With the curiosity of a beginner

Imagine exploring your research terrain as a beginner, with all the curiosity, liveliness, and sensory awareness […] of an animal, a child, or just someone young at heart. What catches your eye, or your nose? What delights you? When you look at your project through fresh eyes, what can you see that you couldn’t before? (From #AcWriMoments Day 3)

I still remember what it felt like to ‘find’ the army songs. The singer in me couldn’t help but sight-sing the scores provided in the tomes I found in the library. Or that one time I found the Manchukuo radio program schedule in a scanned copy of the Manson ilbo (the only Korean-language newspaper in Manchukuo after 1937). I imagined the type of person who might have had access to a radio: them turning it on, tuning to the right station, listening to a radio drama or music before bed at night. Those were exciting finds.

I’m getting caught between thinking through this prompt as a student versus as a researcher. My primary texts are so well hidden that a person would have to have a certain base of knowledge first and be extra curious in order to find them. Is that not the way with archival research, thought? I imagine presenting the texts to a student who doesn’t have to go find them, yet does have to read and make sense of them. I imagine my student M, for example, who is interested in humor in literature, reading Imamura Eiji’s ‘The Crossings’ or An Sugil’s ‘Kitchen Girl’ comparing the ways these stories use humor and to what end. That would be a very new experience for her, and I wonder if she would enjoy it.

I wonder what M would learn about Manchuria by doing such a project. I had the fortune of studying about a place where I had lived. When I read something about the big avenues of Changchun in a text, I remembered walking down Renmin dajie or Ziyou dalu (not that they were called by such names in the 1940s). I could still feel the big trees and the June pollen. When the characters in ‘The Crossings’ started on their journey, I could recall the flat terrain and the late summer monsoons. And, oh, the winters! When the soldiers, be they Chinese or Korean, sang about ‘warring in the snow’, I could hear the quiet crunch of a fresh fall underfoot, the drooping branches of the pine trees laden with the white fluff. M wouldn’t have had that first-hand experience. On top of that, she would read those works as ‘Chinese’ by virtue of them being produced in the wider geographical area of China. Would she be able to sense the nuances of the place? And so what if she couldn’t? How important is that for undertaking research of literature from Manchuria/Manchukuo?

By pondering on this prompt, what can I see that I couldn’t see before? Looking at the Manchukuo era from the perspective of humor would be an interesting study. Comparing comics in the newspapers there to newspapers in the south might be informative. Did writers in Manchukuo use humor differently or for a different purpose than other Chinese writers? Well, both of the stories I cited above were actually written by Koreans (even though I have translated them from Chinese translations), so would it be more suitable to compare them to Korean writers? Thinking of other texts I have studied, such as Wai Wen’s Chinese translation of the stage play The Tale of Chunhyang and An Xi’s radio play Zhu Maichen, it’s like there is a boiling point where the humor turns into rage…which makes me wonder if that tactic works because these are scripts instead of prose?

As an addendum to this #AcWriMoments prompt from last year, this year’s initiative Tarot for Scholars, starts very fittingly with the Fool card. I won’t go into the symbolism and meaning of the card (for now), but I will say this: I would be a fool not to take on the research project I described above!

What’s in a name?

For this #AcWriMoment, turn your attention to a name you’ve chosen for your body of work or a piece of it. In your journal, in your imagination, or in conversation with a friend, reflect on these questions:

What meanings does the name hold for you? How has the name guided your writing process, or how could it guide your process? Might another name be waiting to be chosen by you? Guided by a name you have chosen, what is one small step you can take in your work today?

I did not expect to cry on Day 2 of #AcWriMoments. As the blogger described the angst over choosing a name for her child, she realized that the name will be what the child makes of it, not the other way around. ‘Anything we create — humans, scholarship, works of art — merely moves through us on its way into the world.’ Reading these words released the pressure I have been putting on myself to shape my research and interests to fit neatly and succinctly into the academic mold.

When I think about names and my body of work, the acronym ‘NAJUA’ comes to mind. Yes, now I use that rendering instead of ‘NAUA.’ According to a reviewer of a recent article, the ‘J’ in ‘anti-Japanese’ should be capitalized. I always liked ‘NAUA’ better—it felt more concise and symmetrical—plus, neither of my supervisors ever seemed to mind. But now I can’t get the critique out of my mind, and I can’t justify the missing ‘J’ for any real reason, grammatical or theoretical. Still, it felt like a betrayal (however irrational the thought) of the army? my thesis? to change it.

The name I chose for this website! So obscure, so anachronistic. When I came up with it, I desperately wanted to clothe myself in all things Dongbei—another name that means different things to different people. I imagined branching out from 1940s Dongbei research but staying in the vicinity. Now that I’ve been away from China for nearly a decade, I find it harder and harder to get back to that state of mind. I miss Dongbei, as one always misses a home, but there’s so much about the place I don’t know. It would take more than a lifetime to be an expert. Wait, expert?? There’s that standard again.

Other, more personal feelings cloud what clarity I seek. Abandonment. The complex of it, the experience…the fear of it, the shame. It lives with me. Admitting it here is like walking through mud barefoot. But I can see a psychological parallel with my research on Manchuria. Should I stay loyal to it if it is fast slipping through my fingers? If I let it go, what will take its place? Who am I without a name?

The Strangers' Apparel

I am very pleased to announce that my first translation was published in the 100th (and, sadly, final) issue of Renditions in December 2024 (pp. 178-187). Besides being a significant milestone for me, this news is even more exciting because two translations by Howard Goldblatt are also featured in this issue. My master’s thesis was about Howard Goldblatt’s role in helping Mo Yan receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 2012. To say this is a full-circle moment for me is an understatement!

SACRED ambitions

Wow, it has been a long time since I’ve updated the website and written a blog post. I am restarting now with help, thanks to an initiative begun by Margy Thomas and Helen Sword, which they have called #AcWriMoments. It is 30 days worth of prompts about one’s academic writing and thinking. (Technically, this initiative fell in line with #NaNoWriMo and #AcWriMo last November, but I purposely only drafted my prompts to work on later; hence, my publishing them now). Since I’ve been facing a crisis of purpose lately with regard to writing and academia, I thought it might be good for me to take a moment (!) to reflect.

Honestly, I didn’t fully grasp the prompt on Day 1. Rereading it now a few months later, I understand better the aim: finding the will to carry on by finding inspiration, even guidance, in moments great or small. They distilled their idea into the acronym SACRED:

• Strategic moments

• Artisanal moments

• Creative moments

• Reflective moments

• Embodied moments

• Delicious moments

It’s not often that academic writing is treated as something ‘creative,’ ‘artisanal,’ or ‘delicious,’ let alone SACRED. Yet now that I think about it, I became attracted to academic texts partly because of the lofty, refined style. I love it when a scholar manages to express an argument eloquently and rationally. To be able to take pride in writing like that has been one of my longest-standing dreams. And if I’m really honest, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it. Maybe I don’t even want to anymore. I don’t know whether it’s burn-out speaking, the pressure of academia, or the fallout from the pandemic, but writing feels more and more like a luxury.

I can see that SACRED is meant to be a tool I can fall back on when ambitions begin to fade and the mundane starts to clutter the mind. A part of me is thanking myself for participating in #AcWriMoments all those months ago for what it’s giving me today: a moment to reflect and embody my hopes for the future. Especially now that I have decided to leave Malta (a topic for another post), and am facing a move back to my home country as well as unemployment, this question of what writing means to me is always somewhere on my mind. I’m glad to be publishing this post. That’s a decent step forward, right?

“Sprinkling Death”: Using the Subversive Humor of Mock-Translation in the Classroom

The following abstract is from a reflective practice article published in the International Journal of Chinese and English Translation & Interpreting, December 2023.

Four students in the third-year undergraduate course CHN 3003: Reading and Translating Chinese at the University of Malta worked together to create a mock-translation of a fast-food menu. This article examines this collaborative task and evaluates its strengths and weaknesses against the theoretical framework of mock-translation, while also taking into account the socio-cultural particularities of the Maltese context. Malta is a small island nation in the Mediterranean and a former British colony. Students at the University of Malta, including those who study Chinese, are often bilingual in English and Maltese (a Semitic language) or another European language. Instructors working in the Chinese-English translation classroom may find the collaborative translation exercise a useful tool for getting students to consider the intersection between theory and practice.

Scripting a Multicultural Future: The Chinese and Korean Songs of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army

“Come Out Before the Revolution,” found on p. 117 in Kim Ch’un-sŏn 김춘선, ed., Chungguk Chosŏnjok saryo chŏnjip: munhwa yesul pyŏn 중국 조선족 사료 전집: 문화 예술 편 (Historical Materials of Chinese Koreans: Culture and Arts Edition), vol. 1, 33 vols. (Yanji: Yŏnbyŏn inmin ch’ulp’ansa, 2013).

Below is the abstract for my article published in the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, Volume 23, no. 1, May 2023.

