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Summary: Kim San, a Korean Communist who triumphed over himself
Review: Kim San was executed during the Communist revolution in China. He was a promising communist who dremt korea's independence. He thought that the success of chinese communism would ultimately bring about the defeat of japan. And this would produce korea's independence. That's why he worked for Chinese communism. He said that I was defeated to everything, I lost my mother country, and I lost my youth because I was devoted to independence movement. But I triumphed over myself. Even though, he lost his life during revolution movement. His life itself is the reflection our modern era. Try to read this book, you can get a glimpse of Korean culture and korean people's way of thinking. Most of korean intellectuals have read this book. Before '90, south korean government prohibited the publishing of this book. If you lost your value system, why don't you try this book?
This book will probably teach you the true way to your life.....
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Summary: One of the most important book of Korea of the 1920s and 80s
Review: My review title reflects my own experience in Korean society during the 1980s as a college student. At that time, the Korean translation of this book 'Ariran' (actually, the correct Korean sound is 'Arirang') was read among many Korean college students in addition to the biography of Cheon Tae-Il, a young worker who self-immolated in 1970 protesting against the harsh working condition and the poor treatment of factory workers by employers and the military regime. These books' consciousness-awakening influence may have been like that of Marcuse in the US during the 1960s and 70s or that of Howard Zinn now, and they are still being read in Korea. Many college students awakened by their modern history's agony and workers' poor condition just dropped out schools and went to factories and other sites for engaging in or organizing social movements for social progress and human emancipation, which people now call 'democratization' in a simply technical way. Actually, this book was published in 1941 in the US by a prominent American woman journalist, Nym Wales, who went to China for the purpose of writing newspaper articles and interviewing the leaders of Chinese revolution with her husband of that time, Edgar Snow, who was the author of a well-known book, the Red Stars of Chinese Revolution. If you read this beautifully written book 'Ariran', you can get some ideas of unrevealed events in East Asian history during the 1920s and 30s by the author's description of a Korean revolutionary (Kim San, real name is Chang Ji-Rak), who left the occupied Korea by Japan at that time, went to the mainland, and finally engaged in the several battles of Chinese Revolution against the Japanese and Nationalist Armies believing the Revolution as the first step toward a region-wide revolutions including that Japanese one. His earlier experience in Korea of changing his identity from a Christian to a Socialist revolutionary after seeing the Japanese brutality during the March 1st movement in 1919 is also revealing(but tragically, he was executed in his thirties by Chinese Communists who feared his influences among revolutionaries and labeled him as a Trotskyist). This is a tragic saga incorporating history and an existential story into a person's life. Kim San, whom Nym Wales found the most attractive figure among her interviees including now famous revolution leaders, was a person who could discuss in English with her and translated some Russian revolutionary texts into Korean as an intellectual but also was a combatant in several significant battles in the revolution. He may be considered someone like Che Guevara in the East. This book is a classic. And I wonder why this book is out of print even though there has been an attempt to make his life as a commercial film in Korea because it was so dramatic. Nym Wales wrote a great book, which stimulated so strongly historical imagination that many people could change their own lives in Korea even after the book was published decades ago. I srongly recommend this classic for East Asian Studies students if you like Mishima Yukio's, or other classics in this field
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