East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  Westernization was giving him other troubles, too. At present, Wadanabe’s mind was mostly taken up with a Japanese girl student. Kiki Harada was a willow-slight, plainly dressed girl, good-looking enough to have been married long ago in Western style, but her only joy in life was Kant and Hume. She, too, was a student in philosophy. Her mother was well known as an educational pioneer for women in Japan, and the administrator of a Japanese college for women in Tokyo. Kiki, with that continuity often found in the Orient, was utterly loyal to her mother and only interested to follow in her footsteps. In other respects she was Oriental and conservative—shy, proper, self-contained, with absolutely no frivolous glance in the direction of men. She very much complicated for Wadanabe his perplexities on the subject of love. Love to him now was a sad, wistful, complicated theme. Why should one follow in the approved way of arranged marriages? Why should not love and engagement follow on one’s own initiative? How could one make a conservative Japanese girl be radical? But to hear him talk, you would think there was between them some overwhelming question. However, I met Miss Harada later at an international tea, and when I mentioned to her Wadanabe, she hardly seemed to know who he was. Wadanabe? Wadanabe? Finally she recalled that they had talked together once at a party, and he had perhaps been in one or two of her classes. I began to suspect that romantic love was a lonely pilgrimage to an unearthly country, where you had with you possibly the Western gods and poets, but no human companionship.

  Doctor Dimassi and Doctor Starr planned to do housekeeping regularly, so they asked me to look around for a friend who could cook. This turned out to be Eugene Chung, who joined me just before the college term ended. Eugene was a good deal older than I and we had not much in common. An American, active in missionary fields, had adopted him at one time, and had helped him to get through Peking University. He still called this man “Father” and received many presents from him, including a typewriter and checks to help out his American education. But Eugene was terribly homesick for China, and he was rapidly Chinizing instead of Westernizing. He had come to the West expecting oceans of brotherly love and Santa Claus. Certain bitter experiences convinced him now for the first time of a definite race prejudice. He began to lose all interest in Y.M.C.A. activities. His one thought was to get back to China and his own kind. In China, he was already married and had two children. He had been married without choice in the old style, but separation now had the strange effect of making him as love-sick as Wadanabe. He thought about his Chinese wife constantly, and no Western lover could have been more pitiful and more sincere in missing the loved one. His love, of which he had first grown conscious in the West, made him speculate a good deal on that subject. No wonder, he told me mournfully, Westerners were such ardent lovers. He saw it all now. Longing and abstinence created love, but in a way that was a very good thing. It made the wife more important. In China a man never knew what it was to be without a wife; almost before man realized natural longing, woman was placed in his arms. “Never can we know truth without knowing error. Never can we know light without knowing darkness. Never can we know the Chinese woman until she is not there. So by wandering, we know the value of home,” said Eugene. And he was going to make the most of his new discovery, so he said. He meant to have a new house for himself and his wife away from the grandparents. “Yes,” said Chung with all the ardor of a bridegroom. “And in my house there will be separate rooms. She shall be herself. I, myself. That is the Western custom. This way husband and wife will not have too much of each other. When I was at home with my dear wife, we had too much of each other. Not a night did we pass apart. No, not since I was eighteen. Every night we did as man and wife. That is too much. Too much of a wife is not to have a wife. Oh, I am sorry to be so long from home! Oh, how we miss each other! Absence increases longing, longing increases love. Oh, how much I have come to love my dear, dear wife!”

  Eugene was very solemn in this and never thought there was anything funny in his explanation of love. He was artless and sincere, but we could not kick or play together and could only discuss Chinese history. Indeed, his new devotion and his new typewriter took up all his spare time. For when he was not writing long letters to his wife in Chinese, he was practising with his typewriter the touch method, spending hours and hours on just his name. How I pitied him for not enjoying himself in something else! But his only regret was, he could not combine his two interests, write his wife and at the same time use that machine. This he could not do because she knew no English.

