North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Kornel Chang: How Korea’s liberation led to division into North and South

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

On today’s episode, Kornel Chang discusses his new book “A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under U.S. Occupation,” which sheds light on the period from 1945 to 1950 when the country was divided into the North and South. Chang describes how the immediate post-liberation “opening” was more fluid than commonly portrayed, with ordinary Koreans pursuing varied aspirations […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast, available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the private podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NKNews website at NKNews.org slash private-feed. Hello, listeners, and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jack O' Sweetslut, and this episode was recorded on the evening of Monday, the 21st of July, 2025. And I'm talking via Streamyard with my... my guest, first-time guest, Cornel Chang, who is Associate Professor of History and American Studies

and also chair of the History Department at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Today we're going to be talking about his book, A Fractured Liberation, Korea Under U.S. occupation that sheds light on Korea's history from 1945 to 1950 when the country was divided into what eventually became the two countries that today we call North Korea and South Korea. Cornell, welcome on the show. Thank you for having me, Jacko. So your book begins with a family debate, a deeply personal moment. Can you tell us a little bit about what the argument was about between your relatives

and how that conversation shaped your decision to ultimately write this book? Yeah, so, yeah, so these, my family history and my personal history inspired much of the writing. Obviously, the book itself is a work of research and scholarship, but it was initially inspired by the conversations I had with my family growing up, I grew up in Queens, New York, was an immigrant child. My parents had immigrated from South Korea in the late 1960s, early 1970s. And, you know, at night, I would, as a child, as a six or seven-year-old child, I'd be awakened at a whisper by conversations that my parents and my grandmother would have about Korea. And they were clearly talking at a low voice so that none of their children, me being one of them,

would not hear or would not comprehend. And, you know, the next morning I would wake up and ask my father, what was all that conversation about Korea? And he would say, you know, it was nothing important. And of course, later in life, it was, it was more than nothing important. I would later learn that my grandparents had, you know, fled Seoul in the spring of 1940s, not fled Seoul fled Pyongyang in the spring of 1946, had arrived in Seoul and stayed there for the next three decades before they had eventually immigrated to the United States. And as I got older, some of these stories became much more clear to me because they would actually, by the time I became a teenager, would have these arguments in front of me at the dinner table. And when we

would meet at my Kunapa's house, my oldest uncle's house, for our family gatherings. They would have debate. And the moment I remember is, if you recall, the summer of 1994, where there was a standoff between the United States and North and South Korea over North Korea's nuclear weapons program. And, you know, it was all over the news. Anchors were talking about a possible Second World War and a possible, you know, attack by the United States to destroy the weapons program and so forth. And in that context, my family would have these debates about, you know, how the U.S. should proceed and, you know, what the role of South and North Korea was. And so one of the things that happened, there was a sort of debate between different members of my family

where some family members had a position where, you know, they thought that the United States should take a more kind of peaceful or conciliatory approach with North Korea and emphasize negotiation, whereas Mike Kanapa was not going to have any of it. He believed that you do not negotiate with what he calls a crazy regime, and that the hardline policy that was being employed at the time, though it wasn't hardline all the way through. Obviously, there was negotiations at some point that thankfully ended in a more peaceful resolution. But, you know, at that moment, my great, my, uh, my, uh, Kunap, I would always end the debate by saying, well, if it wasn't for the Americans, we'd all be living under the economy now.

