Kang Kyŏngae
1906–1944
Biography
Kang Kyŏngae (강경애, 1906–1944), sometimes written Kang Kyŏng-ae and known by the pen name Kang Gama, was a Korean novelist, poet and women's rights activist. She came from Hwanghae province. In 1921 she entered a girls' school in Pyongyang, and two years later she was expelled there after a student strike. She then spent a year at Dongduk Girls' School in Seoul. In 1927 she joined the Geunuhoe, the women's association, and became an officer of its Jangyeon branch. She made her name as a writer in 1931 with the short story Pagum (破琴), published in the Chosun Ilbo.
In 1931 she married Jang Ha-il and moved to Gando, the part of Manchuria where many Korean settlers lived, and she never returned to Seoul to live. Her best-known novel is Human Problems (인간문제), serialised in the Dong-a Ilbo from August 1934. It follows the lowest-ranked women of colonial Korea and shows how colonial rule and class oppression press on the poor. Her serial novel Mother and Daughter (어머니와 딸, 1931–32) was the work that got her recognised as a novelist. Her Gando writing describes Korean workers and farmers exploited by Japanese officials, landlords and employers, and it is written with a strong concern for poverty.
Kang's health failed after years of hardship and illness in Gando. She came back in 1942 and died in 1944 while recovering in Jangyeon, Hwanghae province, although one account gives 1943 instead. The book on this site is Salt (소금), a novel published in May 1934, the same year as Human Problems. The colonial censors blanked out passages from it, and Korean scholars have studied how those blanked passages were restored.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
소금
by 강경애
A Korean peasant family flees hardship for Manchuria, where bandits and Chinese militia press them on every side, and the wife, widowed and robbed of her children, turns to smuggling salt to live. Kang Kyong-ae's short novel is a stark account of the exiled poor, told from a…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.