Reading:

*** Han Sorya and North Korean Literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK (1994) by Brian Myers. -- A brief survey of North Korean literature after the 1930s, through the eyes of Han Sorya (한설야), a hack that became the undisputed heavyweight king of North Korean socialist realism under Kim Il-sung. It sort of contrasts the Soviet development of socialist realism with the very loose interpretation of socialist realism in North Korea, particularly that of Han Sorya. Soviet writers also violated key concepts of socialist realism and renovated the theory as they went along, but Han Sorya never really got the basics and his novels were infused with pre-socialist Korean values of filial piety (no children struggling against the reactionary old ways, like in Soviet and Chinese novels), ethnocentrism (no internationalist solidarity across racial lines), feminine chastity and submission (the few female heroines of North Korea's socialist realist novels were never heroic by liberating themselves-- they were heroic by tidying up and boiling rice porridge for male colleagues and looking after children), and sobak han, a trait that is described by Koreans as peculiar only to their people, which can be a "benevolent naivety" or something that leads to explosive anger. Myers says: "Stalin and Mao were revered for their perfect grasp of dialectical materialism, an omnipotent science that made them omnipotent too. Kim Jong Il and his late father, Kim Il-sung, are revered, like the monarchs they more closely resemble, for their perfect embodiment of national virtues." Han Sorya's writing often glorified those national virtues instead of socialist virtues, which it's suggested her barely understood.

Tagged on to the end, is a translation of Han Sorya's short story "Jackals," which Myers describes as "the country's most enduring work of fiction." It's the work of a hack, full of ridiculous and mixed metaphors and factual errors by the author and, of course, a complete violation of socialist realism, the stated national literary philosophy of North Korea. It's a racist caricature of a family of American missionaries, whose son beats a Korean boy unconscious. The family then covers up the crime by injecting the Korean boy with deadly bacteria and burning the corpse. The boy's mother erupts in anger and is dragged away by police. And that's the end.

Okay, so the American boy has just snatched a ball away from the Korean boy and then beaten him unconscious. His father arrives and questions him:

"What've you got there?"
"It's a ball. That thief from the cowshed stole my ball."
"Stole it?"
"Yes, so I took it back."
"What, something those children have kicked and handled? Yech, how filthy! Throw it away at once; there might be germs on it... We Americans must not touch filthy people with our sacred hands, is that understood?"
"But father, we Americans have the right to beat blacks to death, don't we? God forgives us for doing that."
"That's because blacks aren't sons of God... ... For thieves... we have dogs. Just as a dog kills a thief with his teeth, you know, one mustn't beat niggers with bare hands but with sticks. In the same way..."

Han Sorya loves drawing caricatures of the evil Americans:

The old jackal's spade-shaped eagle's nose hung villainously over his upper lip, while the vixen's teats jutted out like the stomach of a snake that has just swallowed a demon, and the slippery wolf cub gleamed with poison like the head of a venomous snake that has just shed its skin. Their six sunken eyes seemed to Sugil's mother like open graves constantly waiting for corpses. Heavy.

*** Please Don't Call Me Human (《千万别把我当人》) (1989), by Wang Shuo, translated (2003) by Howard Goldblatt. -- Was this really written in 1989? It reminds me more than anything else of reading angry/vulgar/funny stuff from Tianya, post-'80s kids talking about national face and the character of the Chinese people with mock-grave seriousness and their very own profanity. It's a messy book and it sometimes doesn't completely work as a novel, I guess, but I'm still trying to figure it all out. Here's how somebody else explained it: "把傻逼当人看，和争取被傻逼当人看，都等于把自己当傻逼看. 这千万别把我当人的意思其实是说，你们把人字儿给占了，那我哪怕不当人了，也要坚决地站在你们的对立面."

(It's sorta funny to note the "banned in China" stamped on the back. This book is still in print in China. I find that's the case with a lot of translated Chinese fiction. The "banned in China" tag sells books but, in most cases, the books are banned in name only and still widely available or they're not banned at all and still in print, being published by legit publishing houses and discussed and written about).