East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  There are flashes struck from midnights,

  There are fire-flames noondays kindle

  Whereby piled-up honors perish,

  Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle,

  While just this or that poor impulse

  Which for once had play unstifled,

  Seems the sole work of a lifetime

  That away the rest have trifled.

  Anyhow I reached for that telephone book with all my heart and faith behind that gesture.

  I was so frantic to hear Trip’s voice soon, to feel that she really existed, that I called very early. It was hardly decent. She was not even up. But I had to be saved quickly from going quite empty like Kim. It was real emergency. And in a way, she was at the mercy of an early telephone caller—she would be there and she could not refuse to answer, for she would not know who was calling, I thought grimly. Well, she could not think any worse of me than she had when she had not written. Better to keep on with the madness. A calmness and deliberateness fell upon me. I might have been making a business call. Now I was repeating aloud over and over, across the wire to reality, the very name that had lived in my innermost chambers for so long. I had to repeat it, Van or Marietta answered the phone, I do not know which. I think, one after the other. And this much I made out indistinctly—in a minute they were going to make Trip get up and come to the phone. They thought it was something important, a wire perhaps from home. I had phoned at half-past seven—the time I got in from Boston.

  Then the third voice came. “Yes, yes, I am she. But I don’t understand—who is calling?”

  “Oh, don’t you remember me?” I cried in despair. “I’m Chungpa Han. Mr. Han.”

  “Mr. Han!” the voice turned staccato, as if with relief. And it held now astonished laughter. “Why, where have you come from? Of course I remember you. And you are still in this country? Are you still with Boshnack’s? But that was in Philadelphia, was it not?”

  “No, no, I am not with Boshnack’s any longer,” I went on joyously. “I am with the Encyclopædia Britannica. And I just got your address. I have seen Miss Laura.”

  “Britannica? That sounds good! You’ll inspire us with awe. You certainly must have arrived.”

  “O, may I come to see you?” And I clutched at the promise and I seized on the definite date. Then I put down my head on the desk and cried a little before any one else came around, for I was in the Britannica office where I came straight from the train, and nobody else had arrived yet except the janitor. . . .

  I had found Trip. Oh, I was safe! I was not to be the prisoner condemned without a hearing. I had a reprieve. This time, I swore, I would be, oh, so clever, Trip should never escape me again like that. But wasn’t it an ironic fact, she had been in New York all this time, just around the corner from the apartment where I had first gone to call? Not only had I been there many times to examine her old house in vain, but I was in the habit of visiting frequently, all that autumn, at the home of one of the Britannica editors who lived two or three streets up on Lexington Avenue. We should have met at least once, or passed on the street. Now since for so long all ordinary rules of chance had been against me, luck couldn’t go the bad way again. . . .

  I was in New York now—on the scene, business always is done on the scene. I would make her translate Oriental poems, I would get her interested in that. Or I would pose as “material.” I would get her mind working with me. And that was a good book, she must see we had to write. Was she still sitting charmed like that in the midst of those papery papers? Oh, let me be her servant forever and put myself in paper’s place! I hadn’t much paper in me, but I had all the stuff. Boshnack and Lively both said I had personality. I knew, like Bonheure, I had a big executive brain. And like George, all the love sincerity. Love sincerity . . . paper sincerity . . . which shall life take? Both in one man are very hard to find.

  4

  Just at this time I forgot about Kim. I forgot about Kim for almost a week. One day somebody at the Korean Institute showed me casually a paper several days old, a New York paper in English. One small paragraph reported the suicide of a friendless “Japanese” on Bleecker Street. The Korean who saved it and showed it to me did so, saying, “I believe that fellow isn’t a Japanese, but a Korean. The name is surely Korean. Do you know anything about this poor fellow here?” I read. And it was Kim. I went at once to Bleecker Street and hunted up the landlady of that apartment. True to the traditions of landladies, she was very vague. She could tell me little of Kim. He had left slightly over a hundred dollars in bills and had been buried on that. The death had been reported to the police. But I couldn’t find out even where Kim’s grave was.

