THE UNMAKING OF AN ORIENTAL YANKEE
“I am a poet.” Spoken by a writer of prose, this simple statement, made by Younghill Kang in a 1946 lecture, seems less a description of occupation than an assertion—a deceptively concise distillation of the passions and convictions behind his life and work (110).1 The first Korean American novelist and a pioneering voice in Asian American literature, Kang was already edging past his prime when he made it. He had successfully published two autobiographical novels and a children’s book, earning him gushing praise from the likes of Rebecca West (“After Mr. Kang, most books seem a bit flat. . . . What a man! What a writer!”) and H. G. Wells (“Here is a really great writer.”) (138). He had drunk gin and talked shop with literary giants of the age, counting among his closest friends fellow New York University freshman English teacher Thomas Wolfe. And at a time when, on the opposite coast in California, anti-miscegenation laws banning Asian/white marriages were still in place, he had even met and married Frances Keely, the pampered daughter of a Virginia industrialist turned professor. (In an essay written shortly before Kang passed away, his daughter Lucy Lynn would write of her parents’ relationship: “He regarded her as the princess with the many mattresses on top of the pea, and he was the foreign prince. In Don Quixote fashion, nothing was impossible” (119).)
But if Kang sampled some rare triumphs for a young Asian immigrant, he also suffered the inevitable humiliations of America’s entrenched racism: Kang slipped into the U.S. just before Congress passed a 1924 law effectively banning Asian immigration, and he was ineligible for citizenship because of his race.2 Like most Koreans at this time, he was a man without a country. Asked to explain his nationality on his 1931 application for a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Kang would write: “In practice an American and permanently located here, but debarred by the United States Government from naturalisation as an Oriental. I am not a citizen elsewhere, since the Korean Government was dissolved [by Japan] in 1910” (65).
A poet, Kang went on to explain in his lecture, is someone essentially solitary, someone who feels human sorrow. Kang had elaborated on a similar theme in his first novel, The Grass Roof, published in 1931: “[I]t seems to be that the poet alone has no home nor national boundary, but is like a man in a ship. His nearest kin is the muse up in the clouds, and his patriotism goes to the ethereal kingdom” muses Chungpa Han, the book’s young protagonist and Younghill Kang’s fictional alter ego (3:376). This realm of the poet, pregnant with the possibility of cultural mediation, is essentially one of expectation: and indeed, as Han considers it, he is himself on a ship, suspended between the faltering traditions of his native Korea and the seductive promise of American modernity. Now, more than ten years after penning those words (and more than twenty years after he himself had emigrated), Kang was back in the land of his birth—not as a returning hero, but as an American military attaché, gathering information for the U.S. Army while it presided over the simultaneous liberation and division of Korea.3 To the end of his life, Kang remained a man stranded—as much by historical circumstances as by early success and his own singular ambitions—in a state of profound exile.
When East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee was published in 1937, the success and modest acclaim generated by The Grass Roof had already begun to crest. Largely on the merit of that first book, Kang had become the first Asian ever to be awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship—an opportunity he used to travel with his young family to Europe and write. “He was young and successful and plucking the plums from the Western world into which he had entered,” remembers Lucy Lynn Kang (119). Kang’s most accomplished work, East Goes West is a unique and vividly realized account of the heady cultural mix taking place on the margins of early twentieth-century America’s growing prosperity. In its portrait of a young man’s fracturing idealism, it is also an extraordinary, if coded, critique of American materialism.
Chungpa Han, first introduced in The Grass Roof, is the precocious and much doted-upon eldest son of an eldest son who ventures forth from the rural seclusion of his hometown to look for his place in the world. The Grass Roof describes Han’s early childhood in northern Korea, and follows his exploits in Seoul and Japan. East Goes West picks up Han’s story where The Grass Roof leaves off. Having witnessed the destruction of his childhood’s bucolic tranquility by Japan’s brutal colonialism, and unable to envision a productive role for himself in Korea, Han decides to head West. He explains:
Korea, a small, provincial, old-fashioned Confucian nation . . . was called to get off the earth. Death summoned. I could have renounced the scholar’s dream forever (plainly scholarship had dreamed us away into ruin) and written my vengeance against Japan in martyr’s blood. . . . Or I could take away my slip cut from the roots, and try to engraft my scholar inherited kingdom upon the world’s thought . . . (2:8).
Han arrives in New York at the tender age of eighteen with little more than four dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare to his name. There, and in his subsequent travels throughout the United States and into Canada, he encounters prep school girls and Village bohemians, entrepreneuring salesmen and radical leftists, fire-and-brimstone preaching evangelists and stalwart Yankee farmers. He also meets, befriends, and is befriended by a rich diversity of fellow immigrants—Siamese, Italian, Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese among others—most of whom, like him, are forced to work a variety of menial jobs to make ends meet. Han’s closest and most constant companions, however, are to be found amongst his fellow Koreans. Most prominent among them are the eager-to-assimilate but ever self-possessed George Jum, with his nattily pressed pants, his elaborate theories on love, and his infatuation with a white Harlem nightclub dancer; and To Won Kim, the exquisitely educated artist and scholar whose self-imposed exile in the West ends in tragedy.
