Kang Kyŏngae (20 April 1906 – 26 April 1944), also known by her penname Kang Gama, was born in Songwa, Hwanghaedo (a province in northwest Korea) in 1907. After her father died in 1925, she moved with her other, who had remarried, to Changyŏn county in South Hwanghae. There, she attended P’yŏngyang Sungŭi Girls’ School (a Catholic boarding school) before transferring to Dongduk Girls’ School in Seoul after she was expelled for participating in a student protest against harsh treatment by school administrators and dorm mistresses.
In 1931, she published her first short story story “The Broken Mandolin” (파금) in the Choson Ilbo and moved to Jiandao (Kando in Korean, in modern-day Yanbian) with her communist husband Zhang Ha-il. She also published the longer fictional piece “Mothers and Daughters” (어머니와 딸) in 1931, and for the next 7 years continued to produce fiction that portrayed scenes of rural poverty in Jiandao, oppression faced by Korean settlers from Japanese police and Chinese landlords, and the burdens of domestic life for women from a feminist perspective. During her time in Jiandao, she also worked as an editor for the Kando (Jiandao) branch of the Choson Ilbo newspaper.
Kang Kyŏngae’s experiences of poverty and the struggles of managing her duties as a housewife
informed the realist style of her fiction. She is best-known for her only novel, published in 1934 “From Wonso Pond (인간문제), and her story “Salt” (소금), which depicts the story of a mother whose husband was killed by anti-Japanese forces and whose son was killed by Manchukuo authorities Today, she is known among other prominent female authors of the colonial period such as Na Hye-seok as a pioneer in representations of women in Korean literature.
She passed away in Hwanghae shortly following the death of her mother on April 26, 1944.
Examples of Writing
Image Gallery
The last episode of Kang Kyŏng-ae’s representative short story “Salt,” published in the October 1934 issue of Shin Family. It can be seen that the ending part has been erased black with ink. However, recently, Han Man-su, a professor of Korean literature at Dongguk University, succeeded in restoring 90% of the erased characters with the help of the National Forensic Research Institute.
The face above is a self-portrait drawn by Kang Kyung-ae.
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