전후(戰後) 한국의 부랑아 구호 담론과 문화적 표상의 변전

Abstract

This paper looks into the features of the street child relief discourse in South Korea after the Korean War and considers how it was reproduced in novels, scenarios, memoirs, etc. In the 1950s, the Rhee Syngman Regime, the media and intellectuals stuck to the argument that children on the street should be strictly supervised in isolated facilities for them. However, diverse institutes related to child care failed to achieve the ultimate purpose to protect them and that’s why they were frequently mentioned in the papers along with associated words, such as suppression, starvation and escape. In fact, children on the street were neglected and they could be recognized as the people only in the imaginary future that no one existed. Hwang Sun-won’s novel Human Touch and Oh Young-jin’s scenario The sky is my roof-alias resistance of teenagers are typical works addressing this issue. These two stories asked a critical question to the society of the times where it was ordinary to detest, reprove and exclude children on the street, but in the end, they failed to reach the realm to interrogate the exclusivity of nationalist normal family ideology. On the contrary, Kim Seong-pil’s memoir A boy, who has no birthday written in the same age is a rare case that a street child recorded his memories and history by himself. The boys’ community in this memoir had a horizontal relationship regardless of the age, unlike other vertical networks formed by leaders and formed its own safety net. In a way, this was to emphasize the weak discourse system and the weak practice of the state, intellectuals and civilized people who only tried to isolate children on the streets from the society and neglected them with no special measure or only provided them with temporary aid. But A boy, who has no birthday that was made into a movie under the Park Chung-hee Regime of the 1960s erased crime scenes completely highlighting the unfortunate rather than the delinquent and finished its story with an happy ending by inserting the scenes to show assistance of intellectuals and adults and publication of the memoir. That’s how the street child narrative of the 1950s with no happy ending was reborn as a perfect growth narrative.