With its keen eye for details, East Goes West is at once a picaresque adventure, an exploration of immigrant urban life in the 1920s, and a bitingly satirical critique of the hypocrisy and pretension behind America’s gleaming industrialized facade. Yet from the time of its publication until now, it has been persistently misread as little more than a charmingly informative memoir. A contemporary review, published in The New Yorker, reports that East Goes West “describes with much humor and charm the author’s difficulties in adapting himself to American life, and his successful search for the formula that was to make him an ‘Oriental Yankee’” (91). In a New York Times review, this assumption of the book’s essential nonfiction becomes explicit: “[Kang’s] story attracts and holds the attention as if it were a novel. . . . But of course, East Goes West is not a novel. It is the candid record of ‘the making of an Oriental Yankee’ as its subtitle states; and its author has been so successfully Americanized as to become Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in New York University and a member of the staff of the Department of Far Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum” (100). In other words, Kang’s own life becomes proof of Han’s successful assimilation.
This fraying of boundaries between fact and creation is most starkly revealed in those reviews where events from Kang’s biography are carelessly leaked into the supposed contents of the book. For example, the Springfield Sunday Union & Republican blithely reports that “[East Goes West] concludes with [Kang’s] winning of an American wife and achieving the first rung of an intellectual career”—although it remains unclear whether or not the book’s hero, Chungpa Han, ever does win over Trip, his elusive idealization of American womanhood (100).4 Certainly, as Kang himself readily admitted, portions of the book were derived from his own experiences; it is, after all, an autobiographical novel.5 But to assume that this exchange runs in both directions—i.e., that Kang’s life could be read back into the book—is a slip that implies more than just sloppy journalism: it indicates a presumption of artlessness in Kang’s work.6
The potential damage of such a claim can be seen in the lengths writers such as Thomas Wolfe, Kang’s close friend and contemporary, went to address it. Bothered by criticisms that his work was little more than a recapitulation of his life, Wolfe included a note “to the reader” at the beginning of Look Homeward Angel that stated: “Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.”7 For Kang, an Asian immigrant, such allowance for creative license was hardly considered. The craft of East Goes West was diminished instead into the uninspired and impossibly bland “story of a human being among other human beings in an amazing diversity of human experience” (100). Kang the writer is replaced by Chungpa Han the character, and in the process, Kang becomes an early victim of the still-prevalent belief that the only contribution any writer of color could possibly have to make is the story of his or her own life.
Kang’s reviewers were joined in their assessment of his work by his editor Maxwell Perkins, the powerful Scribner’s institution who also edited Wolfe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and a host of other illustrious American authors. Introduced to Kang through Wolfe, Perkins’ starkly different attitudes towards both is revealing. In an introduction to Scribner’s reprint of Look Homeward Angel, he writes of Wolfe: “Many of [his reviewers] asserted that Wolfe could only write about himself, that he could not see the world or anything objectively, with detachment—that he was always autobiographical. . . . But all that he wrote of was transformed by his imagination.”8 This transformative power of the imagination is not in evidence in Perkins’ reading of Kang’s work. His attitude towards East Goes West is much more matter-of-fact. The Grass Roof had been quite successful, with steady sales, translation rights sold for several languages, and even a tentative offer for a movie option; and Perkins undoubtedly expected East Goes West to be a book along the same lines9—the relatively straightforward, marketable tale of a young man’s eventual acceptance into Western culture.10 Explaining his suggested cuts to the manuscript in a letter to Kang, Perkins wrote: “The principle I went on was that in the first place this was the story of a man, and in the second, of an Easterner in the West.” In an effort to emphasize this aspect, Perkins urged Kang to include more information about Trip “and to show definitely that you married her, because the fact that you did, makes one of the principal points of the book, in that the Easterner became a Westerner through this experience” (147: February 8, 1937).11
Such an approach to East Goes West seriously underestimates Younghill Kang. Certainly someone like Kang—who had mastered both Asian and Western traditions of poetry and philosophy, and who demanded in an assignment that his students “select for elaborate commentary a literary masterpiece which is chiefly notable for the ethical, social, or religious truth it presents” (64)—would have loftier ambitions for his second major work than merely recording his life. Nevertheless, most readers, including Perkins, continued to see in East Goes West what they expected from it: the candid account of a hardworking immigrant who, through his unwavering belief in the American dream, comes to attain it.
That Kang’s ambitions for this second book were much more complex than what his editor or his reviewers comprehended becomes evident in the fellowship application he submitted to the Guggenheim Foundation in October 1931. The book he hoped to write, tentatively called “Death of an Exile,” was to be a companion volume to The Grass Roof, though one “more mature in style and technique.” And unlike The Grass Roof, which “treated of the Orient,” it was to
treat of Orientals in America, being the reflection through the hero’s eyes of this mechanical age, of American civilization, and of the literary and cultural epoques he experiences here over a period of ten years; also a history of his spiritual evolutions and revolutions while love-sick, bread-sick, butter-sick, education-sick, he is lost and obliterated in the stone-and-steel jungles of New York City. . . . (65)
Kang staked out his literary territory very clearly: the book was to be both a novel of ideas and the portrait of an era. The issues he proposed to address might not have been strikingly innovative in and of themselves, but they were to be explored from the unique perspective of an Asian living in the U.S. with access to the literary, philosophical, and social conceits of two traditions. Through his travels, the “hero” was to experience “the various religions of mankind, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity,” as well as “the various philosophies, pragmatism, naturalism, humanism, neo-realism, etc.” Racism was also to play a formative role in the proposed book: “The theme of race prejudice recurs, in the lives of minor characters and in the life of the protagonist, and the whole alternates between the mood of satire and the mood of a stirring prose poem” (65).
