East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  When Mr. Kim left for a moment, I examined the titles of books. About equally mixed, Eastern and Western, I noted with approval. I went to the Eastern books first. And they might have been those of my poet uncle, though not so primitively bound. Several rare books were there, which my uncle had never fingered—no, not in all his journeys to China, nor into the most scholarly provinces of Korea. There was also a modern section from contemporary Korea, China, and Japan, the chaotic unmade new literature, which seemed to have exhausted inspiration by its wild leap into novelty, into borrowed modes. I turned to the Western books and was slightly puzzled. Late books, esoteric, far removed from Maritime College or even the interest of George. Then whole shelves of English poets, many of whose names at least I knew. And not only English. I saw German and French, Italian and Spanish, and in small sober Oxford bindings, Latin and Greek. There were also a number of books on art, both Eastern and Western, among them bound facsimiles of Korean paintings, a portfolio of seventh- and eighth-century things, and another of the fifteenth and sixteenth.

  Mr. Kim returned, bringing a black glass tray and some black glasses filled with ice. He asked me what I would drink. I had no taste for American liquors at that time. I said, “Do you have ginger ale?”

  “Surely. I see you are not yet baptized into American drink and it’s just as well.”

  I put back, reluctantly, the rare portfolios containing examples of an art which I myself had never seen. Again I glanced curiously around the room. Three pictures were hung on the light clear walls . . . all Oriental, but each, I thought, of a different culture. That one of cats was plainly Japanese . . . the black pine branch painted on silk was Korean, and the landscape triptych on bamboo—that was probably Chinese. The contents of the room were evidently very carefully assembled by one of some means, one acutely sensitive to mood and surroundings . . . even that lampshade, of a fine raw silk which lent itself well to the Chinese brush—both to the heavy powerful strokes and the soft delicate musical ones like rain or drifting wind.

  Mr. Kim came back with bottles. I still was looking earnestly at the lamp. “That is good writing.” I referred to the decorative calligraphy on one side, which, roughly translated, read, “The Exile, Man.” The other faces of the lamp showed black brush drawings, fish, pines, a world of wind and water, a lonely boat, with that vital fine economy from the Orient which inspired Whistler. “The drawing too. That is excellent!”

  My host said nothing. He placed before me ginger ale. He sank into a chair and raised his glass. He, I saw, was drinking something different.

  “What is American drink?”

  “Gin.” He lighted the fire already laid. No heat comes on in apartments at this time, and the evening was slightly chill. “Gin.” Then he said deliberately, pointing to the lampshade, “You like it? Yes, I designed that. And my own textiles. . . . Wait. . . . Here are more by the same hand.” He opened a drawer and brought out rolls of silk, which I undid one by one. They contained his signatures, the delicate characters—three—for To Wan Kim.

  4

  We talked until the fire sank down to ashes. I had met in Kim a deep and reflective modernized mind, mature now, while mine was just beginning to stretch—but in his art he was a rigid traditionalist, untouched by any Western influence. He used the tools, the technique of a thousand years ago, in line with those poet-painters who held that characters were paintings, and paintings the decorative accompaniment to literature . . . symbolic strokes so closely joined to picture-words (and the words themselves set in ancient classical molds as rich and stiff and jewelled as the Elizabethan sonnet) that neither was complete without the other. Here in New York, divorced from other poets of his kind, Kim’s classical artistic life went on as if in a vacuum. It was a curious revelation. He was in mood and outlook probably of the Oriental generation just preceding mine, but even then the classics were being discarded. Kim was tragically aware of this. When I spoke my admiration—my sincere admiration for remarkable work—he replied brusquely and with a scathing irony:

  “Why? You and I know that such writing—unlike the worthier phonetic systems—retards the progress of man. It should have died out long ago like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Why doesn’t it die out in me? Is it because I studied only Chinese classics when I was young? Is this the reason my brain is alive with this script rooted in the history of Asia and the dim past of man? How absurd! What incredible childishness! With seventeen flying brush-strokes to make with such care that monosyllabic sound—Lung—meaning dragon! Then with what fine glow and fondness the calligrapher looks at his work! And there is no dragon, any more than an angel or devil. How can man waste his brains on such a thing?”