Hundreds of military songs are credited to the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (NAUA). The NAUA was a coalition of Chinese and Korean guerrilla armies that operated in Northeast China during the Manchukuo period (1932–45). The NAUA used songs to teach and inculcate new behaviors in line with socialist and communist ideologies. Most importantly, the songs worked on an emotional level, meaning that they conveyed collective sentiments while also directing their appropriate expression in order to foster camaraderie and boost morale. Drawing from concepts formulated by historians of emotions, I argue that the NAUA became what Barbara Rosenwein terms an “emotional community.” As such, the NAUA defied strict nationalist sentiments primarily due to the discursive power and easy dissemination of the military songs. The Chinese and Korean songs, along with their aesthetic features, have not been studied comprehensively. As literary products of a tumultuous era, the NAUA songs deliver historical evidence of the transnational and transcultural ideologies present in resistance groups across the Japanese empire.

The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction by John Christopher Hamm (review)

The following is the first paragraph of my review in Twentieth-Century China, Volume 46, Number 3, October 2021.

John Christopher Hamm's The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction brings the topic of genre fiction off the sidelines of modern Chinese literature and into center field. The clever and perceptive narrative revolves around the novelist Xiang Kairan (向愷然 1895–1957), who wrote under the pen name Buxiaosheng (不肖生) or "The Unworthy Scholar" and is considered to be the father of Republican-era martial arts fiction (武俠小說 wuxia xiaoshuo). John Christopher Hamm establishes a scholarly approach to Xiang Kairan that, on the one hand, pays homage to the nostalgia that martial arts fiction often evokes in general readers and, on the other, newly conceptualizes the oft-discussed foundations of modern Chinese literature. Moreover, Hamm presents an enlightening characterization of the publishing networks that formed the basis for Chinese genre fiction. The book is a relevant reminder that Chinese genre fiction, especially considering our current age of translating and promoting it to global audiences, came of age during the commercialization of literature in 1920s Shanghai.

My Top 5 Favorite NAUA Songs

The Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (NAUA) was a coalition of Chinese and Korean, communist and non-communist, guerrilla forces that banded together starting in 1934. They were generally divided into “route armies” that marched across Manchuria (Northeast China), which was, at that time, a Japanese puppet state called Manchukuo. My interest in the NAUA stems from the hundreds of songs that are attributed to the army and, especially, its leaders. The songs give scholars a rare glimpse into the ways that Chinese and Korean thinkers interacted with each other. Furthermore, the tunes help us better understand the intellectual strains in anti-Japanese cultural products of the war period across linguistic divides.

What’s interesting about the route armies mentioned above is that many of them had their own song, like a calling card for other troops to know who was in the vicinity. The songs were also a way for the soldiers to become a unified entity—brothers and sisters in arms. The first of these songs, as its title implies, is “Song of the First Route Army” (东北抗日联军第一路军军哥), which you can listen to here. I love it because it’s an upbeat, declarative tune with a strong military march aesthetic.

The following songs are my top five favorite NAUA songs. I chose them for their musical, lyrical, and symbolic importance. They give a great sense of the themes in NAUA music, which tells us a lot about what the soldiers felt and believed to be worth fighting for. All of the translations below are my own.

1. “The Encampment Song” (露营之歌) (Listen)

Cliffs of sheer, sharp rock, the thick forest overgrown,

Storms and gales in the wasteland, on river banks battle steeds cry

Armed, sitting around a campfire, the sky bathed in red,

Comrades! With firm determination,

Fearless of the Songhua River’s unrestraint.

Arise, courageously charge,

Chase the Japanese invaders, restore the Northeast,

Like the heavens at daybreak, fathomless splendor will rush forth.

鐵嶺絕岩林木叢生，暴雨狂風，荒原水畔戰馬鳴。

圍火齊團結，普照滿天紅。

同志們，銳志哪怕松江晚浪生。

起來呀果敢沖鋒，逐日寇復東北，天破曉光華萬丈湧。

“The Encampment Song” is the most famous NAUA song. In fact, it lay at the heart of a dispute among former NAUA members in the 1980s, which led to a lawsuit filed in 1999. If you listen to the song in full, you will begin to understand the song as a kind of epoch. The lyrics are highly poetic, mainly describing the natural setting and pairing it with grand images of victory on the battlefield.

2. “China and Korea Have Come Together” (중국, 조선잇대였다)

The mountain streams and rivers of the two countries,

China and Chosŏn, have come together.

History has been raised like a building

on the two plots of the Amnok River and Changbai Mountain.

중국, 조선 두 나라는

강하산천 잇대였다

압록강 장백산 잇대이둣이

분호력사도 어울려있다

“China and Korea Have Come Together” is one of the NAUA’s most symbolic songs. One of the biggest challenges that faced the NAUA when the guerrilla troops first started to work together was the cultural and linguistic differences between Chinese and Korean soldiers. Music became a great way to foster unity among these disparate groups. The above song likens the physical terrain that naturally separates Northeast China and the Korean peninsula to the Chinese and Korean soldiers. In other words, if the land can be thought of as one, then so can the people who live there. There are Chinese and Korean versions of this song, too, which adds to its significance because not all NAUA songs existed in both languages. Indeed, it’s unclear in which language the song was first rendered. All told, this song is truly a transcultural gem and shows how the NAUA aimed to engender a dual Chinese-Korean community.

3. “Song Written in Blood” (혈서가)

Bite the fourth finger painfully paint a red flag

When the flag goes up call out “Hurrah, hurrah! (mansei)”

Record your name in blood

Join the army to do the work of the class revolution.

무명지 깨물어 피로 붉은 기를 그립니다

붉은기 앞에 서서 만세 만세 부릅니다

혈서에 다 이름을 적어 념원을 표시합시다

무산계급 혁명사업위해 참군한다고  

I love “Song Written in Blood” for many reasons. First, at only four lines long, this one verse is one of the most succinct songs in the NAUA canon. Second, despite its brevity, the lyrics really pack a punch. They describe an almost gruesome image of drawing blood from one’s own finger to draw a flag, which signifies pledging oneself to the socialist cause. Third, the song seems to have been originally written in Korean, which makes a lot of sense considering that Koreans were the major communist force in the NAUA at its start. Lastly, the song presents and represents the vow that all NAUA members needed to make and embody if they were to unite and build a new society.

4. “Four Seasons of Guerrilla Warfare” (四季游击歌)

Warring in the snow doesn’t compare to summer and autumn,

North winds cry, heavy snows fly, the snowy ground icy for days,

The winds pierce the bones and snow hits the face,

hands and feet cracking with ice,

Patriotic men don’t fear death so how could they fear affliction?

雪地里游击不比夏秋间，

朔风吹大雪飞雪地又冰天，

风刺骨雪打面手足冰开裂，

爱国男儿不怕死哪怕艰难。

“Four Seasons of Guerrilla Warfare” is stylistically and musically similar to “The Encampment Song.” Both tunes describe the seasons, starting with spring through to the winter climax. “Four Seasons,” however, comprises two verses per season, which makes it double the length of “The Encampment Song.” Additionally, “Four Seasons” conflates the soldiers with the land more prominently than its sister tune. In the spring, the soldiers are “young plant shoots” whereas in the fall they are “eggs of a broken nest” (signifying Manchuria’s state of being occupied by the Japanese). The final winter verse, provided above, poses an important rhetorical question: “Patriotic men don’t fear death, so how could they fear affliction?” Many NAUA songs use similar rhetorical devices to present what I call the “logic of suffering.” These types of lyrics present two unwelcome circumstances (e.g. death vs affliction) and then show how one is better than the other—as long as it means that the Japanese are defeated. In other words, if one suffers frostbite while fighting the Japanese, surely that is still the better option compared to living under an oppressive regime. Songs that show this kind of logic are fascinating because they show how the songwriters combined discourse and rhetoric for emotional effect.

5. “Chinese and Koreans Unite” (中朝民族联合起来)

Chinese and Korean nations, toiling masses unite,

Uniformly fire at the Japanese imperialists.

Only when we destroy the common enemy, can we live a life of freedom.

Strengthen our union, Chinese, Koreans—cherish unity!

Charge! Storm! Towards the Japanese empire.

中朝民族劳苦民众亲密地联合，

一齐向着日本帝国主义者开火。

只有我们消灭这一共同的敌人，

那时我们才能取得自由的生活。

亲密的巩固的中朝民族！

冲锋呀！杀进哪！向着那日帝国。

Yet another song about unifying Chinese and Koreans. “Chinese and Koreans Unite” was one of the first NAUA songs that centered the dilemma of how to bring the two cultural groups into better communication. The song was purportedly written by Yang Jingyu, the general behind the creation of the NAUA. Intriguingly, there are two versions of this song, one from 1935 and another from 1938. The lyrics of the 1935 version are relatively dry compared to the 1938 version. Where the 1935 lyrics are stoic and political, the 1938 lyrics are poetic and filled with longing for a new country, pain and suffering caused by the war, and angst about Chinese and Korean in-fighting. The simple call in the chorus to “Charge! Storm! Towards the Japanese empire” gave NAUA soldiers an unequivocal directive regardless of their personal history and background. Through such powerfully simple lyrics, the NAUA built a solid community intent on living peacefully together and renewing the society around them.