And that, that statement, even as an 18 year old, kind of stuck with me. The idea was like, was it really either or? Was there, you know, no alternative pathways or, you know, other ways in which, you know, other pathways that Korea could have pursued that could have led to unification or a more peaceful settlement of some sort. And so that stuck with me through college and then graduate school where I was not a scholar of Korean history. I started off as a Mexicanist and then moved to U.S. history. So this is actually my second academic book. But the point being that those family stories, those fragments that I heard over time stayed with me. And at some point, you know,

throughout my career, I, you know, I had it in my head that I wanted to write this book. And that book started to, I started to write and research that book about about a month after I published the first book and knew that, you know, I was going to receive tenure in promotion. And then that book took me, which is the book that we're talking about now, took me 10 years. But its origins really can be traced back to these personal conversations that started at six, seven-year-old growing up in an immigrant household in Queens, New York, and then throughout hearing small fragments. And then this book really is my attempt to put all the fragments together and try to kind of piece together a larger, wider, more coherent story. Now, Cornell, why did your family, you mentioned

that your family came down to Seoul from Pyongyang, from the Soviet zone of occupation in spring of 1946. Why was that? Yeah, that's a good question. So this was on one side of my family. And one side of my family, my grandpa in particular on this side, came from, you know, he told me, you know, I had sort of interviewed him, not interviewed him, but just had a casual conversation about these things, where I asked, so why did you, like, why did you leave Pyongyang in the spring of 1946? I knew at the time he himself was not a landowner. And then he said, using his metaphor from his favorite sports, he used a baseball metaphor. He said, I had three strikes against me. The three strikes were one. I was from a wealthy landowning family.

Two, he was a Christian, or he wasn't much of a Christian at the end of his life, but at the time, he was a self-professed Christian and he was part of a Christian family. And then I think finally, and maybe most importantly, he had worked for the Colonial. police. He was part of the colonial police force. And at the time, you know, I asked him why he was, you know, why he had worked as part of the colonial police. And he had said he was, he did not want to be conscripted, did not want to be drafted. So working for the colonial police was his way of avoiding conscription and being sent abroad was, was his response. But in the spring of 1946, he felt threatened enough that he left with his wife and his one-year-old child. Now,

I should make it clear to the listeners that when he left at the time, he did not think this was forever. When he left at the time, he thought it was sort of a momentary refuge that he was seeking and that he would return when there was some sort of political settlement that would then, you know, ensure order of a sort that would ensure him and his family's safety. And in fact, he didn't make this decision on his own. he had a very long conversation with his own mom and dad at the time and consulted then. And his parents thought it was a good idea to go to Seoul just for the time being

and that he could return when conditions were better. So they ended up hiring a motorboat, a driver of a motorboat off the western coast of Pyongyang, and in the middle of the night, drove them down to past the 38th parallel and dropped them off at the coast, not quite sure where, might have been by Incheon, might have been closer to Seoul, but all I know is that they were dropped off by the coast and then they walked by foot to Seoul where they spent the next three to four decades before they finally immigrated to the United States in the late 1980s. Now, in your book, you say that North Korea actually lost a significant proportion of its original population in a similar way, that people just got up and walked out

for either because they were Christians or they came from a Japanese collaborator background or because they had landowners in there, either they owned land themselves or they had landowners in their ancestors, right? That's right. So in the spring of 1946, my grandparents were part of a larger migratory movement. About 50,000 Koreans from the north moved to the south, many of them being from landowning families. and many of the land-owning families also tended to be, you know, Christian-affiliated. At the time, Pyongyang was considered the Jerusalem of the East,

the most Christian city in all of East Asia. It was hard to believe at this point, but it was the case in the 1940s. And so they were part of a much larger movement, and that movement was sparked by the land reform, really, of the spring of 1946. In March of, in March, 1946, the Northern People's Committee announced, a land redistribution program that essentially redistributed both Japanese, formerly Japanese-owned land and those of, they broke up the large Korean-owned estates. And at that point, the wealthy landowners were, their land honings were reduced to, I forget the exact amount, but something in,

at least in the American square footage, around 12 acres of land, which was not nothing to be fair at the point, but it was a huge reduction to many of the largest landowners who had enormous and enormous estates. So that is the kind of trigger and the prompt that sends many wealthier North Koreans from North to South in the spring of 1946. And then there's another large migratory movement from North to South in 1948. Curious to hear the rest? Become an NK News subscriber today for access to the full episode. Head to NKNews.org slash join for more information.

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