The title Kang originally proposed for the book further attests to his conceptual sophistication. For Kang, “Death of an Exile” could be read in two ways. First, as a reference to the tragic character of To Wan Kim, “a beautiful and romantic spirit in exile,” who dies by himself in Greenwich Village “after many bitter experiences” and “being thwarted in love and ambition.” The deeper meaning of the title, however, is to be found in the philosophical underpinnings of the book, not its plot. “Death of an Exile” also alludes to “the idea of a rebirth in the soul of the hero, which had also been in exile. At the end of the novel, the romantic soul in him is dead, and the soul that remains and feels itself at home in the world is the soul that is facing life in the real sense, pragmatically.”12 The hero, having worked his way through quandaries both metaphysical and material, “finally identifies himself as a poet with a belief in the significance and hence immortality of the soul” (65).
This notion of the irreducible soul, purged of abstractions and living in itself, is a theoretical quote of, among other things, the literary source with which Kang closes out his proposal. He writes: “Grass Roof may be said to have been written in the mood of the Everlasting Nay of Carlyle; Death of an Exile may be compared to the mood of the Everlasting Yea” (65). The concepts he refers to are taken from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus [The Tailor Retailored], a book whose eclectic combination of autobiography, novel, and essay might have been an inspiration for East Goes West. “The Everlasting Nay” refers to the loss of faith that accompanies the difficult passage from certainty to uncertainty: “Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moults is sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash-off the old one upon rocks.”13 This description of crisis resembles the radical break with the past that Chungpa Han recounts at the beginning of East Goes West: “It was my destiny to see the disjointing of a world . . . I saw myself placed on a shivering pinnacle overlooking a wasteland that had no warmth. . . . And I felt I was looking on death, the death of an ancient planet. . . . In loathing of death, I hurtled forward, out into space, out toward a foreign body . . .” (2:4). Carlyle’s conclusion that “‘It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual Newbirth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism [a transformation by a flash of spiritual illumination], perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man’” becomes a fitting assessment of Han’s situation at the end of The Grass Roof and the beginning of East Goes West.14
“The Everlasting Yea” elaborates on the idea of release from incertitude through the assertion of individual freedom. It hinges on the notion of self-understanding—that you create your own circumstances and knowledge. “‘Fool!’” Carlyle writes, “‘The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself; thy Condition is but the stuff [out of which] thou art to shape that same Ideal. . . .’”15 In other words, wherever you go, there you are. Or, stop looking for answers outside of yourself. Early on in East Goes West, Han considers the aim of his journey to the U.S.: “This world, which had sucked me in by its onward, forward magnetism, must have that in it, too, to feed and anchor man in the old durability. . . . It was here . . . here in America for me to find . . . but where?” (2:4). A passage in Carlyle’s “Everlasting Yea” answers this question:
“May we not say . . . that the hour of Spiritual Enfranchisement is even this: When your Ideal World, wherein the whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to work, becomes revealed, and thrown open; and you discover, with amazement enough . . . that your ‘America is here or nowhere’?”16
The “rebirth” of Kang’s hero—or rather, the death of the state of exile—comes from the realization that the spiritual home he had come to America to find would by necessity be a place of his own making, not an impossible ideal.
Illuminating though it may be, Kang’s Guggenheim application lists only intentions. When Kang submitted it in the fall of 1931, he was still eager to join the intellectual ferment around him and confident of his ability to do so. It seems appropriate that the tone of his proposal resembles the self-assurance expressed by Han at the end of The Grass Roof: “And there are many more dreams within me, greater and greater, also going to come true soon through my own act” (3:376). But, after all, defining oneself is only half the struggle. How society defines you is not, for most, a matter of choice—even more so when you are an Asian immigrant living in the America of the twenties and thirties. It is hardly surprising that the portrait of an extremely complex man—driven by equal parts ego, intelligence, and idealism—that emerges from Kang’s characterization of himself as a poet contrasts sharply with the good-natured, somewhat naive “Oriental Yankee” that his reviewers and critics saw in him.
In the intervening half-decade between the Guggenheim proposal and the actual publication of his second novel, Kang’s aspirations for the limitless agency of the individual matured and darkened. The New York Times book reviewer who wrote that Kang “is no cynic. He never picks up a big stick. He merely tells us what happened, good and bad, the sad and the merry, and always alive,” could not have been more mistaken (100). Kang was in fact quite skeptical about the rosy promise of assimilation and success advertised by the American dream. However, such a reading only becomes possible when East Goes West is looked at as a novel and not as autobiography. Splitting the figure of Chungpa Han from the presumed identity of Younghill Kang proves to be a liberating act: it restores Kang’s creative muscle, and a more radical and more subversive critique of American modernization is revealed.
From the beginning, the process of Americanization for Han is both a process of marginalization and an initiation into the rigors of materialism. Starting off at the main office of the Y.M.C.A., Han hopes that a letter of introduction from a missionary will secure him an entrée into the bustling world of opportunity and work embodied by the Y.M.C.A. office itself—“high up in a skyscraper, [it] seemed one of the busiest places to judge by the typewriters all about . . . clickety-clacking at enormous speed” (2:16). He is disabused of this notion “with businesslike finality” by the organization’s president, who refers him to the Harlem Y.M.C.A. (2:16). There, in turn, he is told that the only available position must “not be given to a Negro or an Oriental . . . precisely because [this] branch was up in Harlem” (2:18–19). Having unwittingly spent almost all his remaining money on a haircut and shave, Han ends up in a flophouse, an experience he describes as being comparable only to the extreme deprivation of a Japanese prison cell. The flophouse is even worse in some respects: unlike the Korean revolutionists, who had been placed in jail “for a single integrated feeling, a hard bright core of fire against oppression,” the homeless bums of New York with whom Han spends the night are “like pithless stalks, and the force that swept them here, the city’s leavings, was for the most part . . . a personal disintegration” (2:21).