Changing Ideas of Chinese Nationalism

Article 4:《是争名夺利还是捍卫著作权─《露营之歌》作者署名的反思》大雪山 or 达雪风 (the origins and authorship of this article are unclear, but I will refer to him as Da Xueshan)

In the past couple of posts, I have been discussing the lawsuit filed in 1999 involving former Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army soldiers and a particular song attributed to one of the NAUA’s most beloved commanders, Li Zhaolin. The “Encampment Song” lawsuit case is significant because it points to changing ideas about how national laws should work, not only what sentiments and historical events led to the founding of the nation.

To summarize the fourth article, the author lays out some logical fallacies in the claim that Li Zhaolin was the sole author of “The Encampment Song.” The author’s argument revolves around the idea that the song was credited to Li Zhaolin posthumously (遗作), seemingly a mishandling in the way the song was archived in the 1950s. Unfortunately, I cannot find enough information online to definitively say how the case was resolved, or even if it is still underway.

One of the striking issues that permeate this and the other articles is how the authors utilize the phrase “truth-seeking” (实事求是) to justify their arguments. Da Xueshan, for example, takes a passionate stance on matters of legality and evidence-based truth. There is no room in this editorial for something so illogical as works attributed to Li Zhaolin after the fact and his death. The “truth” of the song’s authorship should be ascertained by a legal body so that similar cases in the future will have a precedent. For the former NAUA soldiers, on the other hand, the “truth” is a matter of legacy and honor. Their fundamental question is: what good is the law if it does not know its roots? Da Xueshan builds his argument about the song’s authorship on the premise that the courts must value objectivity. In other words, what good is patriotism if corruption or injustice rules the court of law?

Here we can see the significance of Zhao Yan’s statement that this case would be the first meaningful intellectual property rights case to “cross into the new millennium.” Underpinning the case of “Encampment’s” authorship is whether Chinese law can and should shape the limits of nationalism and what it deems to be official national history. We should not forget that the 2000s also brought to the fore the issue of intellectual property rights in the field of high-tech, which has had global implications and repercussions, further marking the limits of Chinese nationalism. “The Encampment Song” lawsuit became a harbinger of this turn towards intellectual property rights on a national level. In terms of historical significance, the former NAUA soldiers should take some comfort in knowing that their wartime call to arms has remained a matter of national importance, despite the conclusion that more than one person wrote the song.

The NAUA Lawsuit that “Crossed into the New Millennium”

Article 2:《英雄旧部告省长‘露营之歌’起纷争》赵岩作 《法律与生活》1.2000

I’ve come across a few things written by Zhao Yan. He claims to have been part of the media contingent present at the original hearing, so I surmise that he’s a journalist. This particular article is important because it was written right after the case came to light. Plus it gives a rundown of the important events that led to the lawsuit. Basically, the issue goes back to the 1980s, although a 2009 article argues that the problem of Li Zhaolin being credited as the sole author of “The Encampment Song” began in 1967. In the article I discuss below, the Cultural Revolution is mentioned many times as well, so we can’t discount the fact that people’s reputations were at stake and that the 1980s became a time of rehabilitation. (Li Min’s note in the 1991 NAUA songbook describes how she and other former NAUA members had been denounced as spies during the Cultural Revolution, so restoring her reputation may have been one possible reason for her to spearhead the song compilations and her husband’s case as one of “Encampment’s” authors.)

I mention Li Min because Zhao Yan traces the events leading to the court hearing back to an article that Li Min wrote for the《伊春日报》on March 1, 1980, when she happened to be the chair of the Ethnic Affairs Commission (民委）in Heilongjiang. Li Min’s government position is significant not only because of her place in the Korean minority community but also because, at the time, Li Min’s husband Chen Lei, who had also been in the NAUA, was the governor of Heilongjiang province. In the article, she describes the circumstances wherein “The Encampment Song” was written, a picturesque story featuring Chen Lei writing tune near Li Zhaolin, who was working atop a boulder. Li Min’s article angered her former comrades. She allegedly sent a copy to Jin Bowen in Beijing, who was not pleased with Li Min’s depictions and claims. Jin didn’t do anything, however, until other former soldiers wrote to her asking why she was keeping silent on the matter.

What Zhao Yan emphasizes throughout this piece is how, time and again, former NAUA members rejected and contradicted Li Min’s and Chen Lei’s claims. There is little to be said of any former members who were on the fence or on Chen Lei's side. In fact, the one story about someone who agreed with Chen Lei is shown to have been falsified. Zhao Yan paints a picture of a community standing up to corrupt officials – former NAUA soldiers turned bad.

Zhao Yan states that for those comrades who expressed their discontent to Jin Bowen, it was a matter of “whether the spirit and policies of ‘truth-seeking’ (实事求是) that had been restored to the CCP in the three plenary meetings of 1978 following the Cultural Revolution would be followed through and implemented,” (27). It was also a matter of whether “us NAUA soldiers were a true or false face of history for future generations.” Significantly, the authorship of “Encampment” represented the reinstating of the NAUA’s good name and the restoration of pre-Cultural Revolution patriotism. Such a line of reason demonstrates that the songs and their composers represented discourses that solidified the importance of the NAUA in post-war nation-building.

To continue with the story of the lawsuit, Jin Bowen finished her memoir in 1982 and then sent it to the office of Heilongjiang Provincial Party History. They refuse to publish it unless she changes her anecdote about Li Zhaolin teaching everyone “The Encampment Song” between April and May of 1938. But it turns out that Chen Lei was also publishing his memoir and poetry collection in 1982, wherein he claimed to have written “Encampment.” The plot thickens!

One of the most interesting pieces of evidence Zhao Yan discusses is the accounts of Li Dongguang and Li Yazhou (not related). Li Dongguang claims to remember singing the song (along with “Internationale”) at Li Zhaolin and Jin Bowen’s wedding in July 1937. In February of 1938, Li Dongguang was then captured by the Japanese while on a mission to the Soviet border. He ended up at a POW camp for eight years and only returned to China in February 1946. Similarly, Li Yazhou was imprisoned in March 1938. She says that she sang the song throughout her time in jail, therefore it couldn’t have been written in May of that year. Underlying these stories is the idea that imprisonment froze time. Not only did prison cement a political and social identity for Li Dongguang and Li Yazhou that resulted in persecution during the Cultural Revolution, but the song also connects them to their NAUA comrades despite their time apart. The experience, for all intents and purposes concerning the song’s origins, erases anything that could have corrupted these soldiers’ memories between 1946 and 1982-83. It places the song and, in turn, the NAUA into a higher place in their emotional lives. It makes me think that without such an emotional affinity for each other and the songs, it might have been difficult for the soldiers to trust any other conceptualization of the Chinese nation. And in a big way, I think these restoration projects are a way to fight for their hardwon emotional community because, to the former NAUA members, the army formed the basis for their national sentiment and/or political identity. This point hits home if we think about how Li Zhaolin was assassinated by the KMT in 1946, (27). 

To complete Zhao Yan’s missives towards Chen Lei, he describes an investigation and report by the office of Heilongjiang Provincial Party History in 1987. Zhao Yan implies that this investigation had been for show because that office was controlled by Chen Lei. Former NAUA soldiers saw many untruths in it, and it seemed to them to repeat Li Min’s story verbatim. It also insinuated that other witnesses, namely Li Dongguang, were lying. Dongguang responds by saying that, despite the offices he had held after he returned to China, he still suffered during the political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. He could have risen again with Chen Lei’s help—after all, the latter often visited him and almost always wanted to discuss “Encampment.” But to show his moral high ground, Dongguang insists that because Li Zhaolin had been such a positive influence on him when he was young, he could never go to such lengths for political gain. These dramatic claims of corruption and unethical behavior set Chen Lei at complete odds with the unsullied hero, Li Zhaolin.

This brings me to Article 3:《哈尔滨中院院长王克伦枉法不让抗日名将李兆麟将军的灵魂安息》 赵岩作 2010年9月4日

The first thing to note is that this article is also written by Zhao Yan but 10 years after the previous article. The date is important for two reasons. One is that a second lawsuit was filed in 2008 in the name of Yu Tianfang regarding his contributions to “Encampment’s” fourth verse. Unfortunately, I have not found any information about how either case was ruled in the end, but perhaps Zhao Yan’s thoughts in this later article may shed some light on the matter. The second reason to mention the date is that Zhao Yan begins by noting that, breaking with the protocol of previous years, the 2010 celebrations of the 65th anniversary of the victory against Japan were delayed by 19 days in order to coincide with Taiwan’s celebrations. This point becomes significant towards the end of the article.

It is in this piece that Zhao Yan places himself along with other reporters at the court hearings in 1999. And this is where things get interesting because, according to Zhao, at least two of those reporters were demoted afterward, presumably at the behest of Chen Lei. Then, in 2002, as the hearings in Beijing seemed to be coming to a close, the vice-chair of the Heilongjiang provincial court, Wang Kelun, transferred the case to the Harbin intermediate court. (Zhao Yan again indicates that it was a for Chen Lei and Li Min.) “It was like throwing a peach and calling it a plum.” At this point, Li Min was the former chairperson of the Heilongjiang provincial section of the CPPCC Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (中国人民政治协商会议). No sooner had he made the transfer than Wang Kelun became the head of the Harbin Intermediate People's Court.

