East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  And as I wrote my name down—Chungpa2 Han—in my unmistakably Oriental handwriting, which unconsciously dwelt on a stroke, or finished in a quirk that was not Western—I was elated that I had voted not to spend the night with the waifs and strays, but was enrolled there tangibly as a New Yorker.

  I had engaged a small room for two dollars. This was half of all I had. I was satisfied. I thought I had a bargain. I had heard that all the hotels in New York cost ten and twenty dollars a night.

  “They are worth that!” I thought, as the elevator boy danced up, a rich tobacco brown, well-formed and neatly mannered like his dress. He seized my big suitcase of brown cloth purchased in Seoul, Korea, a roomy bag which yet carried little besides a few books, some letters of introduction and a toothbrush.

  The elevator went zk! and up we shot. A funny cool ziffy feeling ran into my heart. It was my first elevator. Fast climb . . . I thought . . . like going to heaven. . . .

  My room was small, white, nakedly clean, as characterless and capable as the cellophane-wrapped boxes in which American products come. The elevator boy smoothed the bed and pinched the curtains and examined the towels and looked in the wastepaper basket and picked up imaginary papers. I sat down in the chair, and crossed my legs. He stared at me dubiously. He waited. He didn’t seem interested in my conversation. I asked him if he liked Shakespeare. He giggled and said coldly, “Who, suh? Me, suh? No, suh!” I know now that he was waiting for a dime. I was not sure. Besides I had nothing but bills, those four dollar bills which rested in the inner lining of my cap. I committed my first New York sin. I gave him nothing, neither then nor when I left next morning. I am sorry. I would like to go back and make it right. I have been a waiter myself. I know the importance of tips. But I would not be able to find that bell boy now. There must be fifty thousand bell boys in New York and they never stay in the same hotel long. Even the hotel may not have stayed. New York—its people, its buildings, its streets, are like a rushing river, the flood of which is changing all the time, so to be a New Yorker, one must feel like Heraclitus, that nothing is changeless but the law of change. . . .

  The bathroom was almost directly across from my room, beautiful, shining, glazed, so ordinary here, and yet a marvel of plumbing and utility. Even a prince in the old days could not have had such a tub. In Korea, the tubs were not of marble, nor machine-turned porcelain, but of humble intimate wood, and they were never used except for a grand occasion. Then all the water must come out from the well. In summer man bathed in streams, in winter from a great hollow gourd, a shell of the summer.

  “But here,” I thought, “a man has only to press a button. All the streams leap when he calls.”

  I let the water run—shee!—shee! as hot as I could stand it, as cold as I could stand it. I washed with soap—in my childhood, people still used an old-fashioned paste of ashes for that purpose—once more with soap, and then thoroughly with clear water. Even my hair I washed . . . everything. . . . I was washing off the dirts of the Old World that was dead, as in my country people did before they set out on a Buddhist pilgrimage. Now I had washed everything. Everything but the inside. If I could, I would have washed that as thoroughly, I suppose, and left a shell. But the inner felt the echo of the outer.

  In my room again, I listened at the window. That incessant hum of wheels and screech of brakes . . . how different from the brawling mountain streams, the remote grass-roofed villages of Korea. . . . Korea, kingdom that was no more, taken by the little blue-clad soldiers to be a barrier against Russia, to be a continental point in Asia from which to punish Manchuria and China for their deep and stubborn resistance to the Machine Age. . . . In sheer amazement at life, I suddenly stopped at the mirror to see if I had changed, as well as my environment. For me an unusual act. In my Korean village there were mirrors, but mostly small ones, about the size of a watch, and generally with covers. Besides, the people who had mirrors usually hid them. It was thought some kind of vice to look at one’s face. Some people like my uncle, the crazy poet, never properly saw themselves.