  “I don’t feel it is wasted when I see such work as yours!” I said honestly.

  “But who cares for such stuff nowadays? The old literary language is doomed. Or it is clear that if the Chinese keep on learning their classical systems, they will have no time to fight with the Japanese. And then there will be no more China and no more Chinese. Chinese of original minds nowadays all turn to write in the Pei-hua. Much is to be said for the able emperor Shi Whang Ti who ordered all classical books to be burned.” He seemed to want to change the subject.

  He asked me again about myself. As I told him more concerning my escape to America, he nodded. “Yes, you and I both come from conservative pre-Christian families. My father has been more indulgent . . . or is it that he has many other sons? In you I see myself some fifteen years ago.”

  He was much interested in my desire to go to college in Boston that coming winter. He knew something of Boston. In Boston he had taken a post-graduate degree in philosophy he said. But he spoke in ironic belittling manner of American civilization there as elsewhere.

  “You will study a little of everything and not much of anything, and you will have no time to think until you come out. The educational method is that of acquiring superficial factual knowledge. Ranging and shallow, rather than searching and deep. It is just like going into a New York subway. They try to educate too many. You can see the same in the Dearborn assembling plants: It is the business method. It works to turn out Fords . . . but not to turn out scholars. A dry, mechanical, tedious atmosphere! Most of the college boys go to college not because they want it, but because there is nothing better to do at this age. If they found something better, certainly they would do it. But then they are like their teachers, who only hold the job till something better turns up. It is merry-go-round. Teachers and boys—both drag themselves into lecture halls with artificial show of interest. You will find it is sham. The teacher gets his job by the rubber stamp, not by what he really knows or how well he can teach. And the students graduate by credit hours and not by their mastery over anything. No wonder the scholar’s high position in the Orient is reversed in this country. Here you will find he is despised and mocked.”

  “Well, it seems I can do nothing until I go to college and learn something,” I complained. “Not even cooking or waiting or dishwashing. When I get out of college, then I may begin to master American civilization, American culture.”

  “You think it is worth mastering?” Kim laughed. He set down his glass. He raked out the dying coals of wood in the grate. “Come on. We will go to the party. I will show you some American culture. Tonight.”

  5

  We did not need to walk very far. “The party” seemed to be just down the street. We rang and walked up many steep flights of stairs. A tall, young American man, with tortoise-shell glasses, face flushed and hair touselled—still plainly an intellectual type, I thought—was standing on the top landing, swaying toward us in a friendly way. He seemed very frank, very informal, very nice. That drink made his speech rather fast and foolish, though. He led us into a studio apartment.

  At first it seemed as if all the noises of Broadway were enclosed in that room. From time to time there were raps from overhead and underneath as well, from irate fellow lodgers. The ceil
ing was somewhat crooked, like the streets outside, and a big skylight sloped down. On the walls were the oddest of paintings, looking crooked also. It was in the days when every drawing of a certain style seemed slightly distorted. In mood, however, all seemed to chime in well with a pair of African idols in gleaming black wood trimmed rather obscenely with shells. Our host, whose name was Bill, with drunken solemnity introduced them to me as “the eternal and primeval Ma” and “Pa.” The room looked rather bare, for furniture had been moved out, rugs taken up for dancing, and chairs stationed against the wall. Toward one end of the big room was a long table with all kinds of drinks . . . different sizes of bottles with different colored labels. Everybody was to help himself and anybody who knew how mixed some new kind of drink. To one side was a grand piano and here one of the men was banging jazz, which never stopped as long as I was there. When that man grew tired or needed more drink, another took his place. It might have been some kind of temple in which to worship African jazz. But this jazz was not so lazy, deep and blue as some jazz I had heard; it was hard, staccato, sounding mechanized and artificial. We sat down near the table.

