East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  Next day George came out alone, and spent some time in my room with me. He wanted to take me back with him to Boston, so I told Mrs. Lively I was going away for dinner. Again she said nothing, though I thought her expression looked somewhat surprised and aggrieved. In Boston after an early dinner we went to see June dance in one of the vaudeville circuits, with a Boston Korean in business there, who owned a car. Afterwards we got June and took an automobile drive. George urged me to come to New York for a visit and I thought it was a good idea. I had intended to come all along before settling down for the winter. He had to get another job and couldn’t do much for me, but I could stay at Mrs. Flo’s in his room and read his books. What decided me was that the Korean who owned a car was ready to drive us all back to New York. I got back to the Livelys’ very late that night—or rather, in the small hours of the morning. The Livelys had given me a key, and I went up very quietly. But next morning when I came down, Mrs. Lively put her handkerchief to her eyes and whenever she looked at me, she sniffed, with deep reproachful sighs. I was mystified, but began to make out that my fault was being away since yesterday afternoon. When Mr. Lively came, he said as much. I had left Mother with all those dishes to do. I seemed the combination of prodigal son and erring housemaid. There seemed to me no legal grounds for this. Nothing had been said about my having a job at the Livelys and no money had passed between us, except my ten dollars for the prospectus. And still the faultfinding was not over. After Mr. Lively was through, Mrs. Lively came to me alone, and bravely winking back the tears, she complained, “How is it? Daddy and I have been so wonderful to you, yet you cannot have any gratitude for us. This is very bad taste in you.” I did not know what to say. So I said nothing. My silence inspired her to say more. I had not only been out too late the night before, I had been out with that bad Korean boy. Neither Mr. Lively nor Mrs. Lively, I found, had any use for George.

  “You ought not to associate with such a boy as that, Chungpa—a boy who smokes, drinks, swears. You are a good Christian boy. You have been taken into a good Christian family and treated like a son here. And I am sure that boy is not a good Christian boy.”

  I could not truthfully say that George was. Of course, he had been very wonderful to me. However, his charity was not of their kind. I saw no way of making them understand each other. It was plain that George and Mrs. Lively ought never to have met, as being totally incompatible. To say nothing of June, the boneless dancer.

  “George is Americanized,” I said. “Most Koreans are not like that. My friend has not much education, but he has a good heart.”

  Mrs. Lively added at this point that she didn’t approve of my friend’s attitude toward girls. I wondered where she could have learned so much about him. Then I realized that when George was in my room talking, Mrs. Lively must have overheard. The anecdote George had been telling was entirely innocent, though perhaps George had made it sound otherwise. He had gone to call on a Korean girl who lived in a girls’ dormitory in Boston. This was like George, who was always very sociable. She was at least forty years old and very serious, a sincere Christian studying to go back to Korea and work there with the missionaries. George’s interest had been purely that of a compatriot. But because there was a rule on the wall saying that lights must not be switched on and off by the girls entertaining visitors, and that curtains of the alcove where they sat must not be drawn, George had amused himself by doing both. He spoke with great contempt of an institution with such rules on walls. Mrs. Lively had overheard some of this, for now she said:

  “It’s all right for a boy to go with girls—not many; but with all girls you should speak decently, act nicely. When you visit a girl, you must always have somebody around. And always the door should be opened wide—so older people can see what is going on in there and certainly there should be a light in that room!”

  George had not sold himself to Mrs. Lively. I saw that he had left a very bad impression.

  “And I can tell you,” she burst out again, “it is not wise for an Oriental boy to go round with an American girl. He should marry his own kind, and she should marry hers.”

  Elsie had followed us into the library and was listening to all this.

  “Oh-h!” she cried, her mouth wide open in surprise. “Mother, if a Chinaman marries an American girl, what kind of baby would they have?” Elsie giggled. “Mother, wouldn’t that be funny? I should like to see it.”

  Mrs. Lively went off at once and talked the whole thing over with Mr. Lively. Then Mr. Lively, too, had something more to say. With eyes unusually round and staring and face excited as when I had taken the wheel of the Cadillac car, Mr. Lively told me, “My dear boy, see here, 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.”

  I was very solemn and silent and unable to open my mouth to say anything.

  BOOK FOUR

  1

  AGAIN I HAD the Great City to wander in. Again I breathed the air of the Machine Age. Again I was buffeted by the waves of an amorphous tide, a tide of such confused racial components that it became traditionless, new, almost naive, ready for anything, with confused unlimited potentialities both of good and bad. I never entered New York without feeling that anything might happen here.