  I have read that the Koreans are a mysterious race, from the anthropologist’s viewpoint. Mixtures of several blood streams must have taken place prehistorically. Many Koreans have dark brown hair, not black—mine was black, so black as to have a blackberry’s shine. Many have naturally wavy hair. Mine was quite straight, as straight as pine-needles. Koreans, especially women and young men, are often ivory and rose. My face, after the sun of the long Pacific voyage, suggested copper and brass. My undertones of the skin, too, mouth and cheek, were not at all rosy, but more plum. I was a brunette Korean. Koreans are more animated and hot-tempered than the Chinese, more robust and more solid than the Japanese, and I showed these racial traits as well. At eighteen I impressed most as being not boy but man. I needed to shave every morning for the thick growth of hair that came overnight. My limbs retained a look of extreme plasticity, as in a growing boy, or in a Gauguin painting, but with many Koreans, even grown up, they still do. In more ways than one, I looked an alien to the Machine Age and New York. One could not tell from my outside that I had lost touch with dew and stars and ghosts.

  I tried to go to sleep, to rest baptized in the roars of Manhattan traffic, as Virgil had been in the Hellenic stream. But all my old life was passing through my brain as if I had not been able to wash out the inside at all. My eyes seemed to turn back, not forward. I saw the village where I had spent my boyhood, and where my father’s father’s forefather had spent his. I saw my father, responsible for the whole family, uncles and aunts and cousins every one, and I, his only son, his vehicle through time, who had made a wide parabola from him. I saw my paksa uncle and my poet uncle and many more. . . . Yes, a synod of ancestors seemed coming to visit me, watching me disapprovingly in that high Western bed, which had renounced plain earth so literally beneath. What can you hope to find here? they said. Life, I cried. We see no life, they said. And yet they did not scold me now. Just waited, arms in sleeves, with the grave and patient wonder of the Asian in their eyes. And with a pang, I saw before me my uncle’s studio, through which blew in summer the pine-laden breeze. I saw his books and the thousands of old poems in Chinese characters I knew and loved so well. Must I leave all this behind at the portals of America? . . . Couldn’t they at least pass through into the world of the machines? . . . And against my will, a poem came into my head, one I had heard long ago. All in one throbbing moil it revolved, mingling in a hopeless incoherence with the foreign noises outside, of that most spectacular city so far over the rim of the world to me and yet a greater cycle in time than in space onward. It annoyed me that I could not quite rearrange the lines of this poem, nor remember the rhymes perfectly.

  It was written in Chinese characters, but it was a Korean poem. One, I think, written by my crazy-poet uncle—although I am not quite sure. (Poetry writing then was so often anonymous. Men cared for the poem, not for the fame.) It dealt with a tragedy that had happened in our province, perhaps a hundred or more years ago, yet still remembered and sung. A young lady of the house of Huang, or Autumn Foliage, had been suspected of unchastity. In Korea, this was such a terrible thing that the family in which it occurred would be disgraced forever, even by rumor. The young lady did the only thing possible in her environment. She gave orders for the building of a wooden coffin and said good-bye. In the wooden coffin she embarked on the sea as to the land of death. Miles away, beyond the sphere of her trouble, as if in token of true innocence, she was picked up by men of the family of Li, or Plum Blossom. She became a daughter of the Li household and married one of the sons.

  In this poem, she speaks of herself symbolically. A leaf of the family of the Autumn Foliage floats loosely upon the sea. It is blown to rest against the branch of the white spring plum blossoms. That leaf of the yellow foliage is carried so far away that if one wishes to see her, he must ride on the back of the white crane.

  This poem was very short, but contained in four short
lines an Asian drama of fate which might have been entitled Hail and Farewell, or Autumn Saved by Spring, or Distance Bridged and Unbridgeable, or many more names besides. And the images were such that it was a poetic experience to write them in dynamic calligraphy, surrendering to the natural motion of leaves and scattering blossoms, of autumn and spring and the waves. In the end I had to rise from bed and write down this poem on paper, to get it all straightened out, before I could fall asleep in my high Western bed.

  5

  My second night was not spent in a New York hotel. . . . But of that trouble, later.

  I was up early and checked out, while the streets were still: quietly rumbling. Half-past eight—it is perhaps the emptiest time. I did not know then that the people were in the subways.

