Song of Ariran: The Life Story of a Korean Rebel

Here for the first time is a personal account direct from aleader of the Korean rebels fighting against the Japanese who haveruled them for a generation. It is a story that fits the Americantradition and the American wish to understand and support allpeoples who have fought against their tyrants and oppressors.Perhaps not many know that Christianity was the mother of KoreanIndependence, that Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points fired theKorean heart and that the betrayal at Versailles broke it. Kim Sanwas a patriot boy then. Now he is one of the three younger chiefsof Korean revolt, and the Japanese, who had him in their grasptwice, would pay a high price if they could catch him again. NymWales (Mrs. Edgar Snow) found him in the far interior of China, andin many weeks of questioning set down his story in his own words –on her promise not to publish it for at least two years.Kim San is an amazing figure, handsome, daring, emotional,shrewd, speaking every language he needs in his dangerous work,including English and Japanese, writing poetry in modern literaryChinese; an admirer of Tolstoy, a student of Marx, as much aconnoisseur of revolution as Andre Malraux, as candid anautobiographer as Benjamin Franklin. He tells of his boyhood, hisstudent days in Japan, his repulse of women who loved him and hisfinal yielding to romance, his imprisonments and grilling by theJapanese, his secret underground work, the battles he fought, thefaith and dream he still pursues. The book also gives, partly inhis words and partly in appendices by Nym Wales, much newhistorical data about the Korean revolutionary movement, the CantonCommune, the first Chinese Soviet at Hailofeng, and other events inthe unwritten modern history of the Far East.— Original English Edition 1941 The John Day Company, NewYork