  One of my favorite routes was along Broadway around 42nd Street where Broadway is democratic, not to say vulgar. But it has New York personality, plenty of it, and its own individuality. “What a sight!” I kept thinking. “Is it not the greatest pageant in the history of the world?” Pedestrians tried to cut in the way automobiles did, and I tried the same, pretending I was in some awful hurry. “Watch the red, when crossing, if you want to enjoy that chop-suey tonight,” the policeman called to me with a broad grin. He, too, felt at one with his crowds; he breathed, was a part with the seething mass, of good and bad, and hell and heaven and limbo—mostly limbo. And my mind raced on. Yes, you have to measure your distance carefully here, even if you have no dinner tonight. Just to talk takes every effort and faculty. A training in itself. It doesn’t pay to try to cut in. Least resistance is to walk straight. Let me try to be in the American line. . . .

  And all the while, revolving the experiences of the past year, I was soliloquizing inside myself somewhat like this:

  “To be a New Yorker among New Yorkers means a totally new experience from being Japanese or Chinese or Korean—a changed character. New Yorkers all 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, 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. Even the man who only goes to a show and is making arrangements about it has a business air. His every action decisive, orderly, purposeful . . . he must know exactly what he wants to do in his mind. Just to move in New York and not be ploughed under, man must prevision and plan out. 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!”

  2

  And yet I was soon to meet a man who was to challenge my complacent view of America and the civilization I was so eager to learn from. That very evening, I went alone to
Chinatown, to treat myself to some dinner. I had no sooner entered my favorite restaurant than I recognized the man sitting in the corner. In fact, he was sitting at the very same table where I had seen him a year before, a well-dressed, refined-looking Oriental, with thoughtful face and interesting features. He was alone, and I got a sense of immense solitariness in his cool aloofness, and in his dark, melancholy gaze. I met his eyes and I bowed to him, as I saw a look of recognition flash into them. For some reason, as I had remembered him, so he, too, remembered me. He came over at once to my table and sat down.

  “How do you do?” he said, in a refined and careful English, with a smile which warmed his rather somber and reserved face. “I have not seen you here for a long time.”

  “You are a Korean?”

  “I was . . . but I have been away so long I do not feel one any longer.”

  “But you will be going back. . . .”

  (All Koreans with incomes returned to the homeland, I thought, in spite of the difficulties there.)

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You like it here?”

  “No,” he hesitated. “I can’t tell where this civilization is going. Can you?”

  “Korea may soon be freed from the Japanese,” I said for argument’s sake. “You would go back then . . . wouldn’t you?”

  “What’s freedom?” he asked quickly. “No one is free. We are all chained.”

  Then he asked me how I liked it. I replied in a flood of words, in which I tried to tell of my pursuit of life, life, more abundant life, and my feeling that America was the country of the present and the near future.

  “You have arrived much prejudiced in favor of New York City. . . . I wonder why?”

  “I may be said to have smelled it many miles away,” I boasted, “like the cedars of the Palace Peh Liang T’ai, as the legend tells.”

  “I would say it was more like Si Yuan,” he replied promptly. “Pleasure resort of the tyrant Yang Ti, where when life went, the trees were decked out in artificial leaves of silk. . . . And why did you think life would be here, instead of on the European continent? When I was leaving, most serious students went to Europe.”

  “Yes. When I was leaving, too. But I always wanted to come to America.”

  “I went to Europe. I was in Europe for twelve years.”

  “Do you think I would like Europe better?”

  “No. . . . Still, Europeans are more like Orientals. The hysterical shouts of the people here get on my nerves. But the West is much the same everywhere. Everywhere troubled and uncertain. Very much like Asia. Educated people everywhere no longer believe much in their own culture, religion, or civilization.”

  “Well—New York gets me! Here I do not feel that hopelessness you speak of. Here you can think anything, see anything, learn anything! I feel like the men of Chinling marching into the capital. . . .”

  (I referred to a Chinese classical poem:

  Changnan is a beautiful place!

  Chinling is a majestic city!

  On and on waddle the green waters,

  And up rise the vermilion towers.

  Flying gables lean over the riding path:

  Weeping willows shadow the imperial canals.

  By tall canopies the solemn bugle shrills:

  Repeating drums speed off the flowery carriages.

  The great shall be in the Hall of Fame,

  And the hero reap every deserving reward.

  And of course I wrote on the menu—the only paper there—certain characters of my quotation.)

  He looked at those quaint, beautiful signs dubiously.

  “You are a funny fellow. You can’t like New York—and this at the same time!”

  “Why not?”

  He laughed. For a moment he said nothing. I watched him lift the clumsy, thick cup filled with ordinary Chinatown tea, in his graceful hand, a hand which, compared to the Western man’s, looked more flowing, more supple, yet also more anciently formed as if whittled to the bone and seasoned before he was born. It was a hand built for deft Korean chopsticks and the slender brush pen, a hand never to be entirely at home in the West, I thought. I glanced at my own hands: they were broad and square, padded firmly and thick, the hands of some archaic generation close to the antique plough, though my dear dead grandmother had scrupulously kept me away from all these practical things, cultivating the scholar . . . still, in spite of her, my hands looked like those of a person of action, his far removed from any activity—except that of the lightning-stroked pen.

