BODUERAE KWON

TRANSLATED BY YOUNGJU RYU

The World in a Love Letter

INTRODUCTION: DEFINING YONAE

According to literary critic Kim Ki-jin, the Korean word that refers exclusively to romance, yonae, was a twentieth-century invention. Writing in the mid-1920s, Kim noted that "the word yonae had begun to be used only recently," entering popular vocabulary seven or eight years before as the shortened form of the expression chayuyonae (free love). Based on Kim's recollections, we can thus surmise that yonae became part of the common parlance in Korea at the end of the 1910s. Chinese and Japanese mediation was essential. In the classical world of Chinese letters, which had stretched over Korea, China, and Japan, the graph traditionally used to refer to the passion between the sexes had been yon ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), but ae ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) began to be used also as having a Western feel. Yonae emerged as the combination of the two graphs. The first observed use of the word yonae in East Asia occurred in the early nineteenth century, when Western missionaries in China chose the word as translation for love.

But it was in Japan of the late nineteenth century that the word yonae gained traction. Behind yonae hovered words like love, amour, and Liebe, as well as the distinctly foreign sensibility that such words seemed to encode. "There is no Japanese equivalent to the English word love," lamented Kuriyagawa Hakuson, the author of an influential treatise called The Modern View of Love (1921, 1929). "When it comes to expressions like 'I love you,' and 'Je t'aime,' there simply isn't a way to render them adequately into Japanese. The linguistic sensibility that exists in English or French simply doesn't in Japanese." Yonae was coined precisely in an attempt to translate this foreign linguistic sensibility. As a neologism born in the process of translation, yonae secured circulation by distinguishing itself from existing passions and stigmatizing them as vulgar and unclean. For this reason, yonae has sometimes been identified with its foreign origin and associated with the indignity and violence of foreign domination in the twentieth century.

In Korean, yonae translates the love between the sexes exclusively. The love of God, of humanity, of parents and friends all qualify as love, but not yonae. This point of distinction was particularly important when the word began to be fashionable around 1920. Contained in the language itself was the notion that there was something special to be highlighted in the love between a man and a woman, that the connection between the sexes had to be singled out for attention among the myriad relationships that human beings forge over the course of their lives. In this regard, we can briefly examine the history of the word sarang, another Korean word that means love but has much broader usage today than yonae. Sarang initially meant to think about someone and was not used widely even after it took on the modern meaning of love. It was only after the spread of Protestantism that sarang came to be identified with God's love and gained wider circulation. In the turbulent 1900s, sarang was also pronounced in the realm of nation-state theory. "Of love [sarang], the highest, the most constant, and the most true and righteous is the love of country," insisted one editorial of Tongnip sinmun [The Independent]. "Is your love for His Majesty the Emperor greater than your love for your own life?" demanded another. When another editorial exhorted its readers "to love your brothers and fellow countrymen ... as you love God," the love in question was this sarang that was to be legitimated first and foremost in reference to God and the country.

Sarang, however, metamorphosed into the love between a man and a woman in Na To-hyang's novella of 1920, Youth. In one scene, a minister gives a sermon and concludes that "one who doesn't know love and doesn't practice love is one who is already dead" after waxing eloquently about the love of God and country. The protagonist reinterprets the minister's message in his own way: "I must love love. For loving love is loving God." This unbeliever who "bows his head before the illusion of a young woman, not before God," and who considers reason more absolute than God or the nation, is the protagonist of Korean literature in the early 1920s. At a time when popular desire for education and culture was reaching a feverish height in the period immediately following the March First Movement of 1919, yonae emerged as the protagonist of its time. It enticed the men and women of the new generation who had just gained access to modern educational institutions. It brought about a revolt against the absolute authority that parents had held over marriage decisions and caused numerous scandals ultimately ending in an affair or even murder. Yonae was also the driving force behind the sudden popularization of unfamiliar expressions like "sweet home," the new emphasis on...