In 2008, after repeated appeals from Li Zhaolin’s daughter, Zhang Zhuoya, and a famous intellectual property rights lawyer, Pang Zhengzhong 庞正中, the Harbin court finally heard the case again. Zhao Yan says that he and the same reporters from nine years before attended the hearing again, but Wang Kelun had the bailiff send them out of the courtroom. While this information is damning to be sure, I can’t help but wonder why Zhao Yan doesn’t mention the Yu Tianfang case of the same year.

Zhao Yan points out that The People’s Daily extolled Wang Kelun for lawfully presiding over the case and for “directing public opinion” (舆论监督). The “funny thing” according to Zhao Yan was that the People’s Daily reporter didn’t seem to know that Wang Kelun’s court “hadn’t ruled on any long-standing cases in over three years.” And, he continues, the reporter “probably didn’t know about Harbin's history of occupation.” Here Zhao Yan relates the story of Li Zhaolin’s assassination by a KMT spy in 1946. When an investigation was called, the KMT gave up Harbin, perhaps the last of its strongholds, to the CCP. “LZL used his life and blood to return Harbin to the CCP,” Zhao Yan states. Thus we can understand Zhao’s disgruntlement about the 65th-anniversary victory celebrations being planned to coincide with Taiwan’s.

It would seem that, to Zhao Yan, a heterogeneous Chinese nationalism founded on the actions of both the KMT and the CCP against the Japanese fails to some extent. Zhao Yan implicitly expresses disappointment that Chen Lei’s status and position superseded the camaraderie and honor of the NAUA community. The way Chen Lei is described as “illegitimately inscribing his name all over the city” lies in direct contrast to Zhao Yan’s veneration of Li Zhaolin’s role in liberating Harbin from the KMT. Not only should loyalty to a place have been more important, Zhao Yan implies, fidelity to the resistance movement should never be squandered. To cement his argument, Zhao Yan reminds readers that, due to an error by Chen Lei during the war, over 100 NAUA soldiers were killed. Li Zhaolin purportedly had had the option to kick him out but didn’t. Yet Chen Lei “forgot about his former leader once he gained power, even to the point of reappropriating heroes’ stories as his own.” 

Judging by the opinion pieces I’ve come across, the lawsuit became something larger than a song and who wrote it. The case showed a teleological turn in the way that the Chinese public viewed cultural products from the war. The legal concept of intellectual property rights highlights a question in current-day Chinese nationalism: how can there be a unified sense of national identity while also allowing for individual achievements that may or may not align with national values? Li Zhuoya (Li’s and Jin’s daughter) says of Li Zhaolin’s songwriting: “if we can’t even defend our father’s courage and ability with regards to his intellectual property, then it’s a disservice to all former soldiers, the people who bled and died for us, and the history of this country.” What is the line between exploiting a government office to show your accomplishments and posthumously being deemed an intellectual hero of the people?

The only conclusion about the lawsuit that I’ve come to expect is Zhao Yan’s statement: “No one disputes the importance of ‘The Encampment Song’ to history, but its ownership is still contested by both sides and there is not a clear answer.” While his position is clear, in the next post I will discuss another article with a counterargument.

A Lawsuit and a Guerrilla Wedding

Anyone interested in learning about the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (NAUA) might come across some information about a 1999 lawsuit revolving around the authorship and intellectual property rights of “The Encampment Song,” undoubtedly the most famous NAUA military song. Jin Bowen, a former NAUA soldier and wife of General Li Zhaolin, filed suit against her fellow compatriot, Li Min, and her husband, Chen Lei. The plaintiff claimed that Li Zhaolin was the sole author of “The Encampment Song,” whereas the defendant claims to have written some of the first verse. In 2008, another lawsuit was filed in the name of deceased NAUA member Yu Tianfang claiming that he had written the fourth and final verse of “Encampment.” The lawsuit garnered an impressive amount of attention in the media. As Zhao Yan puts it, “the case was the first intellectual property rights lawsuit in China to cross into the new millennium.” Due to these proceedings, the common understanding is that “The Encampment Song” was a collaborative effort by Li Zhaolin, Chen Lei, Yu Tianfang, and other “fine talents” (秀才).

I want to share a few of the articles I’ve encountered in my research about the people and lawsuits mentioned above. Learning about the lawsuit has proved challenging due to the difficulty of finding original news articles online. Ironically for a case about intellectual property, most of the articles have been republished in full on various websites and blogs. Still, with all the republishing, I can’t help but think that the case captured public opinion on some level. I’m going to try my best to discuss not only what I’ve learned from the articles but also some of the larger issues they present to Sinologists.

Article 1:《密林中的婚礼——记金伯文与李兆麟将军》张景作，《今日科苑》7.2003

This article is about how Jin Bowen and Li Zhaolin met, fell in love, and had a wedding in the woods. The author, Zhang Jing, apparently visited Jin Bowen in Beijing in 1979 as a part of a project by Liaoning People’s Publishers to preserve the history of the NAUA  (34). This article came out of that interview, though it was written and published long after the project.

Li Zhaolin is described as tall, handsome, dignified, and looked older than he was (seemed 30 or 40 when he was only 27 because he had gone through periods of starvation and hardship that aged him) (35). Jin Bowen, on the other hand, is described, as if by Li Zhaolin himself, as having eyes full of wisdom and a pleasant personality. Once they get acquainted and Li finds out that Jin Bowen is Korean, “he responds in a respectful tone: Our Third Route Army has many Korean comrades. They are incredibly brave and used to hardship.”

There are a lot of authorly interventions that fictionalize and romanticize the relationship between Li Zhaolin and Jin Bowen, not to mention their time as guerrilla soldiers. For example, the author provides dialogues that read more like lines from a movie. One instance is when Li Zhaolin supposedly can’t eat or sleep because he’s anxious about how Jin Bowen will answer his marriage proposal (36). The author assumes an omniscient perspective and adds details that certainly make their love story more romantic but also give the war and their roles as guerrilla soldiers a rosy complexion. The narrative romanticizes the revolution, the fight against the Japanese, and the relations between people, especially those of an intercultural nature.

At one point, Li asks about Jin’s family, and the subsequent explanation is one of the most interesting aspects of the article. Below is my translation:

Jin’s father had been a part of the Korean Independence movement from a young age and had died at the knife of a Japanese. Her brother had been the political commissar (政委) within the Wangqing guerrilla unit 汪清游击队 [Wangqing is a place in Yanbian autonomous prefecture now and presumably it was then, too], and he’d been killed by a traitor. In 1930, Jin and her mother joined the Women’s 妇女会 and Youth Corps 儿童团, respectively, and started doing reconnaissance missions. Her mother was caught by a traitor and punished to the point that she was crippled, so she went to live at a relative’s place. She was then sent to the wilderness to work with (a local) party committee [not sure about where…Jin says 大荒崴子区委工作]. But the Japanese swept out (扫荡) the area and her unit scattered. She eventually found a unit of the NAUA and got acquainted with them (36).

Jin Bowen’s family story apparently touched Li. “After listening to her story, Li Zhaolin looked at this unyielding, simple Korean woman and couldn’t help but feel admiration. From then on, he supported her revolutionary convictions in every task the leaders shouldered her with and encouraged her to study Chinese (especially reading) and to improve her cultural knowledge,” (36). Li finally declares his love for Jin, who says she has to think it over. She considers Li’s political views and standing as well as his personal qualities. She agrees. Here I can’t help but think of China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation, a collection of interviews that the UK-based journalist Xinran conducted circa 2005. China Witness features stories about a number of couples who were part of work or army units together during the war and after 1949. They all said that marriages often came about in benign ways but that political standing was incredibly important in choosing a spouse. Yet, where couples in China Witness describe austere weddings with little ceremony, Li Zhaolin’s and Jin Bowen’s nuptials were downright lavish. According to Zhang Jing, there were flowers and music, as well as jokesters who built the couple a small tent for their wedding night. Another narrative intervention perhaps?

Despite the liberties taken by the auhtor, this article indicates that Li Zhaolin and Jin Bowen entered the popular imagination in China as a “power couple.” It can be argued that their intercultural marriage became a symbol of the larger united front that the NAUA strived to create among Chinese and Korean soldiers. Moreover, the image of a strong married couple presents a legitimate path towards building a new nation that another strong generation could then inherit. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to think that the respect and admiration for this couple was one of the reasons that their former compatriots offered themselves as witnesses for Jin Bowen’s case. In the next post, I will discuss the events that led to the hearings, according to the journalist Zhao Yan.

Abstract: Writing “Manchurian-Korean Literature” in the Manseon ilbo, 1937–1942

This short video introduces my article titled "Writing 'Manchurian-Korean Literature' in the Manseon ilbo, 1937-1942."

I am pleased to announce that my first academic article has been published in the Seoul Journal of Korean Studies. While the video provides a brief overview, the following is the full abstract for the article.