  Then he, too, took the menu and covered it with lines of characters, saying as he handed them to me, “Of course, we both know this is a kind of madness.” But an eager look of understanding and sympathy passed between us, and we wrote back and forth, one quotation suggesting another. He showed me many I had never heard, gems from lesser-known poets of the great Tang and Sung dynasties, metaphysical poems of Taoist poets hard to understand, rare lines from the great masters which until now had escaped my notice. One or two poems I fancied were the stranger’s own—couched in the same bold antique characters, spontaneous, alive as the characters of a master calligrapher, these had a somewhat wider span in time, an application to the occasion and our meeting as if composed on the spur of the moment. In my childhood, before I had realized the passing of the old Korean order, I had dreamed of meeting learned gentlemen like this in the capital of Seoul, of passing my days in the joyous communion of ancient scholarship with brilliant minds like his. How times can change! We had come half way around the world to meet in New York’s slumlike Chinatown. And though we abandoned ourselves irresistibly to the old poetry, it seemed almost with a sense of shame. More than once, too, it crossed my mind that I was wasting time. This was not what I must learn from him. For he gave the impression of one who had soaked in the complexities of Western civilization.

  It grew late. Chinese customers, a few Americans, thronged in to eat. The place grew hot with fumes and steam. The garish Chinese-American electrical lighting was the last possible extreme from an emperor’s golden candelabra used to light poets home through dim and tinkling streets, past overhanging gables and curious towers, as mentioned in the ancient Chinese poetry. We had harked back to a spiritual realm more remote from New York than the world of Horace or Catullus. My companion looked around, disturbed. “The wrong smell for poetry is here. Come to my place. There we can talk.”

  3

  Outside the restaurant a heavy rain like black ink was pouring. Like beetles called up by the rain, the shiny taxis twisted and turned cumbrously, seemed bound to collide in their narrow quarters. These dim light-splashed allies, as sinuous as dragon tails, clanked and honked hideously. My host hailed a taxi. Very luxurious it appeared to me. We sank back in deep upholstered cushions. I stared at the thick tasselled rope to hold by, the built-in tray for the cigarette, as with a swift slicing movement, far different from swaying sedan or white mule chariot, the car churred through the slanting black night rain.

  “This is the Village,” said my new-found friend with a laugh, as the taxi stopped. “But it has neither mountain nor stream.” And he quoted ironically, “If a home has not a garden and an old tree, I see not whence the every-day joys of life are to come! . . . Mine has neither garden nor old tree . . . but village . . . cozy name, ne?”

  This section was very dark and secret-looking. You could not decide if it were merely informal or only a slum. The shadows here were blue and silent. That street lamp far away was pale. There were many big studio windows in neighboring houses, some with a muffled beam of low lights behind drawn curtains rough and fantastic. And outside on the streets dejected cats and ash cans. Going down instead of up, we stepped into a narrow hall lit by a dim electric lantern. “I live on the second floor.” We went up soft-carpeted stairs. On the white door before us was a place for a card. I read in simple engraving: TO WAN KIM. �
��Is it a nom-de-plume?” I asked.

  The words in Korean had a very mysterious sound. To Wan means “Garden Isle,” but this, by Asian connotation, suggested at once some dreamy subjective realm far removed from life—such as “Castles in Spain.”

  “It is a name proper to a Korean ghost,” he said. “Enter.”

  He unlocked the door and we stood in a small foyer painted in a clear Chinese red, the molding in white. It contained nothing but a modernistic mirror on the wall and a stand with an umbrella and a few continental canes. He showed me into another room. The room itself was not large, but most compactly arranged. The furniture was low, modernistic. But he had an old bronze Chinese bowl and a vase of antique Korean pottery, the latter a considerable art treasure. In a narrow rectangular black vase a glistening lily, its golden stamens moist with bright yellow pollen, suggested his love of perfection, and the Oriental’s preference for one flower over many. Its fragrance wafted through the room, anachronistic to the early autumn rain outside. But it made the room seem further isolated, exotic, unreal, with a hint of the artificiality of New York. The streamlined utility of all the furniture gave out a pleasing repose and a sort of dreaminess, in hybrid adaptation to the strange creature it harbored. A cozy hearth invited one to sit in a low rough-fabricked chair and take out a near-by book. I saw brass andirons and all sorts of tools for kindling and keeping a wood fire. But most attractive to my sight were the high bookcases which seemed to fill the room, and were its keynote.