Chae Man-sik is best known for his novel *Muddy Currents* (Takryu), which confronts head-on the extraction economy of colonial-era Gunsan and the everyday lives of ordinary people ground down under it. But his own life story is nowhere near as clean as his fiction. In 1938, Chae was implicated in the so-called "Reading Group Incident," arrested, and tortured. In the aftermath, he was pressured into joining pro-Japanese collaborationist organizations — and he gave in, eventually putting his name to groups like the Korean Writers' Patriotic Association.
If the story stopped there, it would just be one more common narrative of forced compromise. But Chae's story has an unusual next chapter. After liberation, in 1948, he wrote *A Sinner of the Nation* (Minjok-ui Joein), a work in which he openly confessed and reflected on his own collaborationist conduct — in his own words, in public. A writer who had exposed the machinery of colonial extraction later served that same machinery, and then exposed his own service to it. The Chae Man-sik Literature Museum, built in the shape of a ship moored on the banks of the Geum River, displays this whole arc, not just the flattering parts. That refusal to curate away the uncomfortable material may make this museum the most honest place in Gunsan.