  I had met so many different kinds of students during my period of isolation that I planned to bring a small number together for an international party of my own. One of these people was Lopez, a Filipino. Lopez had been a Roman Catholic when he arrived in Boston two years before. Before he left, he had been everything, ending up as a Baptist fundamentalist, believing word for word that Adam walked in the garden with Eve, his wife, that Joshua stopped the sun and that Jonah slept in the whale. By this time he had given up dancing, shiny dressing and all frivolity. Probably it was not so hard for him to give up dancing, for that had made him very unhappy anyhow. At one time he went regularly to the Y.W.C.A. dances in Mechanics Hall, for he loved dancing. There was much race prejudice felt at these international dances, and no girl would dance with him. Oh, how miserable and restless he was, chewing gum, one stick after another, going out to spit it away, coming in to ask once more, “May I dance with you?” Now the world of the flesh was over with Lopez and he was going back to teach fundamentalism to the other Filipinos.

  Another whom I asked was a Negro student, Wagstaff. Wagstaff was very different from the Schmitts’ Laurenzo. He was sober and industrious, and had reached Boston and its universities with an unswerving purpose and concentrated willpower. Originally he came from the South. His life had been varied and broad, but always poor and struggling. He had been a porter on trains. He had played the cornet in a minstrel show. He still played the cornet, and when he came to see me at Doctor Dimassi’s he usually carried his instrument with him in a little bag and played for me. He even gave me a few lessons. I blew and puffed just as he did, but the music didn’t come for me. Wagstaff had been an elevator man in New York and in Cleveland. Now he was an elevator man in Boston while he studied. In fact, he said pessimistically, he expected all his life to be an elevator man. “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.” Yet all his life, as he ironically commented, he had been working like hell to get degrees and a higher education. “And the more American culture I absorb, the more Whitman, Emerson, Lincoln I read, I give you my word, the more hatred and revengeful spirit I have. . . .” At first Wagstaff had been very quiet with me. And with others he was always extremely sensitive, shrinking from racial snubs. But later, the one subject he wanted to discuss with me was the subject at the back of every educated Negro’s thoughts, his shadowy existence as an outcast in the white man’s world, and all the legal as well as illegal discrimination practised against him there. One time he and I were walking late at night. We passed a Child’s on Boylston Street near the Public Garden. I invited Wagstaff to go in and have some flapjacks of the kind those good-looking young waitresses in green coats were making in the windows. He didn’t want to, but I overcame his objections. There were few customers, for it was late. The waiters were standing around idle. We waited a long time and still no waiter came to us. I got all ready to go up and raise a row. Wagstaff wouldn’t let me. “Come on. I don’t want the cakes anyhow. I’m used to this situation. I face it every day. I can’t get up heat on it any more.”

  This wasn’t exactly true, for it was the great emotion back of his existence. I tried to compare the Oriental’s position, and his. But he would not see it that way, I was outside the two sharp worlds of color in the American environment. It was, in a way, true. 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. It was seemingly beyond the power of individuals to break through. Thinking about it, I did not see what he could do. I suggested that like Kim he leave it. France, they said, was a good country for the educated Negro.

  “If I save up money for the steamer ticket, how will I earn my bacon when I’m there? This is the only elevator country. No. I was born here. This is my land. But it’s a two-faced world, I’m the one that knows.”

  His experiences—and I did not see how any Negro could avoid them—had given him the psychology of Guru, the Hindu: get what you can. That may have been why he liked law. He was a law student in the university. Most of his other reading was upon the Negro question. Any book, any poem, any play written by a Negro writer, he had read. And he said, “They say that Negroes always lie. Why shouldn’t they? 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. That’s the perspective that only a Negro gets.” But if any white man were within hearing distance Wagstaff shut up at once.

