skygiants

schiarire recommended me Hildi Kang's Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, a collection of oral narratives from people who lived in Korea under Japanese occupation. The book is composed of six longer 'full' narratives, accompanied by a bunch of collected vignettes that focus on a single topic (education, religion, the forced changing of names from Korean to Japanese.)

In her intro, Kang says that she decided to put the book together when she was listening to her father-in-law talk about his experiences growing up in Korea, and realized that while she knew a lot about the most dramatic stories of the occupation, she didn't know much at all about what day-to-day life was like for the people living in Korea during that time. After that, she and her husband went around interviewing everyone they possibly could to put together a collage of oral narratives. The result: this book!

Personally I am always fascinated by hearing about people's day-to-day lives, so it is no surprise that I loved reading this book, much as was fascinated by Bette Bao Lord's Legacies (though I wouldn't compare the two books too much, really - this collection is a lot quieter and a lot less mediated). Most of the speakers were kids who grew up under occupation; some of them remember their whole lives being altered by occupation, and others say that they pretty much just went about their lives without too much interference. Hildi Kang doesn't try to claim that this is some kind of universal guide to people's experiences (for one thing, as she points out, everyone who was interviewed eventually ended up immigrating to America, which is a specific subset of people in and of itself) but the speakers did come from a wide range of class and geographic backgrounds, and Kang is clearly trying very hard not to privilege any one perspective. I thought all the stories were interesting, but what's going to stick with me most is all the stories of people who were kids or teenagers at the time of one of the major demonstrations thinking it was an enormous lark to run out and shout Mansei! (an independence slogan - "may Korea live ten thousand years".)

(Also, I am glad to have more and more actual informational context about Korean history, because much as I love Capital Scandal, kdrama is maybe not the best factual resource.)