This paper examines the intellectual discourse regarding the place and function of Korean-language writing in Manchuria during the Manchukuo period. I look specifically at several editorials that appeared in the Korean newspaper Manseon ilbo. These primary sources appeared during the literary zenith of the Manchukuo period between 1937 and 1942, five years mainly characterized by widespread debates about what constituted Manchukuo national culture. I argue that the participation of Korean intellectuals in these debates indicates their desire to be seen as an autonomous group
disassociated with the Japanese. The fact that some of the subsequent writing appeared in Chinese translation suggests that it was important for Chinese people as well to see Koreans in a new light. The newspaper articles discussed below show a propensity to change perceptions about Korean belonging in Manchuria through literature and intellectual production. From another perspective, the Manseon ilbo articles shed light on how Korean intellectuals understood their production value vis-à-vis the nation-building discourses of Manchukuo.

UPDATE: This article was translated by 백종륜 Baek Chong-ryun and published in the Journal of Manchurian Studies, Volume 35, April 2023.

The Beginnings of an Academic Career

Today I met with one of my students face-to-face for the first time this semester.

Let me unpack that sentence.

I might start with the word "students." I have students—actual university-attending, Chinese majoring, real-life pupils. I have students because, while in Taiwan over the summer, I was offered a job as a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Malta. I moved to Malta in September and took up my post in October. This semester, I am teaching two courses: 1) Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature, and 2) Reading and Translating Chinese. Between these two classes I have five students. One young woman is in both classes; in fact, she is the only student in her year and, as such, is the only one taking the third-year course, Reading and Translating Chinese. She is also the one I met with today.

Why do I mention meeting said student face-to-face? Because it is 2020, the year of the Coronavirus pandemic. I may have moved to Malta to teach synchronously, but for now, we are keeping our distance and teaching online. I do not mind distance learning. It offers some unique opportunities for students to engage in tasks at their own pace. As an instructor, I find it slightly more challenging than I had expected in terms of preparation and technical savvy, but there was bound to be a learning curve for my first semester as a proper lecturer no matter what. All in all, I think my students and I are handling things pretty well. That said, I know that they miss meeting in person because three of the five have requested face-to-face appointments for our mid-semester individual check-in.

One downside to online teaching is that I do not have as many chances to see my colleagues as I might have had if we were all on campus most days. This is the biggest difference between this international move compared to others I have made. In the past, I was always a student, and, as such, I was part of a cohort of peers whenever I started at a new university. Even though I have joined a lively (and young) faculty—all but one of us is under 40 years old—I am more keenly aware of being on my own with respect to making friends and networking. I think this isolation has contributed to a slightly bigger sense of imposter syndrome compared to when I was doing my doctorate. (Don't worry, it's not an extreme case!) I am dealing with the issue by reaching out to colleagues to meet for various reasons, whether to grab a drink or to do some sight-seeing together. I have also made sure to attend our departmental seminars. I have enjoyed getting to know everyone and look forward to when we can see each other more frequently.

Considering that I received my PhD in May of this year, I truly feel lucky, blessed even, to be given the opportunity to take up the role of lecturer at this stage of my career. I am aware of how competitive the academic job market is these days, especially in Western countries. The pandemic made planning for the future even more fraught with uncertainty. I went from New Zealand to Taiwan on a prayer. I had applied for the post in Malta right before leaving. A few months later, I was told that there would be no interviews because of the virus. I had made up my mind at that point to find a teaching job in Taiwan. I even interviewed with a private Buddhist high school to be their social studies teacher and was about to sign the contract over the Dragon Boat Festival when I received an email inviting me to interview with Malta. I still cannot believe how things turned out in just a matter of a months!

Tomorrow I have my second face-to-face meeting with a student. I wonder what she wants to write for her final paper...

Interview with The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast

Image by Angus Stewart

A few months ago, I made a new Twitter friend who, I discovered, produces a podcast about Chinese literature in translation. I told Angus Stewart (@AngusLikesWords) that I had had a similar idea at one point, and I was pleased to see that someone else had the discipline to make it a reality! Since then, I’ve been listening to his podcast on Spotify (it can also be found on YouTube here; Apple Podcasts users can subscribe here and Android users here). I was looking forward to the day he’d do an episode on Mo Yan, the 2012 laureate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

My master’s thesis was titled The Economics of Literature in Translation: How Americans View Mo Yan (2015). I went straight into a PhD program after my MA, so I haven’t published my master’s thesis yet, which is why I’m so excited that Angus had me on his show to discuss Mo Yan. Most guests of the show are the translators themselves; however, in the case of Mo Yan, interviewing his English translator, Howard Goldblatt, would be the equivalent of Jay Z making an appearance. I’m glad that, for now, my rather academic perspective could be called upon.

Originally, my MA supervisor wanted me to tell a Chinese audience what Americans thought of Mo Yan. Of course, my first thought was, “Do Americans even know who Mo Yan is?” He had just won the Nobel—surely that meant that he had a fan base, right? As anything to do with translation, the answer was not so simple. In my thesis, I demonstrated the economics of translated Chinese literature, making the argument that translators’ advocacy proves key not only in making the text itself marketable to target readers but also in ensuring that literary prize committees become aware of the intrinsic value of an author’s works. I use Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death as an analogy for the process and significance of translation. Making such an analogy utilizes an analytical framework founded on economic principles, which shifts the interpretations of Mo Yan’s works away from the methodologies based on China’s national narrative in order to focus on the creative sensibilities of the author himself.

In the podcast, Angus and I discuss Mo Yan’s rise to fame as well as my interest in his works. The term “native-place literature” (xiangtu wenxue) makes an appearance insofar as it has been used by scholars to understand why Mo Yan sets all of his stories in Gaomi township. (I was quite pleased to note the historical connections of Gaomi in Shandong province to Dongbei.) We also talked about talked about Howard Goldblatt’s translation practices, style and/or philosophy. Instead of covering Mo Yan’s epic novels, the interview focuses on Radish 《透明的红萝卜》, the novella that launched his career in 1985 but which was not published in English until 2015. In connection with Mo Yan’s intricate use of language in describing the protagonist’s worldview, Angus suggests that Radish might be taken as an example of Weird literature wherein disjointed childhood senses result in a rich yet confounding experience.

The following are some questions I had in preparation for the interview and during its wake. They might be of use to anyone else studying Mo Yan and/or Radish.

• What are the implications of using Magical Realism as an analytical framework for understanding Mo Yan’s works?

• What other analytical frameworks or methodologies might be helpful in understanding Mo Yan?

• Are different research methodologies needed to analyze Mo Yan’s works in translation compared to their originals?

• Is there a way to get past methodological frameworks that privilege (China’s) national history?

• What is the significance of making a translation marketable for lay readers, as opposed to pedagogical translations for students of Chinese and Chinese literature?

• What does the loss of innocence in Radish mean in a larger sense? Is it a complete loss? Should/Does our understanding of the protagonist change knowing that the events take place in a Chinese context?

• What is childhood (to Mo Yan, to Goldblatt, to Angus, to me…)? From an analytical point of view, why is the Weird associated with childlike perspectives?

My PhD Defense

From left to right: Dr. Shin Takahashi (examiner), Prof. Yiyan Wang (primary supervisor), Asst Prof. Stephen Epstein (secondary supervisor), Dr. Rosemary Haddon (examiner), and me at Milk & Honey for lunch after the oral examination.

This past Monday, February 17th, I defended my PhD dissertation. This was an experience that my fellow postgraduates and I have been talking—and worrying—about since day one at VUW. In some ways, it was exactly what everyone said it was going to be; at the same time, it was an experience unique to me and my thesis. I’ve decided to reflect on it here because this blog is, after all, partly meant to chart my professional development.

What struck me the most about the oral defense was the toned down atmosphere. I had imagined it in turns as either formal and serious or as an animated discussion. It was neither. Someone (I can’t recall who) said afterwards that it was one of the most “chill” examinations they had been a part of. (“Chill” is kind of New Zealand’s national slogan, but I assure you that it was by no means “chill” from where I was sitting!) Now that it’s been a few days, I can articulate the atmosphere a bit better. For everyone except me, it seemed like a Monday morning meeting: subdued, resigned, a box ticked at the start of a particularly busy week. For me, it was exciting and momentous. My hands shook. I reminded myself to make eye contact with my examiners, but I couldn’t meet my supervisors’ eyes. I was too nervous.

At the time, I couldn’t really understand why the atmosphere felt the way it did. I found myself trying to match the vibe of everyone else in the room. Now that I think about it, the rainy weather also probably played a role, especially after two weeks of summer sunshine. Still, I went in keenly aware that this was the snake fight all academics had to brave at some point. To most people, a PhD seems formidable, even unfathomable. I wanted it to be that, too, in a way. I wanted to come out of there knowing that I had prevailed against unlikely odds. In reality, the oral examination was not the battleground.

This important professional accolade has gone hand in hand with the most precarity I’ve ever experienced in my personal life. It is more than embarrassing to admit, but I cannot afford rent anymore; I have a very small amount of money that has to last until…I find a job? The truth is that I still have the same anxiety about tomorrow as I did the day before my defense. The real battle was not passing the defense; it was keeping my sense of self worth over the course of four years of producing a body of work.

