Memory and Reproduction: A Study of 1980s Chinese Ethnic Korean Revolutionary Narratives Focusing on Yun Il-san’s The Roaring Mudan River

Abstract

This paper takes as its subject the mass appearance of revolutionary narratives in Chinese ethnic Korean (chaoxianzu 朝鮮族) literature in the 1980s, and examines this literary phenomenon as exemplified by Yun Il-san’s 尹日山 novel The Roaring Mudan River. This novel deals with the familiar topic of the role of Northeast chaoxianzu in the Liberation War in a new way. It recalls not only the repressed memories of the Japanese Land Expropriation Decree but also the ethnic conflict between the poor Han Chinese and the Korean peasantry. Moreover, it rediscovers the historical specificity of the Northeast region in terms of the historical rupture between heartland Han Chinese and Northeast Han Chinese. It features the agency and voluntarism of the Northeast chaoxianzu as cooperators and a base of early support for the CCP and the Eighth Route Army, rather than treating them as submissive followers. This means that 1980s Chinese chaoxianzu revolutionary literary narratives as exemplified by The Roaring Mudan River constitute an effective literary response to the serious crisis in national identity that emerged among the chaoxianzu during the Cultural Revolution. In this sense, 1980s Chinese ethnic Korean revolutionary narratives can be said to have expanded ethnic consciousness as broadly as possible. In so doing, they paradoxically reconstructed a more robust sense of national identity for chaoxianzu than had been presented previously.