlawed all publication in Korean. Hwang wrote in private, without any assurance that his writings would ever be published. All the while, he lived in hiding to avoid being pressed into forced labor in Japanese mines or war supply factories.

Beautifully crafted, the stories he wrote in those days of anguish are among the best-loved classics of modern Korean literature. In the bitter circumstances of Korea at that time, Hwang explored the timeless life patterns of ordinary people, lovingly commemorating their dreams, hopes, sorrows, and idiosyncrasies.

Liberation from Japanese colonial rule in August 1945 was a joy to every Korean, but Hwang was soon engulfed in the whirlwind of terror created by the establishment of communist rule in the northern half of the peninsula. His experiences as a landlords son in a time of land reform and social turmoil form the basis of The Descendants of Cain.

Published in 1954 in Seoul, The Descendants of Cain (Kain i Huye) was an immediate success and has been a steady best seller ever since. It focuses on a national crisis which changed the course of Korean history and the lives of half the Korean population, vividly depicting the destruction of an old and close-knit society. The traditional Korean way of life remained strong until 194546, when the story in the novel unfolds. Tenant farmers, most of whom had tilled the same land over many generations, were bound by multiple ties to the landlords. The farmers were not the legal property of the landowners, but in a country of limited arable land and little mobility, termination of land tenure meant an utterly disastrous fall to the status of vagabond and pariah. Therefore, the tenants could not assert their rights vis--vis the landowners. It was also impossible for tenants to escape poverty, as the standard rent throughout the country was half the yield and year after year most farmers had to borrow seed grain from their landlords at fifty percent interest.

On the other hand, because land was scarce, farmers were grateful to be allowed to stay on as tenants. They were also heavily reliant on their landlords for emergency relief, seasonal doles, and so on. Most importantly, peasants accepted their lot as their fate. Having had their lives interwoven with the landlords family over many generations, their loyalty was almost second nature to them. It is true that Japanese colonial rule weakened the power and authority of the yangban classto which most landowners belongedby forcing them ultimately to give up even their proud names and adopt Japanese ones. Japans exploitation of Korea, from 1910 to 1945, which culminated in the massive conscription of manpower and collection of grain and metal goods during World War II, reduced the country to famine and despair. Social structure and social ties were weakened thereby, but the centuries-old relationship between landlord and tenant did not disintegrate entirely until the communists came to power and enforced land reform.

The communists denounced intellectuals as well as landlords because most educated people were from the landowning class, and in traditional Korean society the yangban class monopolized power by monopolizing learning. Hun, the central male character of The Descendants of Cain, is a typical heir of the Korean landowning class. His utter passivity may seem puzzling to Western readers, but his gentle upbringing renders him helpless against brute force and raw emotions. Ojakny, a woman of boundless courage and tenacity when it comes to serving and protecting the man she loves but who is at the same time totally selfless in her relationship with him, embodies to Korean men the eternally feminine. It is worth noting that she comes from the class one rung down the social ladder, and not from the yangban class for whom dignity was supposedly more important than life itself.

The Descendants of Cain exhibits many, though by no means all, of Hwang Sun-wns strengths as a writer. The political frenzy and the dark apprehensions it creates are related in simple, spare prose. The emotional tension in Hun and Ojakny are palpable. Devoid of hyperbole, the novel demonstrates the nobility, cunning, and cruelty latent in the human character, which are brought out by unexpected historical developments. It is a portrait of a society in violent transition. Almost everyone is transformed, including Hun, who surprises himself at the end by deciding to flee with a married woman, something unthinkable under the dictates of conventional morality.

Hwang Sun-wn has also written more than one hundred short stories, covering a wide range of subjects and moods, all delicate yet forceful, capturing the personalities, aspirations, and emotions of his characters. Hwangs longer works written in his later years are more ambitious, attempting to examine social and existential life in the context of history and institutions. The Sun and the Moon (Ilwl, 1964) probes the essential isolation of all human beings by examining the inner conflicts of a rich young man who discovers that his family is descended from a line of butchers, despised social outcasts in traditional Korean society. The young man finally realizes that recovery from existential alienation can begin only with acceptance of who he is.

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