Turbid Rivers

By Ch’ae Man-sik

Translated by Kim Chunghee

(1939, Translated 2016)

Dalkey Archive Press, Library of Korean Literature


Ch’ae Man-sik began his writing career as a journalist under Japanese Colonial rule and eventually became one of Korea’s most celebrated satirists, working in a variety of genres, including short stories, dramas, and novels. In the opening of Turbid Rivers, Ch’ae asks the reader to visualize the meandering path of the Geum Gang river as it wanders its way through Korea’s interior and finally merges with the Yellow Sea. The river goes by many names, including “Silk River” and “White Horse;” the latter “suggestive of purity and innocence. To use the analogy of a woman, it is akin to a maiden as yet untainted by worldly affairs.” Ch’ae notes that the river only becomes turbid as it begins to spill out on its final path to the Yellow Sea, and this is where  Ch’ae sets his story, in the port city of Gunsan. Ch’ae presents us with two remarkable women, one representing the traditional values of Korean womanhood, the other embodying the sensibilities and vision of a “new woman” of the 1930s. We meet twenty-one-year-old Chobong and seventeen-year-old Gyebong at a critical moment in their lives. They have the misfortune of being born into a large family that lives hand to mouth on the income brought in by the labors of their long-suffering mother and their father’s gambling on the local rice market. After accepting the grim calculus of their incomes, Jeong and Madam Yu commit to selling off their lovely daughters; with the sisters gone, their mother can invest in the education of her two young sons, and their father can indulge in his long-held dream of becoming a legitimate rice trader. Chobong is in the orbit of four men. She works for a friend of her father who surpassed him in every way.  Along with his much put-upon wife, “Shaggy-faced Han Chambong” has built up a successful neighborhood pharmacy. To economise, the Jeongs rent out a small room to Seungjae, an impoverished young man who works in a free clinic and dreams of becoming a doctor. She also captures the attention of Taesu, who works as a bank clerk. Handsome, gainfully employed, and be-suited, he charms Chobong and her parents, pays a good price, and takes the woman as his wife. The marriage turns out to be disastrous. While the Jeongs exploit the bride price, Ch’ae reveals the truth: Taesu is riddled with venereal disease and is embezzling money from the bank to support his long-term relationship with a gisaeng with whom he intends to continue a relationship while married to the virginal Chobong. The fourth man sent to torment Chobong is an associate of Taesu’s, a leering hunchback. In many ways, Turbid Rivers is reminiscent of Victorian novels of fallen women–Tess of the D’Urbervilles comes to mind– though Ch’ae does not hold back when describing the sexual extortion and violence practiced by the three villains. Also, with the creation of the younger sister, Gyebong, Ch’ae introduces us to a “modern” woman whose radical ideas about self-determination, love, and marriage hint at the possibility of an alternative path for the women at river’s end.

“When country bumpkins, with a headband wrapped around their heads, and their ears hidden under the band, one day find their lives have somehow been reduced to poverty, they become so anxious that they look for an easy way out, and usually resort to vain or illusionary means. Driven by desperation, they sometimes trust themselves to some cult such as Baekbaek-gyo or Bocheon-gyo, and get swindled out of their last remaining farmland by religious tricksters. And those who claim to be smarter come up to Incheon, harboring a vain ambition to make a fortune overnight. But they all lose their money at the exchange and return with empty pockets.

They’re not heroes like Xiang Yu the Great, who, after being defeated, killed himself on the battlefield. So they’re thick-skinned enough to go back home, yet when they get to Chukhyeon Station to take the train home, they can’t help but be overwhelmed by grief and despair. While waiting for the train, sitting beside the pond, they shed plentiful tears of remorse into it.

Because the same thing has happened to one person, two, ten, a hundred, a thousand people over the course of many years, the pond has been filled and refilled. Such is the story that has come to us, a story that sounds like something invented by the wandering bard and satirist, Kim Satgat.”