earticle

영어

Ming-Qing transition in the early seventeenth century was traumatic indeed not only to China but also to overall East Asia: numerous East Asian states located in the peripheries of the Great Ming empire, including northern “barbarian” states, Japan, Vietnam, and Chosŏn Korea, were shaken by the great empire's fall in the center. It was the Chosŏn dynasty that was most damaged by such overwhelming cataclysm, even though it seems to have dissociated itself from the great transformation of the world order in the sixteenth century. The full-scale Japanese invasions of Korea (1592-1598) and subsequent Manchu attacks in 1627 and 1636 made the Korean people experience large-scale substantial encounters with the Other, and irrevocably transformed Korean perceptions of the world and of the self. In fact, it was both the Ming and the Chosŏn dynasty that were most profoundly shocked by the perversion of the Confucian world order and its subsequent disruption. What kind of world did Chinese and Korean elites dream of when the emerging Manchu and Japan devastated the ideal Confucian order? Changing popular perceptions of other, self, and the world, and search for a new cultural identity, are represented in numerous postwar narratives in the seventeenth century. For frustrated literati, fiction was the literary platform of choice to explore critical issues that were considered taboo in official discourse. Stories of family reunion, in particular, can be reread as a kind of metaphor that may symbolize the reconstruction of the Confucian world order in postwar Chinese and Korean society. Chinese stories of family reunion, however, are different from the Korean counterpart in terms of fictional imagination or fantasy. The tenth story in Li Yu's Shier lu centers on Mrs. Shu who lost her chastity to save her only son so necessary to the continuation of the Shu family during the war and later reunited with her separated husband and son. This story can be read as a perfect metaphor for dynastic transition in that a set of comparisons between family reunion and dynastic change, and between wifely loyalty and loyalty to the state seem perfectly matched. In this sense, the role of a Manchu general played for the Shus' reunion is not less significant in this story. A Story of Ch'oe Ch'ŏk portrays Ch'oe Ch'ŏk and his wife Ogyŏng who, forcedly leaving their home during the war, separately explored various East Asian borderlands including Japan, Vietnam, and Liaodong for decades, and miraculously returned home for family reunion altogether. Apart from Chinese versions of family reunion, this story represents transnational East Asia as a new historical space, in which search for a new cultural identity and new historical imagination were made possible.