Han might still be charmed enough by the possibilities of American individualism—“where individual disintegration was possible, as well as individual integration, where all need not perish with the social organism”—to brush off the flophouse misery, but as this first day draws to a close, he is jobless and without clear prospects for the future (2:21–22). The situation becomes desperate: “I had known the famines of poor rice years in Korea. Now, in utter solitude with a chilling heart, I feared pavement famine, with plenty all around but in the end not even grass to chew” (2:30). Around him swirls a world of commerce and exchange, but it is mechanical and unsustaining. Alone in his unheated room, Han tries to eke out some spiritual nourishment by reading Shakespeare, but finds himself unable to concentrate—“Even in the midst of Hamlet’s subtlest soliloquies, I could think of nothing but food” (2:30).
Significantly, Han is aided in and saved from this hand-to-mouth existence by fellow outcasts—first a bum, then a Chinese restaurant manager, and finally his friend George Jum. On the margins of New York’s unrelenting efficiency, other models for social interaction exist. During another hungry period of his life, Han notes:
[I]f I wandered through the streets of Chinatown about nine o’clock at night—the dinner hour for Chinese waiters and restaurant men—some waiter was almost sure to see me and call out, “Come on . . . Dinner time!” Always they cooked enough to be elastic either way—five more or five less made no difference—and if I joined them, they just brought out another bowl and chopsticks. Such was the Chinese custom. They had a psychology which would seem strange to American businessmen. A spiritual treat for a material, a material for a spiritual—they saw no difference (2:77).
Such generosity is hardly characteristic of Han’s encounters as he seeks to join the mainstream of American life. As he continues in his adventures, Han comes to realize that as a person of color, his difficulties always begin when he steps outside the narrow boundaries of acceptable, unthreatening behavior. So, for example, his stint as a houseboy with one American family ends when the father, Mr. Lively, encounters George Jum and his white girlfriend and begins to suspect that Han might be romantically interested in his teenaged daughter. “‘My dear boy, see here,’” Mr. Lively admonishes. “‘I love you just as much as if you were my own boy. But you are getting wrong ideas. I don’t want to see you marry an American girl. Neither would I want to see Elsie marrying an Oriental. And all decent people are like that. It is not as the Lord intended.’” Han’s surprise is complete: “I was very solemn and silent and unable to open my mouth to say anything” (2:146).
For the non-white populations of this time, making one’s way in the U.S. becomes a matter of negotiating around racist—and often ludicrous—misassumptions. Anti-miscegenation laws still held force in California, and for an Asian man to even be seen with a white woman often meant trouble. Stereotypes dictated the very conditions of life in other ways as well: in one Chinese restaurant, eight of Han’s nine fellow waiters have college degrees—three of those also have Ph.D.’s from Columbia University. Han’s friend George Jum, formerly an ambassador to Washington from Korea, makes his money as a cook (2:70).17 Wagstaff, another friend who works as an elevator man while getting a law degree, asks, “‘What room is there in America for an educated Negro? There is not much else but the “yessuh” job. And either way, I shall hardly be assured of a decent living way’” (2:268–69). Han asserts that “Through Wagstaff I was having my first introduction to a crystallized caste system, comparable only to India, here in the greatest democratic country of the world,” but in fact he has been learning this lesson since he first set foot in the United States (2:269).
If Han seems naive initially, he is also a quick study. Leaving the scene of his first New York encounter, he notes:
[S]oon I became convinced that everyone in New York felt the same way as this dry-voiced, kidding man I had first met . . . the need of sustaining a role, a sort of gaminlike sophistication, harder and more polished than a diamond in the prosperous classes, but equally present in the low, a hard shell over the soul of New-World children, essential for the pebbles rattling through subway tunnels and their sun-hid city streets (2:16).
Cultivating a persona, Han realizes, is a necessary survival tactic, especially in a society where you are almost entirely subjected to distorted expectations. At one point, Han complains to his more cynical and experienced friend, To Wan Kim, about Boston. Kim replies,
“You will get along somehow. . . . Boston has treated you well on the whole. . . . Professors in Boston have great sympathy for any adopted Oriental child. As long as you are willing to be docile and obedient.”
“That’s just it!” I agreed indignantly, and Kim smiled. “I hate being nicey-nice.”
“Well, I’m afraid we cannot do much against Boston,” said Kim. “Morals and manners are greater strongholds than fortifications . . .” (2:251).
Through his experiences, Han comes to understand this lesson quite well. The disjunction between the circumstances that Han finds himself relegated to and the lofty hopes he fosters for his adopted land is not bitter irony, it is an inevitable by-product of America’s racist culture. For an interloper like Han, the trick is to figure out how to negotiate those expectations without capitulating to them.
Perhaps the most revealing instance of the pragmatic survivalism Han develops can be found in the series of dinner parties given by Miss Churchill, an elderly Quaker woman who “used to entertain in a quiet way all kinds of people, particularly young people and many of them from foreign lands, such as India, Japan, or China.” At first, Han is one of many guests, often accompanied by “the Hindu student Senzar, or the Japanese Miyamori.” What follows is in essence a detailed explanation of how Han alone of the three foreign students manages to secure his place at such gatherings (2:289–90).
Miyamori, on the one hand, makes the mistake of admiring American civilization too uncritically. According to Han, “[Miyamori] frankly envied me as a more or less permanent exile, and advised me never to go home, since all was primitive and barbaric hell back there. Tall buildings, subways, autos, universal sanitation, great department stores . . . these seemed like Utopia to Miyamori.” For this fault, and for the fault of writing bad poetry to all his American friends, signed “Very respectably,” he is invited by Miss Churchill less and less (2:290).
