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영어

The study of Korean ethnic minority literature in China has mainly focused on the themes of Korean immigration, of the participation in China’s Anti-Japanese War, and of the ethnic cultural identity as the minority. Yet in Korean ethnic minority literature, it not only shows the history of how the Koreans became one of ethnic minorities in political way, but also the history of how the Koreans settled down in Yanbian area of Northeast China and fused themselves with the local Chinese and adapted to Chinese social systems successfully in ecological way. The rice planting during the Japanese occupation and apple-pear grafting as the style of cultural fusion in Korean ethnic minority literature represent the development of Korean ethnic responses to the new land, new national identity in China. The Koreans’ settlement and transformation of their identity have gone through three steps of positive feedback, negative feedback, and adaptive system for the sustainable development. Throughout the history of China’s Korean ethnic literature, the cross-border Koreans survived successfully in China and became part of China’s social systems and ecosystems, and have satisfied several conditions of human ecology. First, the Korean population in China in a certain time, particularly during the war time, increased to a larger number, because of the drastic change caused by positive feedback. The Koreans’ flowing into Northeast China and planting rice there in Li Huiying’s novelette Wanbaoshan (1933), is presented as the positive feedback to bring not only the instability to both Korean and Chinese social systems but also cause the change of the ecosystems in this region. Second, cross-border Koreans joined the biological community at certain site in Northeast China with self-organization to keep the stability made by negative feedback. In Korean ethnic minority literature, An Shouji’s novel Rice (1940) and Li Huisan’s novelette The Apple-pear Children (2006) delineate the Koreans’ interaction for the stability in the circular chain of effects that opposed the change. Third, cross-border Koreans in China adapted to the physical conditions of lowlands in this region and cultivated rice and apple pear, the right kind of food at the site. Finally, cross-border Koreans grafted their own culture successfully on the rootstock of Chinese culture both politically and ecologically. In turn, all the conditions helped the cross-border Koreans fulfill the transformation from the Koreans immigrants to be one of ethnic minorities in China.