Thousands of Comrades

Park’s novel, a fictionalized account of real-life Korean labor activist Kang Juryoung, is set sometime in the early twentieth century in Gando, a region contested between Chinese Manchuria and the newly Japanese-colonized Korean peninsula, about three decades before Korea was divided. Formerly a vassal state of China, Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910, after the First Sino-Japanese War. At the behest of her impoverished parents, a spirited young Juryoung embarks on arranged marriage to Jeonbin, an educated young man of the merchant class, with whom she falls in love.

When her patriotic husband decides to become a freedom fighter, Juryoung runs away with him to join the Liberation Army in Manchuria, a rag-tag team of nationalist and Communist soldiers that were part of the armed anti-Japanese resistance that took off in the 1920s and 1930s. Kim II-sung, the first leader of North Korea, was one such guerrilla fighter, whose role in the independence movement has been used to secure his family’s rule over the present-day pariah state ever since.

Yet none of that matters to Juryoung, who joins out of concern for her husband, rather than politics: “What’s the use of liberating a country that fails to protect or take care of me? No business of mine what name my country has, as long as my family doesn’t starve and isn’t cast out into the cold,” she reflects. The prose, written in close third person, deftly moves in and out of Juryoung’s perspective. Her unapologetically working-class pragmatism stands in direct contrast to the idealism of male revolutionary leaders; her decision to join the resistance and take on an increasingly prominent organizing role actively defies traditional gender norms of the time. Such feminist veins run throughout the narrative, which follows Juryoung’s reluctant political awakening and transformation into a determined activist leader.

Unlike the boyish and bookish Jeonbin, Juryoung — a sharp-witted, seasoned farmhand — quickly distinguishes herself among the rebels, who promote her from kitchen duties to playing an active role in missions. When she catches the eye of the general, however, an insecure Jeonbin rejects her, and Juryoung returns home in frustration. After her husband unexpectedly dies, Juryoung and her family move to Sariwon and work as rural laborers. Her parents make plans to marry Juryoung off to their new landlord — but she doesn’t go.

Instead, Juryoung decides to strike out on her own and chase her dream of becoming a “modern girl” in Pyongyang, where she finds work at a rubber factory. It’s the first time in her life that she doesn’t have anyone telling her what to do, that she’s not simply prioritizing survival. But although she calls the shots in her new life, Juryoung still finds herself “trapped by the limits of her imagination”; her previous escapades as a rebel fighter feel like a distant dream. “To do something just because she wanted to do it is a precious experience for her,” she contemplates, during a quiet moment of rest with Okkie, a younger factory worker who becomes one of her first true female friends.

During the Great Depression, Juryoung and other workers are hit with a series of pay cuts. As the struggle escalates, Juryoung ends up joining a Communist trade union and leads her fellow female laborers to go on strike; staging protests that galvanize workers and eventually force factory owners to backtrack on wage cuts. She rises up to become one of the most prominent female labor activists fighting for the working class against Japanese repression — a role that leads to her imprisonment by colonial authorities, and to her eventual death.

In the book’s closing chapter, we’re left with the author’s imagining of the speech she may have given at her infamous protest, on the rooftop of the Pyongwon Rubber Factory: “If my one body should die for the 2,300 of my comrades to survive, how could it not be worthwhile? The greatest bit of learning I have ever received is that there is no higher honor than to sacrifice one’s life for the greater good.” Juryoung achieves self-actualization, but sacrifices herself in the process.

Gendered Roles

Both Capitalists Must Starve and When Sleeping Women Wake paint a nuanced portrait of how wartime conditions push women to move outside of traditional roles in patriarchal systems and, in some cases, propel them onto a path of personal liberation — often at a high cost. While Park’s text zeroes in on Juryoung’s journey, Pei Yin’s novel explores these dynamics through an ensemble cast, centered around the story of a mother, daughter and housemaid struggling to survive the Japanese invasion in Hong Kong.

Mingzhu, the Shanghai-born First Wife of the wealthy Tang family, and her inquisitive daughter Qiang, live a restricted but comfortable life in British-occupied Hong Kong with their beloved maid, Biyu. In 1941, the Japanese army captures the city and the three women are ripped apart: Mingzhu is forced to work as a translator for the Japanese, while Qiang and Biyu take on grueling work in a textile factory in the rural New Territories. There, the young and bold Qiang crosses paths with the East River Column, an underground rebel group, and decides to join the scrappy band of guerrilla fighters.