What has changed is that I can talk about my PhD in the past tense now. All of the big milestones are behind me. My proposal was accepted a full three years ago! I wrote the introduction, which I saved until after I had drafted my discussion chapters, one year ago. I submitted in September 2019 and didn’t defend until 2020. Now I have to wrap up loose ends, which does not entail the kind of mental pressure of research and writing. Yay! The strange part is that I actually feel equipped for that kind of mental strain in a way that I had a tenuous hold on throughout the last four years. I can attribute this new level of confidence to my thesis.

Do I feel different? One thing I was secretly hoping for—and that did not happen in the end—was that they would call me into the room by saying, “Congratulations, Dr. Heward.” All I can say is thank goodness for the Facebook friends who caught on to my new moniker. They might not know about the pitfalls I faced, but through their heartfelt congratulations, I feel triumphant.

What’s next? Despite the unknowns I’m facing right now, I am looking forward to what the rest of 2020 holds. I imagine spending this year preparing articles for publication and applying for jobs. Ideally, I will be progressing my career from a new location. I will definitely spend some time with my family, who I haven’t visited in two and a half years. I’m excited to develop this website, too. I hope to enter 2021 richer (literally and figuratively), ready to hit the ground running on many new projects.

A Note on Romanization and Names

The following post is Part VIII—and the last—in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. I have decided to share the introduction in full not only because it encapsulates my work from the past four years, but it also contains a lot of references to information that I hope to blog about in the future.* New readers may find it helpful to begin here. Below I discuss the conventions used throughout this series, and subsequently, throughout the blog. I also share the table of contents from my dissertation as images at the end for those who are interested in the overall structure and the two case studies.

*Some edits have been made to the original wording of the introduction to better suit the style of a blog post.

In recent years, the study of the Manchukuo period has largely been composed of research by scholars in China (especially ethnic Koreans), South Korea, and Japan. Additionally, there is a growing number of studies in English, but such works usually depend on the author’s affiliation with one of the above countries and its respective language. The divergent backgrounds of Manchukuo scholars have led to contested interpretations over shared histories in the region. English-language research emerges from these various positions and therefore highlights the lack of cohesion in the region’s historiography. Therefore, a note must be made about the naming practices used throughout my thesis and this blog.

Many of the proper nouns have, in various scholarly and contemporary texts, been rendered in (romanized) Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, respectively. Recall from Part III that the word “Manchuria” itself has a convoluted history of translation with accompanying political implications since Manchuria is not the toponym used in Chinese to describe northeast China. As can be expected with Manchuria, words frequently pass across linguistic thresholds when different cultures reside in the same spaces.

In general, the proper nouns in the thesis follow Chinese patterns and practices for places and events. When a primary source was written in Chinese, I use standard pinyin romanization. (One exception is that, when providing the pinyin for the Chinese word for the plural pronoun “we,” I use the hyphenated wo-men so that it does not get confused with the English word “women.”) However, if a text was written in Korean, romanized Korean spelling is used, and the same goes for Japanese publications.

The translation of Korean works into Chinese via Japanese presents some difficulties. My translations are based on the Chinese materials to stress that this thesis discusses the afterlives of the original texts in the specific context of Manchuria. Approximately half of the Mansŏn ilbo editorials, featured in Case Study 1, were in a recent compilation where all the primary sources had been translated into Chinese. I accessed scans of the other half of the original newspapers at the Seoul National University library. Due to this process in my research, half of the Mansŏn ilbo titles shown in Table 3 in section 2.4 are written in hanzi, because of their Chinese translations, and the other half are in their original hanja. I have rendered Korean hanja names from the Mansŏn ilbo editorials in romanized Korean, such as Ko Ch’ae-gi and Yi Tae-u in Chapters 1 and 2.

Manchuria landmarks are rendered in a mix of English and Chinese pinyin (e.g., Changbai Mountain(s), Songhua River, etc.). Changbai Mountain is the tallest mountain outcrop in Manchuria, culminating in five peaks that surround a deep crater lake. The main Korean term for the mountain refers to the highest of those peaks, literally “white-topped mountain” (Paektusan; Ch. Baitoushan). Sometimes, as exemplified by the NAUA songs, Korean sources will use a reading of “Changbai,” Changbaek, to refer to the mountain. It is unclear if such cases mean that the text originally came from Chinese or because the writer had other intentions. Due to these concerns, I use the unitalicized Changbai Mountain because it connotes the entire mountain range as well as its main peaks, and the term is intelligible across Chinese, Korean, and Japanese languages.

Another landmark named throughout these chapters is the Songhua (K: Songhwa) River. Apart from a few English translations of Korean songs in Case Study 2 where Songhwa is used, all other appearances are rendered as the deemphasized “Songhua.” Contrastingly, however, the river that serves as a border between China and Korea generally appears in this thesis as the Amnok (Ch: Yalu) River because most sources I cite that use it were written in Korean. Where translated from Chinese sources, Yalu River is used. Chinese and Korean people in the 1930s tended to refer to the Amnok/Yalu River as a shorthand for the border and the turbulent relationship between its peoples. Reflecting the source texts thus emphasizes the similar ways that Chinese and Korean writers conceptualized the world around them while also showing the differences in their thought processes. I do not italicize place names given in Chinese or Korean.

Names for provinces and cities in Manchuria, even though they had Japanese names during the Manchukuo period, are given in Chinese because the primary sources for this thesis are mostly in Chinese. Switching to Japanese would add an extra layer of decoding that is unnecessary when the thesis revolves around Chinese and Korean interactions. One problematic city name, however, is Fengtian. Historically, the Manchu word “Mukden” and its Chinese counterpart “Shenyang” were used interchangeably for the city, but Fengtian was the name of a nearby prefecture. The Manchukuo state-builders used Fengtian, perhaps because it means “mandated by Heaven.” After 1945, the city name reverted back to Shenyang, but I refer to it as Fengtian in this thesis to accurately reflect the period under examination.

Events also present difficulties for naming. In this Introduction, I used the pinyin spelling of Wanbaoshan (K: Manposan) because it has become common in current research on the incident, although older spellings used the Wade-Giles romanization Wanpaoshan. Another significant event was the Manchurian Incident, as it has come to be called in English. I have chosen to use a slightly less popular term, the Mukden Incident. One reason I use “Mukden Incident” is that it highlights the place where the event occurred. But mainly, I avoid categorizing anything as “Manchurian” throughout this thesis. The word “Manchuria” is contested, so to modify an already inconclusive toponym risks further confusion, and future scholars of Manchuria need to pay close attention to when and how the region is described. It is with this purpose in mind that the following chapters highlight the way Chinese and Korean writers in Manchukuo used the words Manzhou/Manju. It is important to retain the ambiguity of the primary materials for the reasons I discussed throughout the Introduction. 

One exception to using Chinese for place names is the region in eastern Manchuria bordering the Korean peninsula. It was historically called Kando by Koreans and Jiandao in Chinese. I use the unitalicized Kando to pay homage to the long history of Korean social life that characterizes that area of Manchuria. 

Lastly, various ways of referring to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) in English are particularly contested because translations come from groups that fought against each other. To introduce the war and its impact on Manchukuo in Case Study 1, the Second Sino-Japanese War is used. In Case Study 2, however, I make use of the Chinese name for the conflict, Zhongguo kangri zhanzheng, literally “the War of Resistance Against Japan.” The songs of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army use similar rhetoric whether in Chinese or Korean. Therefore, Chapters 3 and 4 retain “War of Resistance” to reflect the army members’ mentality and discursive practices. On another level, using “the War of Resistance” in scholarship on the NAUA songs links cultural products from the army in Manchuria to communist troops elsewhere in China and Korea.

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Self-Knowledge through Cross-Cultural Contact

The following post is Part VII in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. New readers may find it helpful to begin here. Below I define the term “self-knowledge,” and then discuss what makes it a useful framework for understanding Manchuria’s intellectual spaces.

In the dissertation, I investigate the myriad ways Chinese and Korean intellectuals in Manchuria created, defined, and transformed the collective self, or perhaps more accurately, their collective selves. The following chapters takes self-knowledge to mean the experiences, cultural symbols, discursive language, emotions and ideas shared among people in a group that are often, but not always, appropriated with the purpose of fostering communitas or community sentiment. By what processes did intellectuals produce self-knowledge and why?  

My study takes a social approach to self-knowledge. Sociologist Darin Weinberg, for instance, recommends stepping away from a first-person perspective of the self in which individuals have what philosophers refer to as “privileged access” to their own mental life.[1] Weinberg instead argues that knowing oneself defies “personal possession” because “self-knowledge is a dynamic and ongoing collective accomplishment rather than a strictly private personal assessment.”[2] By this definition, self-knowledge entails generating subjectivity that can be shared by like-minded people. A social conceptualization suggests that self-knowledge may be a critical factor in the process whereby one collective identity supersedes another.