  Somebody gave me a drink. I tasted it and shuddered. It didn’t seem possible to drink that. Kim was already on his second glass, besides what he had taken at his own fireside. So he seemed to like it all right. But it did not have the same effect on him as on the others. Drinking, they became like little kids.

  One young fellow when first I looked was on the floor turning somersaults, and next he was lying on his back with a banjo on his stomach, playing, and with his lips singing a different tune. This young fellow maintained that he was a Yale man—but never went to Yale. He boasted how he had the choice between going to Yale and going to Paris and he chose Paris, which he said he never regretted. He said he knew the Yale yell. Now, with his drunken body, he stood up and, getting one man and two girls, he made a ring, his own arm on the man’s shoulder, his other on the girl’s, and his forehead against the girl opposite, sounding out the Yale yell.

  Brek ek ek ex

  Koak koax

  Brek ek ek ex

  Koak koax

  O-op parabaloo

  Yale! Yale! Yale!

  “Oh God!” said a man beside me, in tones of loud disgust, looking at his neighbors. “I ask you! I am going to Paris from Yale; he is coming to Yale from Paris. William Wilson! Isn’t this terrible?”

  “Perhaps the influence of dadaism?” spoke up a sardonic slight young man with pointed eyebrows.

  “He never heard of it.”

  “I haven’t either,” said a thin childlike young girl with a soft voice.

  “Sally, you don’t need to. . . . It comes natural.”

  “He behaves too adolescently to understand dadaism where one tries to get back to the mental age of four,” drawled a tall black boy, gracefully draped on a straight chair and speaking with an Oxford accent.

  “I want to dance,” said Sally plaintively. She rose. “But don’t you like it?” she pointed to my glass, in much the same way as you would in asking a child, “What! not like ice-cream?” She had a piquant face and big brown serious eyes which she blinked and focused carefully to see me better—for I imagine that her head was going round.

  “Come on, Sally, I’ll dance,” interrupted a taller girl, with spectacles and a pompadour of bright red hair cut in a boyish bob.

  “Wait. . . . I want to see” (to me) “—what’s-your-name—is happy?”

  “He just came over, he hasn’t acquired the taste for American drink,” Kim said, as he changed my glass for purest ginger ale. “He is here to make research . . .” he smiled, with a light flicker of the eyes indicating that room and the party, “I brought him here to show him some Western civilization. . . .”

  “He is studying Western civilization? . . . Ha ha!” giggled the girls, “Hahaha . . . how cute!”

  “You have read Spengler?” asked the taller girl, sententiously. “Der Untergang des Abendlandes?”

  Kim nodded.

  “And what do you think?”

  But the softer and more groggy young lady, Sally, clinging to her friend, was already pulling her on. Now they came to a halt before the young Negro.

  “You don’t look so happy either, Alfred. Aw, come, cheer up,” Sally pleaded in a coaxing drunken lisp, “Why don’t you be happy, Alfred? I want everybody to be happy at Bill’s party.”

  “Can’t I be happy and keep still?” he answered with a too sober smile.

  “No—you have to a-a-act like a child to be happy. Throw away in-in-in-hibitions. D-dance and sing—and be-be a Negro.”

  “Sally, you’re drunk!” laughed her friend, dragging her on. They waltzed around the outskirts of the bare space in the center, where many others already were dancing, singly or in twos and threes. Now another girl seized the stage. All the rest dropped out to clap her. The man at the piano, half-turning round to look, also played the jazz louder and with more accent to encourage. She was large, tall and well formed. Rouge stood out in pirouette circles on her cheeks, and her mouth was painted like a poppy. She must have been completely drunk, but the drink helped her to make that kind of dance-step better. There seemed no muscle that she did not use, especially hips. I considered the difference between her and the Korean geisha girl, who is very slow and sedate, with a long skirt. This girl was good, so they all said, clapping and beating time. She almost equalled the masters of this dance up in Harlem.