Senzar’s excision from the group comes about in a much more dramatic fashion. An “Indo-Oxford product . . . in America studying engineering,” Senzar seems “handsome, poetic and sad” as long as he keeps his mouth shut. (Such a characterization gives an apt depiction of Orientalism—the illusion of exoticism and mystery can only be maintained through silence.) Conflict arises one evening when he seizes upon Han, the only other non-white in the room, and begins berating Han’s American schooling, “unconsciously parodying the English-felt superiority of the English university man.” The complexities of a colonized mentality are clearly articulated in Senzar’s simultaneous identification with Oxford’s superiority and his rage at the second-class status it relegates him to. “‘You think you’re educated,’” mocks Senzar to Kang, “‘You don’t know how to talk English!’” The other guests, who had been “listening attentively to this, with sly glances of amusement and surprise,” are less entertained when the scope of Senzar’s tirade widens to include them—“‘Then, Americans are not sound,’ Senzar kept on, and the Americans and English began to get very uncomfortable.” Another Oxford man protests, and Senzar becomes even more enraged, excoriating the colonial system and exclaiming, “‘Soon we will drive you English out’” (2:290–92).
Attempting to save the situation, Han jumps back into the fray, countering Senzar’s rant with the claim that “‘You Hindus are better off under the English than we are under the Japanese.’” The conversation goes on and on, but Han finally manages to engage Senzar’s attention once again: “I deflected his words and his wrath toward me. Not without enjoyment, too, I sought to stem that lava which Miss Churchill felt to be such a social catastrophe.” Afterwards, Han is “almost decorated for merit by the exhausted Westerners.” He comments matter-of-factly: “Senzar, for want of tact, was never invited by Miss Churchill again. I became a regular guest now, for dinner and the evening, every Wednesday” (2:293).
The irony of all this is that the statements made by both Miyamori and Senzar are remarkably similar to ones made throughout the book by Han. For example, both Senzar and Han are critical of colonization. Han is diplomatic about his situation—“For me there was always special favor, special kindliness, special protection . . . the white-man’s-burden attitude toward the dark colonies. Ralph’s kindness . . . Leslie’s brutal cruelty . . . I weighed them in my mind, and it seemed to me better to miss the kindness and not to have the cruelty” (2:115)—while Senzar bristles with indignation at his: “‘So you think you know the English? No! This cold-blooded, thieving, wooden, two-faced race? Oh no!’” (2:292). Moreover, Han’s frustration with the disjointed, assembly-line instruction that passes for Western pedagogy parallels Senzar’s assertion that there is “‘Nothing to get from their education anyway. Only mechanical things’” (2:292). And both are aware of their own exiled status in the West. When Han describes Senzar’s attitude towards his native country—“Of course, he was a fanatic patriot, but his words were so much in the clouds, you could not make out whether he intended to go back to India or not”—he could be discussing his own conflicting sense of self-interest and love of country (2:290). Similarly, Miyamori’s reluctance to go back to the “primitive and barbaric hell” of “home” (2:290) is echoed in Han’s realization that he has become “softened somewhat by the luxuries of Western living” (2:361).
In contrast to both Senzar and Miyamori, however, Han has learned to master the fragile balance of accommodation. If he is unwilling to remain silent and inscrutable on the fringes of conversation, at least he knows how to function within the strict rules of polite company. He is not, like Miyamori, overly eager to Westernize, thus making him uninteresting to a Western audience. He is also not, like Senzar, so flamboyant in his criticisms of Western culture that he is deemed uncivilized. Han’s deflection of Senzar’s attention away from the others, using Korea’s colonization as bait, is a classic middle-man maneuver; it might be disturbingly opportunistic, but it is also extremely astute, earning him the gratitude of his hostess even as it grates on our modern-day multicultural sensibilities. Because of this performance, Han is invited back again and again—an opportunity that gives him access to free food and the social connections that eventually lead him to his beloved Trip.
In its dramatization of the racial politicking happening in the parlor rooms of American society, this episode is both more complex and more informative than it might appear to be at first: the dissonance between Chungpa Han’s persistent idealism and his clear-eyed observations of the hypocrisy around him is not mere inconsistency, it is a carefully constructed conceit, with Younghill Kang as its master architect and principal beneficiary.18 At the time Kang was writing East Goes West, America was going through a profoundly xenophobic stage, and to be an Asian in such a society—even one who operated in the oftentimes more progressive world of academics and intellectuals—required a certain decorum and polish, and an acute sense of survival. Kang the writer, like Han the character, needed to tread the middle ground between the extremes of honest expression and diplomatic restraint. Like Han, he could not afford to alienate his audience. And like Han, he was vying for a place at the table.
For Kang, however, a place at the table meant access to American citizenship—that sense of home—that was denied to him by law. Like all Asian immigrants, Kang was prevented from becoming naturalized because of his race. “I know I am an American,” he would write, “[in] all but the citizenship papers denied me by the present interpretation of the law of 1870, under which a Korean is not racially eligible for citizenship” (33:63). Nevertheless, his previous successes had made him cocky about his ability to surmount these difficulties. Taking up the challenge voiced at the beginning of East Goes West—“Out of action rises the dream, rises the poetry. Dream without motion is the only wasteland that can sustain nothing” (2:5–6)—he set about trying to accomplish what even Thomas Mann had been unable to do—get a law passed through Congress that would make him a U.S. citizen. The bills that eventually came before Congress (H.R. 7127 in the House and S. 2802 in the Senate) were not introduced until the fall of 1939, but Kang had grasped the importance of pro-American boosterism long before. As Kim points out to Han, “‘In this country, in this age, art becomes the instinct for self-advertisement’” (2:160). Later in his life, Kang would conclude even more explicitly, “Artists are propogandists. They propogandize themselves” (110).