  O Kim, why did you do it, I thought! Yours was not the spirit of Pehyi-and-Shutsi, who starved on roots of grass, rather than come out and accept a high post under an alien dynasty. You had no reason like Chu-yuan, who drowned himself to convince his king, who would not listen to counsel. You were no patriot like the Japanese Samurai. And it could not have been done in the mood of the high Korean official Minyung Whan, who had lost his fatherland to those same Japanese. Neither had you conspired like Achitophel with Absalom against King David. And you had none of the ambition of Zambri, who usurped the throne of Israel and burned himself with the king’s house rather than give it up. You did not have the gloomy conscience of Saul, nor of Judas Iscariot. Nor were you forced like Socrates to drink hemlock. Yet was it done for the mind’s sake, at the end of a blind alley, because death was the logical conclusion?

  Yes, you always argued death was natural, inevitable. But then this natural death is a long, sloping, gradual sinking down. Why should you die while still blooming, still at the age of the full-leafed tree? No tree of that sort dies a natural death. Such trees are cut down unnaturally, by an outside force. Then was Kim, too, destroyed by the world’s outside forces? I believe that he was.

  Perhaps, like the Eastern landscapes he loved in painting, he had too much that was diffused, mysterious and dynamic, and not enough that was anthropomorphic, static, and composed. One moment the dark clouds drift swiftly, a summer storm showers vehemently down. Clouds disband again quickly from mountain summits and over faraway valleys. Memory of unearthly bliss seems upon all nature. As if uncovering revelation, great masses of clouds roll back revealing long pure slopes rising from deep ravines where the sunlight is bright once more after darksome hours. Evening follows with its blending succession of different colors, gradually all being absorbed and melted away by the night shadow, as the marblelike twilight slowly changes to thick somber vapor. What different moods over the same landscape—the moods of storm, of blissful recollection, of impenetrable gloom! From cruel to smiling, from dignified to playful—the uncertainty and unevenness of nature was like the temperament of Kim. He seemed always at the mercy of his moods, never controlling them with a steel-lined purpose. The secret ways of nature, the mystery of Kim. You could never tell what was going to happen from either. You had to take Kim as you found him. Never seek, you never get. Neither sceptic nor believer, neither optimist nor pessimist, neither a yea-man nor a nay-man, he was one in one moment and another in another moment. He would be wise, then foolish, an old sage once, and next a helpless child. Now most egoistic, now most humble. At all times willful and unsatisfied. What are you to do with a man like that?

  But it seemed unfair to pass any judgment on him. He was what he was. The romantic Korean exile, my brother, who had died. Like Byron

  . . . From my youth

  My spirit walked not with the souls of men,

  Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes.

  The thirst of their existence was not mine,

  My love, my griefs, my passions and my powers

  Made me a stranger. . . .

  He was a child of revolution, whose soul passed from one continent to another never to find peace, denying earth as home . . . a strange, gi
fted creature born with the instinct for noble human things. He was wasted. All his work had been burned in that Bleecker Street fireplace, nothing was left. But the greatest loss to me, Kim’s friend, was himself, his brain which bore in its fine involutions our ancient characters deeply and simply incised, familiar to me. And over their classic economy, their primitive chaste elegance, was scrawled the West’s handwriting, in incoherent labyrinth, and seamy Hamlet design. To me—to me almost alone—a priceless and awful parchment was in him destroyed. Could it not have been deciphered, conveyed to the world?

  My first instinct had been to go to Trip, to make her mourn with me over Kim’s death and waste in a strange land. And then I did not dare. For I thought I would speak out all my thoughts, and I feared she would shut me out. No, I must write to Hsu Tsimou, his friend. Vision dimmed, eyes blurred as tears fell on my paper. And though I did not know it, I was writing to another dead man. The joyous Chinese lyricist had been killed in an airplane crash, but on his native soil, expressing his firm belief in the future of Western science transported to China.

