His violence shows frustration, and the wife bears with it because she has no option. He calls her names, ridicules her singing, and treats her like a dog. At the same time, the wife is actively trying to relieve their poverty through this booze peddling scheme, but the husband criticizes her efforts. He would rather her be a stay-at-home mother.
In Hyo-sok's story, it is significant that Ho's only love affair is broken up because of the conditions of colonial poverty. The woman he has a brief but memorable affair with disappears to become a tavern girl as a result of her family's downfall. But when he encounters the blooming buckwheat, it reminds him of his affair with the town beauty. He reminisces about those better days when destiny was more kind. It says that "whenever he recalled it he felt that his life had been worth living" (5). In other words, he lives in the past where there is meaning by contrast with the present. The tragedy of colonialism is that he hasn't found her in all his searching. Love is ruined (although there is a twist at the end).
In sum, these two Korean stories illustrate much about those bitter colonial days when rural life was oppressive. Comparing them has brought out the ways in which impoverishment, characterization of the people, resources and landscape, and gender relations are portrayed both similarly and differently by each author. Both narratives, by showing these conditions, are powerful critiques of colonialism.
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Ki-baik Lee, A New History of Korea, trans. Edward W. Wagner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1984), 371
Andrew C. Nahm, Korea: Tradition and Transformation (Elizabeth, NJ: Hollym, 1988), 224.
Lee, 356.
Kim Yong-sop, "The Landlord System and the Agricultural Economy during the Japanese Occupation Period," in Landlords, Peasants and Intellectuals in Modern Korea, eds. Pang Kie-chung & Michael D. Shin, 131-174 (Ithaca: Cornell U. East Asia Program, 2005), 145.
Yong-sop, 155.