  The man in the “Quick Lunch” I entered had plenty of time on his hands. He had nothing better to do than to stand on one foot and the toe of the other, and look at me quizzically while I was eating my two doughnuts and milk. I had been inspired to order these by a previous customer, a taximan who finished so quickly that when I looked a second time he had only half a doughnut left; by the size of the last bite, I saw how he did it—half a doughnut for a bite.

  “Third breakfast this morning,” he had mumbled. “First one at four, second at six. . . . Been up all night.”

  “Tough,” said the quick-lunch counterman laconically. He was blonde-looking, Uneeda-cracker colored, with deep wrinkles cutting his face, so that he seemed forty-five. But I think he was about thirty-five, or he may have been ten years less. His eyes were dry, semi-humorous-looking, and in his dirty apron, he had a dry, casual ease as if, behind his counter, he would not have changed his pavement view of humanity even for the Prince of Wales.

  “Don’t eat the hole!” he said to me finally, with a faint, dry grin.

  I couldn’t think of anything to reply to this in English, so I just nodded and went on with my doughnut.

  “Guess he don’t speak English,” said the man, still regarding me like a sceptical parent, and addressing a waitress only by a rakish cock of his sandy curls. “Look at his suitcase there. The guy just came. Guess he don’t speak any English yet.”

  “Sure he does,” she said good-humoredly. She was tall and skinny and young—about seventeen but big. Her face, long as a colt’s, had a confectionery pink-and-whiteness. There was something friendly and good-natured about her.

  I took it for encouragement and began. I asked the man his name.

  “MacNeil,” he said jauntily, his arms still folded; “Scotch.”

  I asked him, did he know “MacFlecknoe,” an English poem which I had learned in Korea.

  “Who?”

  And I quoted:

  All human things are subject to decay:

  And when Fate summons, monarchs must obey. . . .

  “Unhuh—that’s fine,” he said sceptically, with a wink at the girl. “And who’s that other Mac, the son-of-a-bitch?”

  “Yes, that’s what all Mac means: son-of—”

  “Well, I’ll be darned if Mac means ‘son-of-a-bitch’!”

  By this time I felt for a piece of paper to write things down to memorize. The conversation was getting beyond me. I said if he didn’t mind, I would take a few notes on what he said, to help my English.

  “Yeah? Go ahead.”

  Without change of countenance, he moistened his thin, gray lips as he gravely took a swipe at the counter with the soiled towel over his shoulder. Nothing was too fabulous for him to accept dryly in this quick-lunch world of downtown Manhattan.

  “What was that you said? Not son of Mac but son of—”

  “Son-of-bitch . . . it’s what you say here in America when you get mad.”

  “And mad?”

  He made a fierce expression to show it.

  I wrote that down.

  I regarded my tutor hopefully.

  “What’s that?” I said, pointing to the vinegar.

  “A skirt,” he said. “Do you want to know that?”—indicating the salt. “‘Kiss.’ Ask the girl for it. Let’s hear you say it. Good word to learn.”

  The girl broke into a young loud guffaw, not prudish nor coquettish, but evidently full of delighted appreciation for his pavement wit.

  “Say, Paul, you’re getting fresher every day,” said she, admiringly.

  I left them with reluctance, for they were touched for me with the magic of the city and its first encounter. But soon 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 more 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.

  But I was not a New Yorker yet, though fast becoming one. I set out to present a letter of introduction. It was to the head of all the Y.M.C.A.’s in New York, urging him to interest himself in my behalf, and I got directions by showing the address to people as I went along. By the time I reached him New York was very busy again, and his office, high up in a skyscraper, seemed one of the busiest places to judge by the typewriters all about him clickety-clacking at enormous speed.

  “Ah,” I thought. “Not like the missionaries, with whom it is difficult to get anything done.”

  When he said, after reading the letter, “Yes, and what can I do for you?” I told him I needed a job.

  He said with businesslike finality, “Mr. Allen in our Harlem branch at 125th Street is the very man for you.”

  I waited while he did some telephoning, arranging for an interview around seven that evening. I started at once. I went on foot. That seemed to me simpler and besides I should see some more of the city.

