A new woman and ambiguous identity

The movie “Blue Swallow” is based on a true story about Park Kyung Won who is a female pilot during the Japanese colonialism era in Korea. While I was watching this movie, two things came up in my head such as modernization of women and pain of dualism. In the beginning of the movie, young Kyung Won stands outside of the classroom and tries to learn while other boys learn in the classroom. I realized that women’s role was limited because they had to do their work inside of the house instead of learning in the 1900s. However, Kyung Won wants to learn despite her father’s opposition and gets accepted into a flight school. She does not stop to achieve her dream, and she finally becomes a famous skillful pilot in her school by winning at a Japanese flight competition. As Yoon’s reading mentions, “A new type of Korean woman had begun to emerge” (P. 73) and Kyung Won becomes a role model for women in Korea. Despite Kyung Won’s high achievement, she is not welcomed in either side of Japan or Korea. Kyung Won’s last dream is a long distance flight from Japan to a city called Chosun in Korea. She tries to get some sponsors from Koreans who live in Japan, but they blame her for using Japanese air planes, which shows Koreans hatred and hostility to Japan. Later, the ministry of Japan forces Kyung Won to show her royalty of Japan in return for his support for her dream of a long distance flight. I think that Kyung Won hesitated a lot to become a traitor, and it is very sorrowful that she could not fly with her nationality with all disrespectful attention from numerous Koreans. This depicted the pain that Koreans had with ambiguous identity during this period.

Finally, Kyung Won begins her long distance flight to Chosun. In this scene, Kyung Won encounters bad weather, and I think that the bad weather describes how Koreans are experiencing a hard time due to the loss of their country and harassments from Japan. Also, this long distance flight portrays how Kyung Won wants to get away from the Japanese interruption as well as how she wants liberation from Japan.