Song of Ariran

Here for the first time is a personal account direct from a leader of the Korean rebels fighting against the Japanese who have ruled them for a generation. It is a story that fits the American tradition and the American wish to understand and support all peoples who have fought against their tyrants and oppressors. Perhaps not many know that Christianity was the mother of Korean Independence, that Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points fired the Korean heart and that the betrayal at Versailles broke it. Kim San was a patriot boy then. Now he is one of the three younger chiefs of Korean revolt, and the Japanese, who had him in their grasp twice, would pay a high price if they could catch him again. Nym Wales (Mrs. Edgar Snow) found him in the far interior of China, and in 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 literary Chinese; an admirer of Tolstoy, a student of Marx, as much a connoisseur of revolution as Andre Malraux, as candid an autobiographer as Benjamin Franklin. He tells of his boyhood, his student days in Japan, his repulse of women who loved him and his final yielding to romance, his imprisonments and grilling by the Japanese, his secret underground work, the battles he fought, the faith and dream he still pursues. The book also gives, partly in his words and partly in appendices by Nym Wales, much new historical data about the Korean revolutionary movement, the Canton Commune, the first Chinese Soviet at Hailofeng, and other events in the unwritten modern history of the Far East. 

   — Original English Edition 1941.