Aligned with the Communist party, the real-life East River Column worked closely with Chinese Nationalists and foreign troops to help liberate Hong Kong. Hiding out in the countryside, they launched attacks, sabotaged enemy supply lines, gathered intelligence, and mounted escape operations to free prisoners of war and internees from Japanese camps. At one point, the resistance grew into a sizable force with some three thousand members, including local women and children. One example is Fang Gu, an educated female guerrilla fighter who helped smuggle scholars living in her mother’s boarding house out of Hong Kong island. After joining the resistance, she worked her way up to become a captain — a trajectory that parallels that of the protagonist Qiang in Pei Yin’s novel.

The trauma wrought by colonial oppression is a powerful catalyst for change, yet the protagonists’ transformations are forever mediated by their gender — a pervasive source of conflict and negotiation. Captured by Japanese troops, Mingzhu is appointed as a translator for a Japanese captain, who turns out to be a spy for the anti-colonial resistance. The unexpected role saves her from becoming a “comfort woman,” a term referring to women who were made to serve as sex slaves in Japanese camps.

Researchers from Japan and Korea estimate that the Japanese military forced about two hundred thousand women from across the region to work in such brothels. But Chinese scholars argue that the figure may be even higher. After all, women abducted from China – who usually did not survive the comfort stations, and were rarely mentioned in Japanese records – are likely underrepresented in the existing data, according to the authors of Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves.

The threat of rape, violence and starvation is constant throughout the novel, a fast-paced narrative that doesn’t shy away from the bodily horrors of war but actively confronts them. In one tense scene, Qiang embarks on her first mission to scout a newly discovered comfort station — only to watch helplessly as a pregnant woman flings herself from the building’s rooftop in order to escape the torture. The site, Nam Koo Terrace, is now an abandoned mansion in real life. Some locals claim that it remains haunted by the ghosts of comfort women who perished inside its red-brick walls.

Meanwhile, a starving Biyu survives a beating by Japanese soldiers on her way back from a factory shift when her friend Francine bravely steps in to defend her. In the process, however, Francine is raped and killed, leaving a distraught Biyu to take her broken body back to her elderly father, whose mental health collapses following his daughter’s murder.

As in Capitalists Must Starve, the text’s protagonists are given moments of temporary relief from the brutalities of colonial oppression, in the form of tender interactions and unexpected connection. Despite their harsh circumstances, they gravitate towards love in whatever capacity they can. In addition to familial love and friendship, the narrative also features romantic side plots, involving foreign love interests.

A married Mingzhu falls in love with Henry Beaumont, a Chinese classical literature enthusiast and Qiang’s language tutor, shortly before the invasion. A British prisoner of war, Henry ends up working for the Japanese-controlled press, where he secretly gathers intelligence for the rebels. Before the city falls, Qiang also meets an intriguing young Japanese man, Hiroshi Nakamura. When the two encounter one another again, they appear to be on opposite sides of the conflict; only later does Qiang realize that Hiroshi is also part of the resistance.

Such interracial relationships, relatively taboo during the era, are also made possible by the ruptures of war. Perhaps the text could have had more to say about British colonialism and Chinese collaborators — important dynamics which are only briefly alluded to. Nevertheless, through crafting characters that complicate the stereotypical portrayals of British, Chinese, and Japanese people during the period, the novel considers an oft-overlooked viewpoint from those on the margins, and doggedly delivers their stories to the forefront.

Above all, the two novels illuminate the diversity and complexity of women’s lives under the Japanese occupation of East Asia, which are too often depicted through the singular lens of victimhood. Female rebels, the ordinary women who exerted their hard-earned agency under the most precarious wartime conditions, are too-often left out of the historical account. Overlooking them represents a collective failure to commemorate their contributions to the region’s anti-colonial resistance.

These narratives, although fictionalized, are a chance to pay tribute to these real-life women who fell in the cause of liberation. They are an invitation to reflect on the gendered aspects of our own cultural histories, lest they, too, end up becoming forgotten.