  Charles Evans I invited to my party. And my Italian friend Cortesi. And Wadanabe came too. Eugene, the Chinese student, was naturally there. Lopez, Wagstaff, Charles, Cortesi, Wadanabe, and Eugene . . . oh, my party was a terrible flop. Even Charles’ free and easy spirit could not pull it off. Each one there had been friendly to me and, on occasion, a sincere, pleasant companion. But no two got together, except the Italians who were friends before I knew them . . . each pair were like oil and water. In fact they would have nothing to do with one another.

  4

  In his final year Charles Evans became engaged to Ruth Bachelor, the niece of Professor Burton. It was a most fitting union. Even in appearance they went well together. Charles was a tall, raw-boned fellow with a shock of dark hair, strong black brows and blue eyes. His warm, dynamic temperament suggested the South rather than the North, but his mental approach to all things, his caution of extremes, and his puritan probity were of New England. Ruth was rather tall, slender and unusually pale. She was a daughter of the same race as Emerson and Thoreau. You hardly needed to be told that her father was a gentleman farmer on a fairly large estate outside of Boston, with a typical New England white house laid out with fine lawns, pastures and woods. Of course it was reflected in her that the earth was wholesome, the sky blue, life sweet, and work a blessing. Yet I never heard her asserting any of these views. She resembled the gentle and orderly landscapes of her own native region, harmonious and mild even in a semi-wild state . . . and of a pleasant, even temper, practical, active yet serene. She was graduating that same year from a college in the city, but her heart was ever in the country in her own spot of ground where she knew all the walks, tree by tree and stone by stone. One suspected her of being a quietist, since it appeared as if from childhood she had mastered the art of living. Then if so, she must have shaped and formed her own philosophy. If so we never heard. When all other girls told theirs, or even their personal tastes and smallest viewpoint, Ruth kept still. She seemed ever ready to listen and laugh, to catch the humor in all things but not to talk back. So probably she was peaceful by nature rather than by conviction. But this quiet assurance was just what Charles needed, and I noticed that getting engaged to Ruth did more for my friend than any amount of philosophical talking. He now ceased most of his gloomier doubts and questionings. He directed faculties and energies to definite purpose.

  They were married that summer after a short engagement. I attended the wedding. In fact, I was Charles’ best man. I suppose he was the first American ever to have a Korean in that capacity. They were married in Ruth’s New England home by a Unitarian minister who officiated not because either Ruth or Charles was a church-goer, but because Ruth had known him from the time she was a little girl and had always told him that when and if she got married, he must marry her. Charles already had a position engaged for that winter, teaching in a boys’ school. He and Ruth left in Ruth’s car for a summer honeymoon on the coast of Maine.

  That same summer I attended another engagement party. And this time it was for Chai, the Hawaiian student. His Bostonian courtship had flowered in success. But then Chai had received a very lucky break. Just that spring Miss Martha Wright got sick. She was taken to that hospital where he was interning. Chai couldn’t have made a better opportunity. There she was for six weeks, removed from the other candidates. As doctor and lover, he reaped a double advantage. She could see Chai in either role—he was ever at her side—always in the best light, and nobody could complain either, when Chai looked after a patient. Courtship was business now and business courtship. So every morning she received from his hands the Boston Herald and every evening the Boston Evening Transcript. He remembered her taste in books, of course, and the flowers which surprised her each day put in their tender word. In short, spring, convalescence, innocent flowers in dark Boston . . . and a wistful young foreign doctor giving from morning until night exhibitions of professional talent and lover’s unfailing devotion . . . the thing clicked. They were engaged soon after she came out. Doctor Morrison, to whom she was the confidential secretary, received the news with the greatest cordiality and took the young people under his wing. So they were married, the same year that Kim fled to Europe. The news of their marriage came out in Boston papers with pictures of both and long complimentary write-ups as if here was a wonder in the world. They were going immediately to Hawaii to live. Tropic and exotic isles were to be their home.