Kang was ultimately able to scratch out a place for himself as a writer within the crippling limitations of the role assigned to him because he managed to subvert them. Just as Han uses his own history (i.e., Korea’s colonization by Japan) to get into the good graces of the assembled company, Kang played off the assumption that his book is autobiography to prove to his audience—the American public—that he was citizenship-worthy. He manipulated the misperception that he and Han are the same person. Han’s clever positioning of himself between the extremes of Senzar and Miyamori thus becomes both a lesson in survival skills—a description of how to stay afloat in the frigid waters of social acceptability—and a demonstration of Kang’s own balancing technique in East Goes West. Thus, the book’s harshest critiques of America’s bigotry and ignorance are placed in the mouths and actions of other characters, while Han narrates from a seemingly inoffensive fly-on-the-wall perspective. (As Han discovers in his very first job, “It was interesting in a sense, being treated just like a dog or cat. One could see everything, and go unnoticed . . .” (2:60).) Through Kang’s shrewd construction of Han as an amiable fellow who understands the rules of the game and who knows how to make himself useful (which in this case means making oneself palatable—not too strong and not too weak—very much like an acceptable dinner guest), he was able to negotiate between his ambitions for the book, his insights about American society, and his own political self-interest.19
The recommendations that Kang’s citizenship bid received from university presidents, bestselling writers, philosophers, politicians, and publishers represent the initial success and the ultimate limitations of such a strategy. Maxwell Perkins writes: “I have known Younghill Kang both professionally as an editor, and personally, for some ten years now, and I believe him to be thoroughly qualified—in his understanding of American principles and in his love for this country—to be a citizen of whom Americans can be proud” (112). Kang is thus singled out as a talented intellectual who, through his demonstrated commitment to “American principles” can be trusted with the honor of citizenship. A comment by the popular author Louis Adamic expresses a similar sentiment: “Younghill Kang is, emotionally and intellectually, identified with America; his interests in America, in fact, are greater—in many respects—than those of all too many native Americans” (112). By out-Americanizing the Americans, Kang is deemed worthy of becoming one.
Both these endorsements, like the citizenship bid itself, presuppose a utopian vision of reasonableness, a belief that for the exceptionally gifted, exceptions can be made—that the racist structures that had conspired to shut Kang and countless other immigrants out could, under the right conditions, be flexible.20 They are an appeal to the seductive if elusive humanism on which Kang’s hopes for success in the U.S. were built. In an article requesting support for the bills, Kang would write: “Democracy is the only possible medium in which men may struggle individually toward poise and dignity and self-respect. . . . If we behave ourselves and move with high thoughts, each man attains kinship with a king” (33:62). But neither Kang’s illustrious connections nor his personal and literary achievements nor his “high thoughts” ultimately proved sufficient to remove him from the ranks of those barred from citizenship because of their race. The congressional bills that had been introduced as part of his citizenship bid were never passed.
It is a testament to Kang’s perspicacity that his book already contains within it a critique of the racist culture that would burst his idealism. Kang might have been enticed by the possibilities offered by an idealization of individualism, but he is not stupid. Unlike Han, he is not surprised to find that a “crystallized caste system” exists in America. East Goes West might open with the hopeful optimism of Carlyle’s Everlasting Yea, but it closes on a much more ambivalent note.
In the last pages of the book, Han describes a recurring dream: he is trying to reach his childhood friends who are playing on a rope bridge that leads to a “paradise of wild and flowery magic.” As he descends to meet them, things begin to fall out of his pockets—“money and keys, contracts and business letters. Especially the key to my car, my American car” (2:361–62). He chases after them, suddenly finding himself in a cellar. He notices that he is not alone:
Other men were in that cellar with me—some frightened-looking Negroes, I remember. Then looking back, I saw . . . men with clubs and knives. The cellar was being attacked. The Negroes were about to be mobbed. I shut the door and bolted it, and called to my frightened fellows to help me hold the door.
“Fire, bring fire,” called the red-faced men outside.
And through the grating I saw the flaring torches being brought. And applied. Being shoved, crackling, through the gratings.
I awoke like the phoenix out of a burst of flames (2:362).
In pursuit of that ultimate icon of the American dream—his car keys—Han is cornered by the ugly reality of his position in society. The fire-baptism that he experiences here is not the birth into a newfound sense of freedom that Carlyle envisioned as the Everlasting Yea. It is the realization that to be non-white in a fundamentally racist society is to be trapped by others’ fear of you. It is a birth into an expectation of violence. In the end, Han has more in common with the “frightened-looking Negroes” than with the “red-faced men” gathering outside—he too is trapped.
Kang’s belief that he could escape the metaphorical fate he depicted in East Goes West was based on an arrogance that was both his strength and his greatest weakness. In an essay called “Younghill Kang’s Unwritten Third Act,” James Wade writes:
Somewhere in [Kang’s] middle years those vaulting aspirations were realized to be impossible, an experience that happens to all of us, except the most unassuming. Kang, in his pride and sense of superiority (and he was superior in a great many ways), apparently wilted under the realization. If he could not be the greatest, he would not settle for second-best: for him it was genius or nothing. Rather than compromise those ambitions cherished from childhood, he fell silent and saw his career ebb away into relative obscurity. For such a man, the late-learned lesson must have been a bitter one (108:59).
