About Cho Myung-hee Cho Myung-hee (1894 – 1938) was born in 1894 in Jincheon, North Chungcheong Province, as the son of a poor scholar. His pen name was Poseok. He graduated from Jungang High School in Seoul and studied philosophy at Toyo University in Japan. In 1919 he was arrested and jailed for participating in the March 1st Movement. He first established himself as an author in 1925 with the publication of “Into the Ground” in Gaebyeok magazine, and published his most representative short story “The Nakdong River” (1927) in Joseonjigwang magazine. He went into exile in 1928 in the Maritime Province of Siberia in the Soviet Union in order to escape the Japanese crackdown. In 1934, he served as an executive of the Far East chapter of the Soviet Union of Writers and also published his epic poem, “Goryeo Trampled.” He was arrested by the Soviet military police in 1937 and deported to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. In 1938, he was reportedly executed by firing squad at a Khabarovsk prison. His publications include a collection of poems, On a Spring Lawn, and a collection of stories, Into the Ground. He is considered to be a representative writer of the Japanese colonial period who followed the communist ideologies of KAPF (Korean Federation of Proletarian Art) and fiercely depicted in literature the dark reality of farm life in those days.
About “Into the Ground” Cho Myung-hee’s short story “Into the Ground” recounts the psychological and physical deterioration of the protagonist/narrator as he struggles with extreme poverty and hunger in the colonial capital of Seoul. Upon returning home from his study in Tokyo, the protagonist moves to Seoul with dreams of becoming a writer, but he finds himself trapped by both poverty and a loveless early marriage. In falling into a desperate hand-to-mouth existence, he joins the dispossessed masses of colonial Korea. Written and published during a period of harsh censorship, “Into the Ground” is remarkably frank in its critique of the social, economic, and racial inequalities of Japanese colonialism. It addresses the brutality of the colonial police, the Japanese settler colonialists’ racist attitudes and economic exploitation of the Korean population, and even the draconian measures of the censorship office. In addition to functioning as an exposé about the lives of the underclass, the short story is a study on how intense physical deprivation comes to affect one man’s psyche. Cho Myung-hee experiments with various writing styles to achieve these ends, from juxtaposing violent imageries with interior monologues to having lines of prose burst into sections of verse that seem to speak directly to the readers as both a lament and a call to arms.
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