Saving Chinese laborers from Sinophobia: Sino-Korean, born-translated literature

Abstract This article examines the work of Korean writer Chu Yosŏp, originally written in Korean taking the guise of a Korean translation of a Chinese-language story (born-translated literature). Chu's audience was steeped in Sinophobia orchestrated by the colonizing Japanese empire. His unprecedented genre recounts the lesser-known, lived experiences of the Chinese lower class that Korean-language news media failed to report. My analysis of Chu's work demonstrates, first, that the feigned Chinese voices of this genre illuminate transnational Sino-Korean affinities that were forcibly suppressed by colonial policies and discourses. Second, born-translated literature upends and reconfigures the colonial structure of surrogate feeling, in which the colonized emote in the service of the colonizer. Third, Chu's aesthetic strategy of deconstructing colonial affect attends to and redirects evershifting cultural processes, rather than tackling discrete entities, to surmount the active–passive divide. In so doing, his literature seeks to refashion a politico-aesthetic ecosystem encompassing the Sino-Korean clash, rather than confounding specific ideologies. Finally, the aesthetic for the lower-class Chinese people in Chu's born-translated stories is predicated on metaphysical ethics in which antithetical others mutate into inviolable others, and in which the practice of saving others dovetails with transforming ourselves.