Blaming Kang’s lack of productivity on ego alone is not entirely accurate, however. This “relative obscurity” was triggered as much by profound disillusionment with the political situation as by the onslaught of middle age. “It has been hard for me to retake my place in American life after World War II,” Kang would write, “partly because of my restless anxiety about the world situation, particularly the recent Korean events” (66). In the aftermath of these upheavals, Kang found that he could not maintain the level of poise required to balance between the twin poles of his intellectual ambitions and his pragmatic, social needs.
The mental and material cost of all this for Kang was great. As Lucy Lynn Kang poignantly writes, her father “was not equipped to survive in a system of capitalism and free enterprise, once the bubble of success broke” (119).21 Moreover, by assuming that he could transcend the restraints on his fellow Asian immigrants, he had become complicit in the diminution of his own work. Kang’s youthful idealization of the opportunities awaiting him in the United States must have seemed like that first haircut Chungpa Han receives upon arriving in New York—sitting back in the barber’s chair, he is seduced by the luxuries of the moment. He doesn’t yet realize how much this momentary indulgence will cost him (2:17). By 1954, Kang would write:
I was of the Western generation that had matured believing in Northrup’s Meeting of East and West. I foresaw great cross-fertilization of science and art. I thought of myself . . . as a cultural go-between, never as a member of any political party. In more ways than one I was seeing the death of all I had hoped for. Such a job is hardly possible now and I seem to have no job, a small enough tragedy in the greater one holding us all” (66).
As he crisscrossed the country in an old Buick, supporting himself through lectures and occasional teaching jobs, Kang would become alienated from even a sense of his own literary accomplishments.
If, in the end, East Goes West is flawed, it is still remarkable in its aspirations and achievements. The passion for literature that sustained Kang in his youth stands out against the ruins of his life, forcing a closer look at the lessons of this first generation of Korean immigrants. “To me literature is the most important of all the arts,” Kang would say in 1941. “Good literature cannot be destroyed. A hundred years from now people who read American history to learn about the Roosevelt Administration will not have the whole truth. They will find more truth in Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis, for literature alone can give the emotional side of human beings” (134). Certainly, Kang’s depiction of urban centers like New York through the eyes of Chungpa Han makes for a richly entertaining and informative account of the cosmopolitan subculture of immigrants in the twenties and thirties. Kang’s portrait of the small urban Korean community on the East Coast, driven by nationalism while scrambling to sustain a livelihood on the margins of the mainstream, is probably the only literary account of its kind from that time.
The significance of East Goes West extends far beyond mere historical documentation, however: it is a portrait of one man’s journey through idealism, in all its complexity and contradictions, its difficulties and unique pleasures. Kang is not, and perhaps never imagined himself to be, a visionary writer. In many ways, he is still very much a product of his times. But he is also a man of undeniable insight. So, for example, while his portrait of African Americans relies largely on popular stereotypes—invoking in one instance the “flamboyant lazy magic of disintegration” of “Negro jazz” (2:18) and in another, the “Negro humor which found some funny side in lack of dignity, in losing face” (2:72)—his assessment of their situation in relation to his was remarkably astute. The image of imminent lynching at the end of the book is just as potent a premonition of the urban riots of today as it is a reference to the racial unrest of the time. It is as a record of one man’s response to the world around him—of his questing intelligence—that Kang’s work transcends the shuttered expectations of his own time.
Out of print for much of the past fifty years and all but un-anthologized, the impact of Kang’s books on American and Asian American literature has been largely limited to the influence he had on people such as Carlos Bulosan, the pioneering Filipino American writer. Bulosan, who published his own account of immigrant life, America Is in the Heart, in 1946, credits Kang as an inspiration: “I returned to the writers of my time for strength. And I found Younghill Kang, a Korean who had immigrated to the United States as a boy and worked his way up until he had become a professor at an American university. . . . But it was his indomitable courage that rekindled in me a fire of hope. Why could I not succeed as Younghill Kang had?” (143:265).
Kang’s failures are as much a part of his legacy as his successes, however. Kang saw himself as unique, apart from the rest—the Korean who could become an American through force of will, the Asian immigrant who could sustain a career as a successful writer—but his life is, in its hopes and disappointments, actually the life of many first-generation immigrants who come to this country and find themselves disillusioned and alone. The lessons he learned are worth remembering: The “Oriental Yankee” of East Goes West’s subtitle might read as an antiquated version of today’s term “Asian American,” but “The Making of an Oriental Yankee” is in fact that process of deconstruction—of simplistic nationalism, of naive faith in America’s gleaming promise, of a stable, color-blind identity—that is implicit in the construction of a new sense of home.
Proof of Kang’s singular abilities—his perceptive eye, his acrobatic talent for mediation—ultimately comes not from his inclusion on a guest list, but from the writing and publication of East Goes West itself. In his book, if not in his life, Kang emerges as the singular writer and poet that it was his greatest ambition to become. The story is there, for anyone to read.
SUNYOUNG LEE
This essay—and this reprint—would never have been possible without the contributions of Juliana Koo, whose editorial insight, thoughtfulness, and commitment are always an inspiration. Thanks also to Lawrence Chua, for his ever-incisive comments and suggestions.
1. The citations refer to the suggestions for further reading (at the front of this book; this page), which assigns each source a number. The source number is followed by a page number when appropriate. References to The Grass Roof are taken from Follett’s 1959 reprint. References to East Goes West are from this edition. Materials not in the bibliography are listed in these notes.
2. As a result of the Naturalization Act of 1790, only “free whites” were able to become citizens of the United States. This and subsequent laws and interpretations by courts excluded Asian immigrants from voting and owning property as well.
