Paek Sinae (1908-1939)
Life and Journey
Paek Sinae (1908-1939) was born in Yŏngch’ŏn, a neighboring town of Taegu, the provincial capital of North Kyŏngsang area. Her father was a self-made businessman who owned orchards and farm land as well as mills in and around Taegu. Paek grew up in wealth but was a sickly child. She was enrolled in schools, but soon quit all of them, probably due to illness and her father being indecisive about educating a girl in a school system. Instead, he had Paek’s maternal uncle teach her elementary Chinese classics at home. Paek eventually became a teacher and worked in an elementary school for less than a year, but circumstances around how she obtained a diploma (her father’s pressure to school authorities?) or why she quit the job quickly are a mystery. Somehow, Paek Sinae, by her early twenties, became a self-taught writer, avid reader, and adventurer who would run away to Siberia and Japan all by herself to see the world.
She is sometimes considered a socialist writer due to her engagement in socialism from 1925. In the fall of 1926, Paek arrived in Vladivostok as a stowaway, and was deported for illegal entry into Russia after a couple of months. She continued to be involved in nationwide (Korean) socialist women’s activism after her return, and when Paek Kiho, her brother and fellow socialist leader in their area, resigned from the local leadership, Paek Sinae took over his position briefly in 1927. As with many things in Paek’s life, it is unknown exactly when and why she disengaged herself from socialist organizations, but by 1929, when Paek won a literary award – her first attempt at becoming a writer – she seemed distanced from the movement.
Paek Sinae, two portraits.
Between 1930 and 1932, Paek spent some time in Japan but these visits were not supported by her family and she eventually returned to Korea due to financial difficulty. Nothing much is known about why Paek went to Japan or what she did there, but a photograph showing Paek as an actress for a Chekhov play in Japan, and a couple of short stories written by a Japanese writer (possibly a lover), are among the few tantalizing clues to her life in Japan.
Paek’s marriage to a man arranged by her father ended in divorce in 1938, but ironically, 4 out of the 6 years of her married life were the most productive times for Paek’s writing career. Although not much was written about her husband or her married life, Paek seemed to enjoy stability during marriage. Shortly after divorce, she died of cancer at the age of 31.
Paek wrote an essay and two versions of a short story based on her trip to Siberia and an essay on her trip to Qingdao, China. These essays are unconventional travelogues that do not show an itinerary or reason for travel, but reveal Paek’s notion of herself as a woman and as part of a colonized people under imperial rule. The following piece, a short vignette written at the request of a monthly magazine Chogwang in 1937, offers a striking contrast to the travelogues just mentioned. It shows Paek’s cheerful side along with a refined style and wit, a markedly different tone from her fictional works, some of which evoke a sort of Zola-esque realism in describing the destitution Koreans faced.
