Capitalists Must Starve

Park, author of A Magical Girl Retires, follows the life of Kang Juryong (1901–1932), a Korean rubber factory worker who staged the first high-altitude protest, in this straightforward biographical novel. At 20, Juryong enters an arranged marriage to 15-year-old Choi Jeonbin. When Jeonbin joins the independence movement against Japanese occupation, Juryong goes with him to southern Manchuria, where the First Regiment of the Tongeuibu Unified Korea Council has its headquarters. Once there, she’s conscripted for a secret mission to smuggle arms. Her success in the Liberation Army creates tension with her husband, and soon he sends her back home. Later, after Jeonbin dies from an illness, she moves to Pyongwon and joins the thousands of young women working in factories and mills during Korea’s industrial revolution. Initially, she hides her experience with the rebels, but soon can’t keep her revolutionary spirit a secret (“she seems to be born to fight”). The prose is a bit wooden, but Park skillfully chronicles Juryong’s transformation from concerned wife to revolutionary (“Her insistence, now, that her husband take her where the movement takes her isn’t because she believes in the movement but because she’s worried for his well-being”). It’s an accessible introduction to a hero of the labor movement. (Sept.)