3. “I’m still in Korea,” Kang wrote his editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, on January 1, 1947. “I don’t enjoy myself very much. Thirty million frustrated, confused, and humiliated Koreans are trying to become a nation. The only excuse for the continued presence of Americans in Korea is to help prepare the Korean people for their promised independence. The steps in accomplishing this mission are clear: we are getting nowhere” (147).
4. The clearest allusion to a future for Chungpa and Trip occurs in the still very ambiguous lines: “With the expanding spring, the flower of our relationship was to bloom fuller and fuller, containing seed of all our future days . . .” (2:358).
5. To find clues to Kang’s life in his books, it is useful to study those portions that he explicitly claimed as autobiography—for example, in sketches such as “Oriental Yankee,” published in Common Ground in 1941.
6. A particularly snide review that ran in the Times Literary Supplement explicitly states: “[Kang’s] autobiography is of great length, and yet it is told in an artless way that makes it rather fascinating” (98).
7. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel, introduction by Maxwell Perkins (1922; New York: Scribner’s–Simon & Schuster, 1995), xv.
8. Wolfe, xii–xiii.
9. Perkins’ view of The Grass Roof can be seen in a draft of the recommendation letter he wrote for Kang’s 1931 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship application. “[The Grass Roof] makes the Western reader feel at one with the Oriental characters.” The next line is visible through Perkins’ penciled cross out: “Generally they seem to be hopelessly alien and incomprehensible” (147).
10. Of the New York Times book review describing East Goes West as “not a novel,” Perkins writes: “The first really adequate review we have had” (147: October 14, 1937).
11. Much has been made of Perkins’ suggestions that Kang cut descriptions of “the frivolous Easterners” in early drafts of East Goes West. Taken in the context of the correspondence as a whole, it becomes clear that Perkins’ comments have more to do with his assessment of Kang in terms of commerce rather than art—and thus with keeping the manuscript within an acceptable, or publishable, length—than with attempts to censor Kang. Perkins might not have been sufficiently visionary to ascertain the potential value of Kang’s portraits of Koreans for future generations, but on the basis of his brief notes to Kang, it is difficult to assert that he manipulated the original text without Kang’s approval (147).
12. The eventual title and subtitle of the book, East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee, were the result of a collaborative brainstorm by Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins (and presumably Kang). Perkins originally suggested “The Americanization of Younghill Kang” and “Rebirth in America” (the former giving further indication of how Perkins hoped to package Kang’s book) while Wolfe’s first offerings were “Yankee Out of Korea” and “Oriental Yankee” (147: April 5, 1937).
13. Thomas Carlyle, from Sartor Resartus, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed. (New York: Norton, 1986), 964–65.
14. Carlyle, 970.
15. Carlyle, 984–85.
16. Carlyle, 984.
17. Ever pragmatic despite his extremely romantic views on love, Jum notes that: “‘The wages of a good cook are $50 a week with board, room and laundry. Better than a bank clerk or a college instructor, you will find. And it’s much better money than when I was an ambassador for the Korean government in Washington, D.C.’” (2:35).
18. In its dead-pan portrayal of the attitudes goading such opportunism along, the Senzar episode also gives a sadly accurate commentary on the condition of some multicultural interactions—two colored folk duking it out over the same tiny scrap of privilege while an appreciative audience looks on.
19. A passage in East Goes West describing the battle of the wills between a professor of Greek and Vidol, a Siamese classmate of Han’s, is a useful indication of the rationale behind such literary dissimulation. Whenever Vidol is called on by the professor, he refuses to admit that he hasn’t done his homework, saying instead that he can’t remember the answer: “[B]efore such alien falsehood, the professor lost all control; he would grow white and shake with fury. It was an obsession with him to break down Vidol, to force him to confess he was not telling the truth.” Han interprets Vidol’s stubbornness to another friend:
“Of course, the East does not put the same emphasis upon the words of fact as the West,” I tried to explain. “A gentleman says what is respectable and decent to say. No doubt Vidol really means ‘I ought to have read.’”
Han portrays this attitude as an East/West dichotomy, but as used by Kang, it can be read as a kind of strategy—an indication of what to expect from Han himself (2:175).
A later discussion of race with Wagstaff further justifies such a tactic: “‘They say that Negroes always lie. Why shouldn’t they?’” Wagstaff asks.
“They must lie to exist. They see around them a world of lies, a cruel unfriendly world from birth, where they are gyped because of color. There is only one philosophy that can come from that. It will not be ‘honesty is the best policy’ or any lie like that. Learn the language of gyp, learn to gyp too. Confess honestly that right isn’t might, but might is right, always since the world began.”
Likewise, Kang realizes that he could never hope to pass in society by remaining completely honest. His use of Han as a mask becomes less a matter of deception than an instinct for self-preservation (2:270).
20. This promise is articulated by Senator Kirby, one of Han’s road companions. He says: “‘Now you must definitely make up your mind to be American. Don’t say, “I’m a Korean” when you’re asked. Say “I’m an American.”’” When Han observes, “‘But an Oriental has a hard time in America. He is not welcomed much. . . . legally I am denied,’” Kirby comes back with: “‘There shouldn’t be any buts about it! Believe in America with all your heart. Even if it’s sometimes hard, believe in her’” (2:346).
21. In an April 20, 1986, letter to the New York Times, Lucy Lynn Kang would hint at political difficulties as well: “My Korean-born father, Younghill Kang, a writer . . . sought American citizenship and political freedom; he, too, could only live as part of a free society. . . . During the McCarthy era, when people were blacklisted for expressing such sentiments, my father, along with countless others, suffered adversities” (118).