Translator's Introduction to We Didn’t Know — Web Exclusive
By Don Mee Choi
Cho Se-hui (b. 1942) is considered one of the most important contemporary South Korean writers. His most well-known work, A Tiny Ball Launched by a Dwarf (1978), has enjoyed more than 100 printings since its first publication. "We Didn't Know" is one of the linked stories in his second book, Time Travel (1983).
"We Didn't Know" is a story of resistance about a hunger strike carried out by Korean women factory workers. The story needs to be understood in the context of the military dictatorships of South Korea supported by the U.S. from the 1960s to the late 1980s. During South Korea's rapid industrialization, young Korean women from poor and rural areas were exploited and had to endure harsh working conditions in garment, textile, and electronic factories. Even though independent labor organizing was banned, Korean women factory workers resisted and organized themselves. The South Korean government broke up strikes and gatherings by hiring thugs to humiliate and attack the workers. Korean women workers played a crucial role in building South Korea's minjung ("people's") movement in the 1980s that opposed the authoritarian rule, economic inequality, foreign domination, and national division of Korea.
In 1979, the same year that South Korea's dictatorial president Park Chung Hee was assassinated, Cho received South Korea's prestigious Tong-in Literature Award. Cho has since spoken of the oppressive dictatorship of Park as a period when people were arrested for even uttering the words "democracy" and "freedom." Cho felt that he could not remain silent under such oppression and was compelled to write about the exploited lives of the oppressed. He had two goals in mind: to reach even readers with limited education and to make sure that his books would not be banned.
I faced a number of challenges in translating "We Didn't Know. " Korean is distant linguistically from English, and there is an enormous gap between Korean- and English-speaking cultures. When I translate, I try to remain faithful to the Korean by adhering as closely as possible to a literal translation of the original. That's not always easy. In "We Didn't Know," the author seldom uses pronouns, which is a common practice in Korean. The subject of a sentence is often known only through context. Because this is a story about a collective struggle, I used "we" in most cases.
Don Mee Choi was born in South Korea but now lives in Seattle. She has translated When the Plug Gets Unplugged: Poems by Kim Hyesoon and Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women.