One of the main premises of this thesis is that shared experiences lead to collective knowledge, which serves as a precursor to imagining a community. Knowledge of the collective self in turn reinforces a sense of community. What happens to self-knowledge in different settings where cross-cultural contact occurred? I aim to show how self-knowledge changes and to explain how different spaces affected the forms of self-knowledge produced through Chinese and Korean intellectual interaction.

In connection with intertextual exchange discussed above, my dissertation considers writing to be a significant form of self-knowledge. Drawing from the semiotician Theo van Leeuwen, I view writing as the practice of recontextualizing discourses. In other words, intellectual writing reflects values and ideas that are important to society at any given time. Van Leeuwen stresses that discourses do not merely exist in written form, but originate as “social cognitions,” a form of conscious knowledge because it is known across individuals.[3] Hence, a writer re-contextualizes previously held notions and ideas by giving them form in writing. I discuss the journal publications and army songs as expressions of self-knowledge for the purpose of reconstructing the discourses around Chinese and Korean interaction the participants themselves used.

Social cognitions, especially in their written form, sustain the extensive and complex processes involved in nation-building, a primary concern for the thesis. Representing a collective self in writing has historically been seen as a legitimate way to determine who “we” are and why “we” do things. Because of how the written word has been linked to the process of legitimating nations and nationalism, this thesis recognizes that some forms or platforms for self-knowledge production were considered more useful, authentic, and applicable to nation building than others in the conceived sense. 

[1] Brie Gertler, Bill Brewer, and Stewart Cohen, Privileged Access: Philosophical Accounts of Self-Knowledge (Florence, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2003) is one point of entry into the philosophies behind the concept of self-knowledge. See also Brie Gertler, “Self-Knowledge,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2017 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/self-knowledge/. Accessed 20 March 2019.

[2] Darin Weinberg, “The Social Construction of Self-Knowledge,” in Contemporary Social Constructionism, Key Themes (Temple University Press, 2014), 101–112 and 102.

[3] Theo van Leeuwen, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6.

Intertextual Exchange

The following post is Part VI in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. New readers might find that it's helpful to begin here. Below I define what the terms “intertextual exchange” and “intellectual interaction” mean and why they were important for Chinese and Korean writers in Manchuria.

Intertextual exchange, in its most basic form, is the process through which readers respond to writing via their own textual creations. In Karen Thornber’s study of East Asian writers in the early twentieth century, she argues that intertextual exchange occurred within literary contact nebulae. According to Thornber, literary contact nebulae, as opposed to “contact zones,” highlights the unfixed and fluctuating nature of “active sites both physical and creative of readerly contact, writerly contact, and textual contact…”[1] In other words, the movements of writers and texts characterized the location of literary contact nebulae. Moreover, writers not only knew about the work of their colleagues at home and abroad, they often also knew one another personally. For that reason, the phrases “intertextual exchange” and “intellectual interaction” stress the physical and social aspects of textual contact.

While Manchuria can be viewed as a contact nebula in its own right, my thesis further identifies the region’s urban and rural spaces as containing their own distinct intellectual activities. In so doing, I aim to address two specific questions: 1) How did Manchuria’s urban and rural literary contact nebulae operate? 2) What is the significance of differences in these operations? I argue that dissimilarities of literary contact nebulae contributed to the unequal power relations that played into Chinese and Korean interactions in Manchuria. Highlighting the differences in contact environment sheds light on the cross-purposes behind intertextual exchange.

The exchanges featured in the following case studies offer a multifaceted look at intertextuality in Manchuria. Be it translations published in the Manchukuo capital (Case Study 1) or military marches composed in mountain camps (Case Study 2), the texts I investigate contain conversations between people who saw themselves as a part of (potential) communities. Yet in spite of the distinct creative environments that produced the representative texts, both cases were shaped by, and contributed to, a larger conversation about nation-building in Manchukuo and beyond. Thus, intertextual exchange may involve a variety of processes, including “appropriating genres, styles, and themes, as well as transculturating individual literary works via the related and at times concomitant strategies of interpreting, adapting, translating, and intertextualizing.”[2] By turning the word “transculturation” into a verb, Thornber highlights the relationship between creative texts in East Asia and the collective identities they were written to represent. Put another way, writers produced cultural works by drawing from other cultures. Intertextual exchange in Manchukuo was no exception.

[1] Karen Thornber coined the term literary contact nebulae to sharpen the focus the more familiar “contact zone” advocated by Mary Louise Pratt. See Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion, 2.

[2] Ibid., 2.

The Role of the Intellectual in Manchukuo Nation-Building

The following post is Part V in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. New readers may find it helpful to begin here. Below I discuss what it meant to be an intellectual in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation and why it is important for scholars of Manchukuo to keep definitions of the intellectual at the forefront of their work.

The unfixed nature of the concepts of minzu and minjok signal another crucial term for this study: the intellectual. What it meant to be Chinese or Korean directly related to role of the intellectual in East Asia in the 1930s. After all, intellectuals led the production of self-knowledge for the propagation of the minzu and minjok. Because of the important social role they played, the concept of the intellectual has been an essential element in cultural, political, and societal studies of early twentieth-century East Asia.

Many factors contributed to the emergence of “intellectuals” in China and Korea, and literary production in Manchuria was inextricably linked to these larger trends.[1] Central to the transformation of the role of the educated elite from pre-modern scholar-officials to modern social commentators was the idea of the nation promulgated by the West and mediated through Japan. The national idea, as it has come to be called, not only came to dominate the objectives of intellectuals to renew their respective societies, but also their methods of social enlightenment. With the intrusion of Western countries came a prototypical modern life and new technology. Intellectuals inspired awareness through mass media in the form of printed materials, newspapers, and radio, thereby enabling a sense of national identity, a process underlined in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.[2] Moreover, as Ernest Gellner argues in Nations and Nationalism, the nation leveled differences like class, status, and gender to a certain degree.[3] As self-appointed purveyors of cultural symbols and knowledge about the character of the minzu and minjok, intellectuals in East Asia played a major role in conceptualizing what exactly could be constituted as “Chinese” or “Korean.”

In Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919, Andre Schmid argues that Korean intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century negotiated a path between a dying Chinese imperial order and a rising Japanese empire. Schmid makes two points particularly relevant to this study. Firstly, he argues that Korean intellectuals engaged with writing and ideas from the old Sinocentric order and the new Japanese imperial order. Invariably, being an intellectual during the early twentieth century therefore meant employing what Schmid calls “cultural strategies” that involved measuring oneself against neighboring communities.[4] Schmid’s positioning of Korea serves as a reminder that Manchuria was also located between Chinese and Japanese civilizing discourses. The symbiotic relationship of Manchuria with the Korean peninsula further illustrates that the discourses earlier intellectuals had used in “identify[ing] just what denoted their particular nation as Korean” likewise affected how Koreans in Manchuria viewed themselves.[5] Discourses originating in Korea likewise affected Chinese intellectuals in Manchuria.

Secondly, Schmid considers the content of newspaper writing paramount to imagining the nation. “Precisely the formation of particular ways of understanding and ordering the nation determines the direction of nationalist movements, the activities of its members, and the participation of the nation-state in the broader global arena.”[6] Schmid otherwise refers to such media content as self-knowledge and argues that it laid the foundation for nationalist movements during the colonial 1930s and after 1945. The current dissertation draws on Schmid’s vocabulary of content and self-knowledge because it defogs the misty lens of ethno-nationalist sentiment. If early configurations of nationalism in Korea and elsewhere were constructed through intellectual discourse, as Schmid argues, then it follows that writers in Manchuria worked for a similar purpose.

Lydia Liu, a literary scholar of China, recounts a process for Chinese not unlike that of early modern Korean. Rather than newspaper content, Liu analyzes literary works, because literature and writing eventually became the site where intellectuals focused their efforts to articulate the national character (guominxing).[7] Liu points out that the discourse of guominxing, though informed by a Chinese context, revolved around Western notions of nation and nationhood. Like the concept of the “intellectual,” the early modern definitions of guominxing and the word “literature” (wenxue) were impacted by what Liu refers to as translingual practice, whereby “new words, meanings, and discourses arise, circulate, and acquire legitimacy within the target language because of, or in spite of, the latter’s contact—or collision—with the source language.”[8] In other words, Chinese intellectuals employed literature as a legitimate means to make manifest their visions of collective identity, which were dependent on the national idea.

The importance of nation-building discourses, including that of literature as a tool for defining national character, undoubtedly affected Manchuria’s educated elite. However, the writers featured in this thesis, though generally well-educated, cannot be considered elite as such. Chinese and Korean intellectuals in Manchuria recognized their positions as outliers both in relation to the Japanese imperial hierarchy and in relation to their counterparts in central China and the Korean peninsula. Moreover, social relations between local Chinese inhabitants and Korean migrants had been strained for decades, so these thinkers were duly aware of their (often negative) (pre)conceptions of each other. The value of the non-Japanese intellectuals who worked in Manchuria lies in their subjectivity as spokespeople for their communities and in the ways they interacted.