  Kim lifted his glass only once in a while now. His face was flushed and his eyes shone across at me in some kind of sarcastic humor. But he kept his own counsel and spoke only when spoken to. I gathered that he was well known in this group and a privileged character, without having ever been truly known. In becoming Americanized, Kim was not so frank as George. Kim, the black boy and I seemed the only quiet members of the party. The young Negro drank little and in all things, including dress and speech, seemed more formal than the rest, more like a foreigner. Doubtless he drank more, I concluded, up in Harlem. Or else the “zeitgeist” for his race was something different from jazz and freedom and Africanism. I turned to listen with interest to him speaking.

  “Obscene? Oh, no. I don’t see anything obscene about them per se,” he was saying to his white neighbor, nodding coolly toward the African idols. “Not in their own jungle shrine, certainly. Obscenity is really relative. . . .”

  “How’s the master?” one young man spoke to Kim with real enthusiasm about his work, “I’m going over and see some more of your brushwork soon. May I?”

  They began to talk ahout recent exhibitions in New York art galleries. I heard the names, Matisse, Cézanne. Symbolism; and “Significant Form”; Millay, Eugene O’Neill, and Katharine Mansfield.

  Platters of meat, cheese, olives, hors d’oeuvres, were brought in for guests to help themselves (those who were not being sick in the bathroom or bedroom by now). The Yale man who wasn’t a Yale man created a real sensation. He had been out in the kitchen helping and had taken his own hand for part of a roast to be cut. It was really a serious wound, they said, and he was hustled off to a doctor around the corner.

  We got up to go. Bill was very nice. He was full of cordiality to me just because I had come there with Kim. When we came out, my head was spinning, as if I too had drunk a lot. Strange to find air not thick with cigarette smoke.

  “How did you like the poet-scholars of America?” Kim was saying.

  “Are they really the poet-scholars? Those—little boys and girls?”

  “All behave like that. So who can say? And the greater are even worse. In this country, in this age, art becomes the instinct for self-advertisement.”

  We walked back to Kim’s apartment. And Kim spoke still more on the same subject: “Americans are said to be only a young race. Nobody claims that they are very superior yet. But I call these particular friends of mine ‘the pygmies.’ There is a
fascination in watching them. (That is why I once wanted to go to the Congo. . . .) They all work hard to give a book or painting—some piece of art—to the world, to get renown and notoriety. In thousands of studios over the city tonight you could see them . . . for there are many more of this same kind—more than all the students in New York University or Columbia, which have their ten thousands. . . . Hordes and hordes . . . the twentieth-century poets and artists of America. . . . I should say they are gnats rather than pygmies. Yes, gnats. Then I must be the ass . . . to be annoyed. Gnats always come swarming around an ass. He kicks; they fly. A silly way of doing—there are so many gnats in the world, an ass could never escape. . . .” (I thought he did not like his Village neighbors very much.) “But Oriental poets and artists were never like these . . . it is a different species.”

  “We do not come to the West for poetry,” I hinted, “but for man’s new way of mastering Nature. With the scientific outlook, man gains more success. . . .”

  “Science has destroyed diseases and superstitions and sent away mysticism . . . that is true. It has improved the material condition of human life. But even so, I see the soul everywhere is sunk in melancholy discontentment. . . . Man is no happier, as he loses mystery. . . . Where now is the old magic, which, as legend tells, transported even dogs and chickens to heaven by a draft from Lao Tze’s cup? Once man felt about himself and all the creatures a Wordsworthian glow of immortality.”

  “You have been in the West for sixteen years and you see nothing to it?” I exclaimed incredulously.

  “Nothing to root man, nothing to anchor him. . . . I have not been idle. For sixteen years I have wrestled, in Germany, Italy, France, England, America, leading myself into a Kantian labyrinth, into an Hegelian logomachy, into a scholastic inferno (yet not through any Protestantism nor Catholicism), into the geometric abstractions of Einstein . . . and I can find nothing.”