Kim Saryang’s Ten Thousand Li of a Dull-Witted Horse- Remembering the Anti-Colonial Struggle

Abstract

Kim Saryang (real name: Kim Sich’ang, 1914–1950) was among the Korean authors of the 1930s and 1940s who wrote frequently on the issues related to the Korean ethnonational identity, both in Korean and in Japanese. In May 1945, when dispatched on a lecture tour to the Japanese army units stationed in North China, he used this opportunity to escape and join the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army guerrillas in the Taihang Mountains. His China diary, Ten Thousand Li of a Dull-Witted Horse (Nomamalli, serialized in Seoul-based journal Minsŏng in 1946–47 and published in book form in Pyongyang in 1947), was written in his new status as a North Korean writer; the book is the main object of analysis in this article. The diary was an attempt to systemize the memories of the joint Sino-Korean anti-Japanese struggle, with the continuous process of building new, Socialist subjectivities in Communist-controlled parts of China and Korea. The article deals with the ways in which the new, postcolonial and Socialist Korean identity-in-making are both reflected in Kim’s rendering of his battlefield observations and remembrances and further given form through the act of writing on the armed anti-Japanese resistance—in broad meaning, the foundational background of what further was to become North Korean history. At the same time, the article emphasises the role Socialist international ideology played in the articulation of Kim’s narrative.