Abstract

The question of enemy property (jeoksan) and its dispensation wends its way across a number of literary works in the late 1940s and 1950s. Among others, prominent writers such as Gye Yongmuk, Yeom Sangseop, Im Ogin, Chae Mansik, and Choe Jeonghui addressed this material history in varying ways, all of which find common ground in an interrogation (at times implicit) of the meaning of liberation (haebang) itself, a term closely associated with the post-1945 articulation of anticommunism (bangong) in the Republic of Korea (ROK). During the Korean War, the notion of traitorous property (yeoksan), referring to homes of communist sympathizers, gained currency. This article follows what we might call the property trail in the works of Chae Mansik (1902–1950) and Choe Jeonghui (1912–1990) from the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s, a time when the dispensation of enemy property was widely perceived as central to the newly forming socioeconomic order of the ROK. For both writers, haebang becomes something other than a marker separating past from present. Their work seeks to write history in another form, as the story of a property trail and its attendant feelings, attitudes, suspicions, desires. To follow this property trail is to approach the untoward coincidence of liberation and division of the peninsula manifest in habitation of the enemy/traitorous home.