  All sinks to death in the end. It is the “coming to pieces” as the baby of four can explain, “to make more lives.” 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. Then the universe to which man is attached, like some mean parasite, it alone proves living of positive worth, it alone stands to verify faith? . . . but over Kim’s death I still puzzled and mourned. How could he let the universe pass on and beyond him without cleaving full strength? If our values are not deposited in living, then are they in dying? We give up the gem of life to obtain the pearl of death, Chinese philosophy says. But if we find no enthusiasm for life, how can we for death? And life was no gem for Kim. I only knew that dying must have been a source of comfort, the first peaceful dream and undisturbed sleep for a long time that the King of Terror could present to him. Somewhere he must be in American earth, stones for a pillow under the head, a grass-woven blanket on top, all his hopes, fears, ambitions, ironies, love, lying buried there, too.

  Easter season would come—Manhattan Easter—with its bright sunshine and gay flowers. How brisk and debonnaire those people, not unlike Helen and Kim, dressed in the spirit of spring and walking on Fifth Avenue! Those little children, how beautifully they would be dressed, running hand in hand through the parks and the streets! New hats would show all around, new shoes, everything new, to symbolize the new season—the new life of an Easter morning as gay as the Easter flower. From that time on, the Park would gather more people as it gathered more leaves. Here Trip and I would walk, under little city fruit blossoms and willow streamers. We would walk carefree and hungry, toward China Garden, the Peking restaurant uptown which served fried shrimps that Trip liked (flaky cocoons, their little red tails curling, crisply). With the expanding spring, the flower of our relationship was to bloom fuller and fuller, containing seed of all our future days. . . . Yes, everywhere gloomy weary hearts of winter would be softened. But not Kim’s. The heart that was frozen in the winter’s cold snow, in death, too, it must lie frozen. Rain would drip on the green roof, but for Kim still ash and dust-powder. Forever frozen heart, forever cold body that could never embrace love’s naked arms! It obsessed me that the exile in life must remain the exile in death. Nothing here would visit his grave with wholeheartedness. The gray moon would touch it but half, the snow would leave half to the black shimmer of branches. The August sun might blaze with an outer wholeheartedness, but the heart that had never felt its humanity but by half would keep the oblique touch of winter even under a softened and fertile earth.

  I looked everywhere and seemed to have passed unharmed through a vast destruction. And Kim with greater talents had been lost. Because of Helen he died in America. He chose Greenwich Village as a grave, he, the man without a village. But he died a Korean exile to the end. America was not for Kim. He would never have been convinced by Life Begins at Forty . . . nor would he have nodded his head to syncopated tunes, “I-can’t-give-you anything . . . but . . . love, Baby!” And Helen, too, died like the cutting down of a tree; she was a bough off the puritan tree of America. I had come to America, I had lived just while trees were falling. I watched the ax descend. Helen, who looked eagerly for love with a racial nostalgia, with a Boston uncompromising soul, she, too, was gone. Yes, for a long time everybody over the world had been steadily at work destroying. Down, down with the ancestor’s house. For they pointed out how it was not built on a firm foundation, and how the rain leaked, the storm shook. “In my father’s house are many mansions” . . . still not a blueprint could be found.

  In the East it was the same with a difference. It was much worse. Chaos, however, there was on both hemispheres. Kim and I came when the Village spirit was upon America. It was the time when everybody wanted the artist’s and rebel’s life. Marriage was a failure. Exile was the only refuge. Men and women everywhere tried free love, companionateness, everybody wished hard to live the life that did not smell of baby diapers, corned beef and cabbage. In Asia, Christianity, church-going and monogamy had just commenced to be heroism—drinking, polygamy, wild life, and free verse-making to be labeled by some reckless young radicals vice. While in the West, vice versa. But on the whole, Christianity, Confucianism, both seemed to have come to much the same pass. Both seemed dying, like Helen and Kim, cut down and apart.