  PART 3

  BOOK ONE

  1

  MY PERIOD OF conventional education was over, my self-teaching days had not begun . . . and now my life shifted for a time to Philadelphia. I was happy to leave Boston. I looked back upon that period, shaking my head. Four years I had kept on existing with difficulty as a student. I had received a diploma from one university in Boston and one more from another. I got by somehow on partial scholarships, the college loan funds, my friends’ help and jobs that were given me mostly out of sympathy. In a way I might have starved if I had not been a student. It was a kind of racket. Just by being a student, I had got fed, clothed, sheltered, as guest in the house of Western civilization. And I thought to myself cynically, now I understand why there are so many quasi-professional students here from the Orient, like Mr. Ok.

  The scholar of the West is an introvertish creature, happy in inner worlds of thought, irritated, bored and out of place when he is forced to see too much of his ordinary fellow humans. Mine seemed not really the temperament of the Western scholar, while, unlike Kim, who was pure poet and intellectual of the East, I had some baser elements in me of George Jum. I understood very well George’s passion for the “diplomatic service,” or for the exhibitionist world of the American stage. One of my selfish thoughts about the passing of Korea often was, that without a country there seemed no way for a man to take some active part in the human affairs of his time. And like George Jum I really like to walk the earth with people. I got on well with them. I did not become suffering and ironic like Kim before tastes, interests, attitudes that were not mine.

  So it really pained me at times to keep on, getting more collegiate up in Boston without getting more educated. I could not help seeing that concentration on one subject makes nobody any real specialist, and minoring by distribution of hours makes no man liberally cultured. Latin and Greek fail to make anybody classical. Neither can the modern language department make one erudite. Sometimes, indeed, college education seemed to me only a curious convention . . . the specialty supposed to specialize, the minoring to broaden, the scraps of mathematics, science, and psychology supposed to develop higher reasoning powers, lastly the physical training supposed to finish off the
rounded man. Aha, there he is! the cap and gown gentleman with a sheepskin under his arm. How suave his functioning mind! How sound his body! He has met all the requirements that college has measured to him.

  I had my qualms. George Jum already had done more toward acclimatizing himself in America than I had done. He had had more of the three great L’s in living, not just existing. . . . Leisure, Love, Luxury. He was not a guest in the house. He felt himself quite at home. And certainly he had acquired better the popular social requirements of American youth, while outside, than I while inside, college. Flirting, necking, drinking, telling anecdotes, I had none of these which George already had, even though these are thought to be specialties of the successful college boy. Of course the I.Q. had not X-rayed George and diagnosed him all over. But it wasn’t with entire complacence that I compared myself with him. George was so free and independent, and he could still make his own dogmatisms on everything.

  George remained a carefree and slovenly generalizer. But I saw it was up to me to become a professional specialist—not just the specialist of the major in college—since I could not cook for the wealthy nor aspire to Hollywood. Something in me all the while opposed such specialization. I thought to myself, “There are many here who specialize in certain things—it is almost the law of this American civilization . . . like the man who helps to make machines, by working on a particular detail, say, driving a nail. So his life work means that he repeats that single routine work in one narrow channel. He is not a magnanimous creator of that gigantic machine, no, for he has lost the plan of it, he has been absorbed by it, he is the servant of it, not it of him . . . how has he any vision to see to the far horizon? He has henceforth no destined goal except to drive that nail.” And it seemed to me that the life of the specialist became utilized in an ever narrower groove, and did not reach the embracing whole of life. “Poor soul,” I thought, “Poor modern soul, he is tortured in his confined prison, never to get out . . . he must handle his specialty, never the infinite. He rides in his automobile over miles of paved space, but he does not leave the car he is riding in. He flies, but he never enters the air of the universe. He submarines, but never sinks himself to the heart of the ocean, he tunnels mountains, yet he never feels the spirit of earth, as Shelley or the Taoist poets did.” And what was I to specialize upon? I had intended at one time to study medicine. But I found out very soon that I was no medicine man. Before the accumulation of facts necessary for that my soul seemed to dry up, becoming parched like a desert. I would have to run quickly and read over Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind,