Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed

Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

In 1948, what legitimated the People’s Revolutionary Army’s rise to power in North Korea was the participation of many of its leaders and soldiers in antiJapanese struggles in Manchuria during the Pacific War (1931-1945). In a 1958Left History 12.1
speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the People’s Revolutionary Army,
Kim Il Sung underscored this historic connection declaring, “The anti-Japanese
guerrillas established the traditions of a fighting spirit … for a people’s power
which would oppose imperialism and safeguard the interests of the working peo-
ple” (Kim Il Sung, Selected Works, Vol. 2 (P’y?ngyang, 1971), 66-67). According
to Kim, the DPRK’s national ideology was based on international history. Hyun
Ok Park, in Two Dreams in One Bed, digs beyond the ideological, examining “the
social origins of the Korean communist movement and the ways in which the
nationalism espoused by the communists impeded their recognition of social rela-
tions in Manchuria,” undermining their claims to internationalism (23).
“Two dreams in one bed” refers to the ambitions and activities of
colonists and nationalists, as they resided in the “bed” of capitalism during the
Pacific War. The metaphor of “dreams” has both temporal and spatial meanings
as Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese competed for living and sleeping space in the
“bed” of Manchukuo (1932-1945). Her integration of capitalism, colonialism,
and nationalism challenges postcolonial scholarship, including those of Partha
Chatterjee, on the grounds that assuming the unity of ethnic nations overlooks the
cleavages intrinsic to capitalism. In examining Koreans in Manchukuo, Park does
not draw clear lines of subalternity but considers the “disjuncture of national gov-
ernmentality and capitalist expansion, addressing the people inside the circuits of
capitalist production and exchange.” Instead, she investigates the “subjectivity in
social practices through which people respond to multiple forces of power that
might not only propagate but also circumvent each other” (16).
Park focuses on Manchuria in the early-twentieth century and the “ongoing
construction of boundaries between national and non-national members, which
were inscribed in the relationship involving exchange of land; and the forces that
simultaneously shaped and destabilized national boundaries and social practices of
production and exchange” (19). To understand the “entwined abstraction of peo-
ple and land” that resulted from the “interplay of Japanese colonialism and capi-
talism,” Park draws on archival and secondary materials in Korean, Japanese, and
Chinese. Within Manchuria, Park specifically examines the Kando (Jiandao) and
other regions of Southeastern Manchuria, such as Fengtian, heavily populated by
Koreans (19).
Park’s book begins with description from An Sugil’s 1967 novel Pukkando,
which narrate the “epic of Korean migration of Manchuria from the 1860s to
1945 and lives caught between Chinese nationalism and Japanese imperialism”
(25). Chapter two, “Between Nation and Market” and three, “Agency of Japanese
Imperialism” compare the transformation of Korean migrants “into national sub-
jects and of land into national territory, which for both Chinese and Japanese
national politics were entwined with capitalist development in the two regions”
( 1 2 3 ) . Attempts to tra n s fo rm people and land faced ove ra rching tensions
“between the national and capitalists desire of the North east government, which160 Book Reviews
circumvented counterstrategies of Chinese power against Japan’s osmotic expansion” (123).

 Chapters four, “Multiethnic Agrarian Communities” and five, “Colonial Governmentality,” discuss the role of the state in the formation of Korean subjectivity during the Manchukuo period, unearthing “historically specific expressions of contradictory national and capitalist dynamics” (123). In closing her last chapter, “Specter of the Social,” Park refers to Lee Chongsok’s scholarship, which identified three major constitutive connections between Koreans in Manchuria and the North Korean regime that followed the Second-Sino Japanese War: “the national united front that encompassed diverse political camps so as to create a unified state in the postliberation period, the land reforms that distributed land to peasants, and the priority given to mobilizing and benefiting the masses” (230). Park sees his connections less obviously, stating that the “multifaceted Korean history in Manchuria shows that Korean politics and anti-Japanese revolutionary movements were anything but unified” (230). As it began, Park’s book ends with excerpts from Kim Mans?n’s 1948 short
story called “Dual Nationality” (Ijung kukch?k) that shed insight onto the dual workings of nationalism and capitalism. 

For the protagonist Elder Pak, a resident of Kando, nationality is a tool for accumulating wealth and safeguarding “his sovereignty over his labour, which is embodied in his land” (231). To secure ownership of his land, he was naturalized as Chinese but hid his certificate during the Manchukuo era. Japan’s osmotic expansion forced internationalization on the part of everyday Koreans; internationalization that was mirrored in Chinese and Korean socialist movements that sought to defeat Japan. But Japan’s defeat quelled the same forces that gave rise to internationalism. Kim’s story ends with Elder Pak’s unfortunate death at the hands of the retreating Manchukuo army in 1945. The ending “attests to the breakdown of a colonial order that had enjoined pluralistic inclusion of all ethnic and national groups. This story also reveals that Elder Pak’s dream was a fragile emanation of the colonial order, a dream that was shattered when this order came to an abrupt end” (233). Interspaced with narratives that capture the meanings of daily experiences, Park, Hyun Ok, Two Dreams in One Bed, exposes the socially conflicting conditions that gave rise to the North Korean ideology of self-reliance (chuch’e). Janice C. H. Kim—York University