We floated insecurely, in the rootless groping fashion of men hung between two worlds. With Korean culture at a dying gasp, being throttled wherever possible by the Japanese, with conditions at home ever tragic and uncertain, life for us was tied by a slenderer thread to the homeland than for the Chinese. Still it was tied. Koreans thought of themselves as exiles, not as immigrants.
Out of print for the past fifty years, East Goes West is being rereleased in May 2019 for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. A semi-autobiographical account of a young man's experiences after coming to America from Japanese-controlled Korea in the late 1920's, this book is considered the first true Korean-American novel, and as such, serves as a colourful snapshot of its time and place. In addition to the restored text, this edition includes a chronology of author Younghill Kang's life, suggestions for further reading, a useful foreword by author Alexander Chee, and an edifying afterword by Sunyoung Lee (Editor and Publisher of Kaya Press). It is Lee who explains that in its day, although well-received, many reviewers dismissed East Goes West as “merely memoir”: 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.Lee counters: Kang staked out his literary tradition 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. Especially through this lens, East Goes West is a masterwork – I found it much more readable than other books from its era – and I am grateful that it has been brought back from the dead. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted might not be in their final form.)
New Yorkers seem to have some aim in every movement they make. (Some frantic aim.) They are like guns shooting off. How unlike Asiatics in an Oriental village, who drift up and down aimlessly and leisurely! But these people have no time, not even for gossiping, even for staring. To be thrown among New Yorkers – yes, it means to have a new interpretation of life never conceived before. The business interpretation...Free, factual man is reasoning from cause to effect here all the time – not so much thinking. It is intelligence measuring, rather than intellect's solution. Prophets of hereafter, poets of vision...maybe the American is not so much these. But he is a good salesman, amidst scientific tools. His mind is like Grand Central Station. It is definite, it is timed, it has mathematical precision on clearcut stone foundation. There may be monotonous dull repetition, but all is accurate and conscious. Stupid routine sometimes, but behind it, duty in the very look. Every angle and line has been measured. How solid the steel framework of this Western civilization is!At eighteen years old, with four American dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare, Chungpa Han arrives in New York City with hopes of continuing his studies of Western literature. He meets many helpful emigrants from various Asian countries in the city's bustling Chinatown, but it is to other ex-pat Koreans that Han is primarily drawn; and it is from them that he receives the best advice and aid. Over his ensuing collegiate career, Han will work as a houseboy, a farmhand, a door-to-door salesman – and in every situation he will encounter goodness and racism, always managing to get by and not cause waves. Kang is careful to have other characters make all the dramatic gestures and opinionated speeches – Han rarely gets passionate outside of intimate discussions of art and literature – and while this makes the main character seem passive and submissive, his inner thoughts show a progressive development from naive to cynical. By the end of the novel, despite having completed his education (in and out of school), settled into his working career and a hint at romantic fulfillment, Han muses:
All lives rise from nature, express it a moment, then come to destruction in the undying world – the scientist with his laboratory invention, the explorer with his passion for the undiscovered land, the mother with her devotion of love, the lover with heaped agony, all doomed and destined to be ashes under the volcanic destruction of death, as Pompeii under Vesuvius. It is all a matter of how soon. Life the eternal butterfly flutters into its natural web. Yes, the philosopher, too, dreaming he may be that butterfly, moves on to his death, and only the undying universe remains, the bird of two wings.I had never considered the early Korean-American experience before (closer to home, Han spends some time in a small Canadian college and pretty accurately dismisses it as a backwater both yearning to be British and at least a generation behind American progress), and East Goes West was an interesting and educational read. There are some irony-laden funny parts (especially Han's time with the millionaire evangelist), some quasi-racist observations that, while they may reflect Kang's thoughts in the '30s, don't weather the intervening years well, and much thoughtful commentary on the East vs the West. Not a book to get through quickly, I'm happy to have received this one for review; hope it finds a new audience.