In order to understand the interconnected nature of intellectual ideas and the social conditions from which they are born, Timothy Cheek suggests recovering “the questions of the day.”[9] Under the rule of the Japanese, one inevitable question for Chinese and Korean intellectuals in Manchuria was “who are we now that Manchukuo exists?” Even though Chinese and Korean intellectuals were equipped with a similar vocabulary of nations and nationalism, their positions in relation to one another depended on how Manchukuo impacted their work. For this reason, I argue that Manchukuo offered a framework for cross-cultural production, under which Chinese and Korean writers had opportunities to negotiate their social relations with each other.

Schmid’s notion that self-knowledge equates to national knowledge is problematic in the context of Manchukuo. Non-Japanese intellectuals were privy to their own productive value vis-à-vis the national idea, but desired to “establish sovereignty over their own labor.”[10] The question for intellectuals then becomes, for what purpose(s), and to what effect(s), did they wield their productive value?  For the purpose of this thesis, I treat the intellectual in Manchuria as a social actor. The two cases presented in this thesis are contingent on what Cheek refers to as “worlds of intellectual life,” which can include the metropolitan elite, provincial elite, and the nonelite, or “local intellectuals with the skills, interests, and activities clearly representative of the everyday lives of most of China’s thinkers and writers but not widely influential.”[11] Within these levels also exist worlds shaped by social experience: popular culture or “voices from the land,” women’s worlds, and “worlds of affinity” such as ethnic minorities or self-chosen identities.[12] By thus delineating a clear conceptualization of the intellectual in Manchuria, we can begin to understand the kinds of communities Chinese and Korean writers imagined.

Significantly, the concept of “intellectual worlds” leads Cheek to discern between urban and rural publics. He describes these cross-cutting worlds as a “matrix of spatial interaction and social experience” that provides the framework of intellectual life.[13] According to Cheek, local thinkers sought as much to answer the questions of the day as their urban counterparts, and they used their discursive powers to shape new social and spatial realities.[14] The Chinese and Korean writers discussed in Case Study 1 worked in Manchukuo’s cities, an environment structured for the dissemination of the national idea. In what this study treats as a direct correlation, scholarship on Manchukuo’s intellectual history has focused precisely on works produced in urban environments. In contrast, the NAUA songwriters are representatives of the non-elite intellectual world, or in other words, the rural public that Cheek describes.

Chang-Tai Hung, a historian of popular and folk musical culture, acknowledges the discursive power of communist music as “an activating force in shaping the minds and hearts of the people and a determinant of historical reality.”[15] Hung further asserts that military songs from the War of Resistance, as well as their later collections, are “highly selected public documents intended to provide justification for a specific political agenda.”[16] Similarly, the NAUA songs contain important discourse about social life in Manchukuo that were often veiled in urban writing. Regarding Chinese and Korean intellectual interaction, in particular, the NAUA songs reveal that one aspect of their political agenda was precisely to bring the two communities together. Such was not the priority for urban writers, as the intertextual analysis in Case Study 1 will demonstrate. These differences show that Korean and Chinese writers in Manchuria determined their own intellectual value, a value that was not wholly connected to nationalist sentiment.    

[1] Timothy Cheek notes that the concept of “intellectual,” articulated through the modern Chinese word, zhishifenzi, came from the Russian word “intelligentsia.” Timothy Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 5.

[2] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. edn. (New York: Verso, 2006).

[3] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell University Press, 2008), 62.

[4] Ibid., 3-4. See also Tikhonov, Modern Korea and Its Others.

[5] Ibid., 4.

[6] Schmid, Korea Between Empires, 6.

[7] Liu, Translingual Practice, 50.

[8] Ibid., 6 and 273 for the translingual practice of wenxue.

[9] Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History, 16.

[10] Park, Two Dreams in One Bed, 196.

[11] Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History, 10-11.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 92-96.

[14] Ibid., 10-11 and 16.

[15] Chang-Tai Hung, “The Politics of Songs: Myths and Symbols in the Chinese Communist War Music, 1937-1949,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 4 (1996): 903.

[16] Ibid., 907.

What it Meant to be Chinese or Korean in Manchukuo

The following post is Part IV in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. New readers may find it helpful to begin here. Below I discuss why the terms “Chinese” and “Korean” are sometimes difficult to define when it comes to the Manchukuo period.

Defining the terms “Chinese” and “Korean” is of fundamental importance to my thesis. I primarily use these two words to emphasize the language in which any given text was written. But I also use “Korean” and “Chinese” as signifiers for communities that employed these languages to differentiate themselves from other collectives. In the context of 1930s Manchuria, language became a critical tool for Chinese and Korean writers to distinguish themselves from each other, the Japanese colonizers, and even from central China and the Korean peninsula. The latter point indicates the inherent difficulty of using the terms “Chinese” and “Korean” as modifiers for people or language in Manchuria because each word has ethnic and national implications in the region of East Asia.

What it meant to be “Chinese” or “Korean” in 1930s Manchuria diverged from the categories of ethnic and/or national identity that were simultaneously being shaped in the Korean peninsula and China proper. To define each term must not only take into account the transnational independence movements in East Asia but also the specific circumstances under the Manchukuo regime. With regards to the independence movements, scholars note the rise to popular use of the words minzu, minjok, and minzoku (in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, respectively) meaning “nation” or “ethnie.”[1] Lydia Liu cites minzu as a Sino-Japanese loanword, meaning that it came into modern Chinese and Korean through Japanese kanji inspired by European languages.[2]

The etymology of the terms minzu, minjok, and minzoku demonstrates that the Japanese empire had served to spread ideas associated with modernity, especially political and cultural nationalism. While intellectuals in China and Korea considered themselves to be purveyors of cultural and scientific knowledge, much of their modern learning had come from Europe via Japan as opposed to having developed organically within a larger East Asian civilizational sphere. Japan’s cultural influence was compromised, however, as the Japanese empire reached the height of its power in the 1940s. The more force Japan used to spread its empire and the ideology of Pan-Asianism, the more determined many Chinese and Korean nationalists were to extricate their countries from Japanese rule.

Andre Schmid, a historian of Korea, notes: “The appearance and spread of minjok offered writers a powerful conceptual tool to reconsider the nation in multiple ways. The same term served intellectuals in all three countries of East Asia, giving to nationalist writing in East Asia a shared vocabulary and, through this common usage, reinforcing the naturalizing claims of the term to universality.”[3] Consequently, a direct relationship developed between intellectual practices and the burgeoning ideas around nationhood at the turn of the century. The terms minzu, minjok, and minzoku answered the purpose of very different political undertakings in spite of their linguistic and ideological similitude.[4] Politically, “China” and “Korea” in the 1930s had not consolidated as the entities they became decades later. The Republic of China under the Kuomintang faced threats to its integrity from foreign and domestic entities, including the increasingly influential Chinese Communist Party. Being colonized, Korea did not have a polity except for the partially recognized Korean Provisional Government in exile based in Shanghai, but it was by no means the only potential leader of an independent Korea. Japanese state-makers, on the other hand, appropriated the concept of ethnic self-determination in their creation of Manchukuo as a multi-ethnic state. These discrepancies between historically defined ethnic communities and the political realities of ethnic nationalism necessarily conditioned the Chinese and Korean experiences in Manchukuo.

In explaining why Korean nationalism came to center on ethnic identity from the late nineteenth century, Gi-Wook Shin specifies two interrelated processes: “the rise and dominance of ‘nation’ as a major source of collective or categorical identity over nonnational or transnational forms (class, for example), and the rise and establishment of a racialized and ethnicized notion of nation.”[5] Shin highlights this subtle division to remind us that there was no guarantee that, as a form of collective identity, the nation would prevail over other rival forms.[6] He further argues that historians need to study the historical processes “in which the nation rose, was contested, overrode other contending forms of collective or categorical identities, and came to be conflated with ethnicity and race.”[7] This thesis represents collective identities that contended with the Manchukuo state and various notions of the ethnic nation as the predominant forms of community. Chinese and Koreans in Manchuria negotiated multiple forms of collective identity, such as 1) that imposed by Manchukuo nation-builders; 2) the hoped-for outcomes of the minzu and minjok independence movements; 3) the sense of community that stemmed from each group’s respective relationship to Manchuria. The nations that later became the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and the Republic of Korea (ROK) overrode the conceptions of identity presented in this thesis, which means that the evidence here may offer insights into the relationships across East Asia before the rise of current nation-states.

Scholars of Manchuria have privileged the nation as the default collective formation based on the minzu and minjok over other conceptualizations. Intellectuals throughout East Asia invoked the minzu and minjok for the purpose of turning it into an objective reality, as described above. Such an interpretation, however, overlooks the function of the intellectual in the particular social environment of Manchukuo. Japanese state-makers based the establishment of Manchukuo on the postulate that a nation-state was the best form of collective identity under circumstances where outright colonization was not possible. The Manchukuo regime therefore impinged upon the nationalist objectives of non-Japanese intellectuals. Under these circumstances, Chinese and Korean thinkers were faced with opportunities to form other kinds of communities.

[1] The three words are represented by the same Chinese characters: 民族.

[2] See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 292 and Andre Schmid, Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 173-175.

[3] Schmid, Korea Between Empires, 174.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2006), 3.

[6] Ibid., 7.

[7] Ibid., 7-8.