  Everything ends . . . even the merciless virtue of destruction, even the proud individualist’s rebellion and anarchy . . . sooner perhaps in the West than in the East. I saw my meeting with Mr. Glenn Bates was a sort of American milestone. It seemed to be right, what he said, how the great work of destruction was being finished off. That magazine Justice after about three issues never came out any more. I don’t know why. And after that I never heard from Mr. Glenn Bates. I regret the failure of that magazine. Suppose it had kept on. Maybe by now it might have got the circulation of The Nation or The New Republic. Back numbers of Justice are now selling at a very high price. Frank Harris has died. Everything he ever wrote becomes an item. I have noticed in Publishers Weekly that one copy is wanted for the price of ten dollars. So I hope those copies left over each month and stacked up in the closet have at last come into dealers’ hands. . . . What I mean to say is, Justice, too, was a sign of the times, for it tried to be socially conscious. In the early twenties, the more sensitive American writers were touching no political issues. Politics—like all shades of domesticity and like church-going—was a form of the older generation’s vice. I had seen all this changing. Now it began to seem Village life was somehow over. A few years of wild living, and everybody gets sick, gets lonesome.

  Some commit suicide. Some fly forever away. But those who are left get tired, and begin to want something the opposite. Nostalgia creeps in for the man in the comfortable rocking chair with the child on the lap and the woman near-by knitting. . . . And the artist’s skylight studio begins to say “For Rent.” Anarchy, good or bad, has gone into retreat. Now a few advanced Americans were just beginning to come out for Communism and Catholicism, taking their cue from abroad. Soon politics, economics, some social philosophy was to be the whole thing. What a change from the mood of lonely Bohemia! Ten years from this time, intellectuals, too, will range themselves with keen interest behind Roosevelt or Landon.

  Even George Jum had changed. I received this letter: “You will want to ask me about Hollywood. Only minor parts there. I was disgusted. So I have come to Hawaii, where lazy monkeys can pick up the nuts without working. It is a hot co
untry, and that means there is more love. I am going to get married and settle down. I am engaged to a Korean girl, one American-born, with a good stenographic training, and very pretty to see. (Of course I think she is beautiful!) So here in Hawaii I will spend all my hours in eating, loving and sleeping. Is love the be-all and the end-all, am I still romanticist? I never go back on my words. But what is the difference? Man has to love, and it costs the same amount of energy either way. . . . P. S. For the rest, I have not failed. I have only not succeeded.”

  5

  My exile seems as if ended. But I have never gone back. The opportunity has not come. My father’s family is all dead or scattered. My own beyond-time, time traveling ties have been made on American soil. There are, besides, political difficulties besetting the Korean who returns to the native shores. Perhaps spiritually, it would be difficult to return wholeheartedly, and I would be there as an exile from America. The soul has become molded to the Western pattern, the whole man has become softened somewhat by the luxuries of Western living. I could hardly hope now to run barefoot over ice and snow, as in my village the boys were proud to say they could, on feet as flexible and padded as the puppies’ armored shoe of skin. When I finally go back, it will only be for a visit.

  Once here in America, I had a dream . . . a dream that I had climbed to the top of a lofty tree. And looking over a leafy ocean of verdure, I saw stretching across wide water a hairlike bridge, like those suspension bridges we often used in Korea. Creeping across this bridge and beckoning with eyes of glee were Yunkoo and Chak-doo-shay—the little boys I played with as a child. Then I saw at the other end of the bridge, so long and precarious, a paradise of wild and flowery magic, with mountains and waterfalls and little gushing streams on which as in an old Chinese landscape could be discerned the scholars with their brush-pens or tranquil fishing-rods. I waved and shouted to Yunkoo and Chak-doo-shay, and I struggled to reach the bridge, which seemed somehow attached to my tree. Panting with the effort of climbing, I looked down and gasped with fear at being so far above ground. But Yunkoo and Chak-doo-shay were daring me to follow, standing up now and running back and forth like men on a tightrope across the little trembling bridge. I had almost reached it. Yunkoo held out his hand and pointed back to what was now a never-never land. But all in a moment, things began tumbling out of my pockets, money and keys, contracts and business letters. Especially the key to my car, my American car. I clutched, but I saw it falling.