Review of The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myong-Sun by Jung-ja Choi

*The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myong-Sun* by Jung Ja Choi (2022). Published by Routledge.

I always find myself in an interesting situation when it comes to this book blog. As someone who is in a humanities graduate program, I love to read not only books that are fictional or poetry, but more academic-based sources as well.

I think there’s a serious problem in the academic world when it comes to the fact most of these books are not accessible to those who don’t have institutional affiliations.

I’ve been writing reviews and summaries of these books whenever applicable on my book blog because of this; not everyone has the the resources or time to spend money on these books or go to graduate school.

So book The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myong-sun is a text I read for my independent study my second to last semester. I was self designing a course on Korean women’s literature from 1918-1938, and I was looking for books to read on the individual poets that were in translation.

I saw Routledge had just published this text and got really excited, so I put in an Interlibrary Loan for it and had it within two weeks. And oh man, I devoured this book. It was such an important text for me. If it wasn’t $160, I would buy my own copy.

Let’s get into my review!

A deep dive into the work and writings of Kim Myong-sun.

Kim Myong-sun is the first modern Korean women writer, as she published her short story “A Girl of Mystery” in 1918, ushering in a completely new era of literature written by Korean women writers.

I had read a little bit of her work going into this text, whatever I could get my hands on in translation, but the beginnings of this book go into her life. The daughter of a kisaeng, Kim would forever feel the shadow of her mother’s profession on her work and professional life.

As one chapter describes, she would branded publicly as the daughter of a kisaeng and pretty much slandered.

Kim became prominent in the twenties as one of the New Women, which consisted of other female writers in the period like Na Hye-seok, but her downfall was similar to the other New Women.

A lot of my research has to do with the toxic masculinity of the period and how a lot of male writers and intellectuals were pushing ideologies of nationalism, so anything that was written had to promote the cause in some way.

Women were seen as people who needed to stay at home and be chaste, so these female writers were actively defying expectations.

In Kim’s case, she was dubbed as too autobiographical, promiscuous, the daughter of a kisaeng, and she had a fall from grace in the later half of the thirties because her male contemporaries truly were out to get her.

She was born in contemporary North Korea and educated in Japan like her female writer counterparts, which is how she slots in that equation. This is the core of the beginning sections of this text, and her personal history is explored in-depth.

We then progress into her literature through multiple different themes.

As someone who had read her short stories and poems before this, this text changed the way I looked at her work. While writers like Na were following the agenda of trying to get nationalism and educate the women through that medium, Kim was more looking internally and expressing han through a different way.

She was writing about herself and her grief, which is powerful. As Choi points out, she was radical as she was engaging in #MeToo a century before it started, and focused on mothers and free love to name two chapters that Choi digs deeper into.

Overall Thoughts

This was such a delight to read as someone who was desperate for this kind of work to be done.

There isn’t a lot available in English and I was starting to exhaust my resources, and I really wish this wasn’t $160. I would definitely purchase my own copy if it wasn’t that expensive—I loved this text so much. It formed the basis for the paper I was working on and was a deep dive I truly needed in the moment I had gotten ahold of this book.

I appreciate this kind of work so much, and the writing was really clear for academic work.

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