  Whom did I find to talk to on that day? I don’t remember, but I know I talked. The New Yorkers were not hard at all to talk to, though they could understand me better than I could understand them. But I sat down in all the parks I came to and standing my bag beside me, rested, deliriously stretched my feet, and watched. I practised my English until I could hardly turn my tongue any more. Oh, how hard to say “r” and “th” and “w”! They had to be torn from the throat and reared high like the skyscrapers. The sounds were dry and ponderous and without juice. My own language rolls from the gullet and is inextricably mixed with moisture and nature’s fire. But now with all its energy, my tongue moved between teeth and lips rigidly, to pronounce “Roman Catholic” or “Methodist Rise,” as a Greek methodist-preacher gave me some lessons in a New York park. Even “Fifth Avenue” was hard for me to say, and many times I practised that because I liked to say it.

  I lunched with the crowd. I ordered frankfurters and sauerkraut, not because I liked them, but because the man next to me was eating them. Already I was beginning to feel at home in New York. But my hair was too long. Somebody told me so—asking me if I wanted to look like an “Indian.” I judged from his tone that an American should not. It must be cut. I wanted to make a good impression on Mr. Allen and grab that job.

  I went into one of those glassed-in barber shops. The customers were wrapped up in white like Buddhist monks, only rather cleaner. I also was put to bed with a sheet. I told the barber what I wanted, saying it as well as I could by my hands, because my tongue was very tired. Here was a chance to rest, I thought. And I could not be robbed, in sight of so many people of New York. In the Orient, one goes to a barber shop as to a picture show. There is one entrance fee for everything inside.

  Whenever the thin, dark barber with the sharp eyes close together said, “Do you want?” I nodded. Four or five times it was repeated, like courses of a table-d’hote, and each time I said, “Yes, that too.” He cut my hair, shampooed it, oiled it, perfumed it, combed it and brushed it with an Italian flourish. . . . I was so tired after walking,
that I almost went to sleep. “My, you get a lot for your money here!” I was thinking in dozing admiration. “They certainly find things to do.” A Negro boy shined my shoes on my feet too.

  Drowsily, I asked, “How much?” $1.60. I woke up. For a haircut, it couldn’t be true! I jumped out of the chair just as I was, in my sheet. They had to show me the itemized account. Everything was there with a corresponding price. And I had thought it was according to the Oriental custom, where every luxury in the barber shop is included at the cost of one barbering, and that a very low one well within the means of everybody! There was no getting away, I had to pay the price. I had only $1.70 in the world. In less than a minute, I had only ten cents left.

  “It’s a good thing I went to work about a job right away,” I thought. “But I must ask for an advance.”

  It was in sobered mood, not to say humbly downcast, that I entered Harlem . . . in blinking astonishment looking around. . . . The pale people with steely eyes and ridged noses and superior shrewdness had faded away. Negroes peopled the world, big and small, rich and poor, fat and thin, light and dark, old and young, men and women and children . . . barbers, hair dressers, undertakers, cabaret-singers, employment agencies, theatres, restaurants, poolrooms, dance-halls, all belong to this other kingdom, this Negro kingdom, more secret, more mysterious, more luxuriant, more soft, more exuberant. Here was no standardization. Every individual bubbled out on the streets absolutely different from everybody else in clothes, in gestures, in color. Their effort to adapt themselves to a natureless environment resulted in odd freaks at every turn. And nature glinted here, not to be routed. Everywhere laughter was more hearty, the air was richer in suggestion, more emotion-filled; the colors had more depth, so had the smells; the lights, though not so numerous, seemed mellower, gaudier, more picturesque, the spice of Africa was in the atmosphere. Their native jazz came through the windows, from brassy phonographs, a raucous, inarticulate rhythmical cacophony which I remembered having heard elsewhere as I walked . . . indeed it penetrated through and through New York . . . the soul of man dancing amidst machinery . . . for it expressed not Africa alone, it had caught up the rhythm of America—this Negro jazz—it had taken possession of the Western planet, working upon all hitherto known cultures and civilizations, flamboyant lazy magic of disintegration.