Now, always before in my dreams when I entered that village, it was with Trip, in a car. . . . I must not lose the car key. “The car key, the car key!” I cried to myself in my dream, forgetting Yunkoo and Chak-doo-shay. “It fell in the bushes at the foot of the tree. I must find it.”
I half climbed, half slid down the tree and began grubbing in the leaves and sticks, and ever present in my mind was the urgency of finding the car key, of recovering all of the money.
And now, as is the inconsequential way of dreams, I was running down the steps into a dark and cryptlike cellar, still looking for my money and my keys. The cellar seemed to be under the pavements of a vast city. Other men were in that cellar with me—some frightened-looking Negroes, I remember. Then looking back, I saw, through an iron grating into the upper air, men with clubs and knives. The cellar was being attacked. The Negroes were about to be mobbed. I shut the door and bolted it, and called to my frightened fellows to help me hold the door.
“Fire, bring fire,” called the red-faced men outside.
And through the grating I saw the flaring torches being brought. And applied. Being shoved, crackling, through the gratings.
I awoke like the phoenix out of a burst of flames.
I have remembered this dream, because, according to Oriental interpretation, it is a dream of good omen. To be killed in a dream means success, and in particular death by fire augurs good fortune. This is supposed to be so, because death symbolizes in Buddhistic philosophy growth and rebirth and a happier reincarnation.
Afterword
THE UNMAKING OF AN ORIENTAL YANKEE
“I am a poet.” Spoken by a writer of prose, this simple statement, made by Younghill Kang in a 1946 lecture, seems less a description of occupation than an assertion—a deceptively concise distillation of the passions and convictions behind his life and work (110).1 The first Korean American novelist and a pioneering voice in Asian American literature, Kang was already edging past his prime when he made it. He had successfully published two autobiographical novels and a children’s book, earning him gushing praise from the likes of Rebecca West (“After Mr. Kang, most books seem a bit flat. . . . What a man! What a writer!”) and H. G. Wells (“Here is a really great writer.”) (138). He had drunk gin and talked shop with literary giants of the age, counting among his closest friends fellow New York University freshman English teacher Thomas Wolfe. And at a time when, on the opposite coast in California, anti-miscegenation laws banning Asian/white marriages were still in place, he had even met and married Frances Keely, the pampered daughter of a Virginia industrialist turned professor. (In an essay written shortly before Kang passed away, his daughter Lucy Lynn would write of her parents’ relationship: “He regarded her as the princess with the many mattresses on top of the pea, and he was the foreign prince. In Don Quixote fashion, nothing was impossible” (119).)
But if Kang sampled some rare triumphs for a young Asian immigrant, he also suffered the inevitable humiliations of America’s entrenched racism: Kang slipped into the U.S. just before Congress passed a 1924 law effectively banning Asian immigration, and he was ineligible for citizenship because of his race.2 Like most Koreans at this time, he was a man without a country. Asked to explain his nationality on his 1931 application for a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Kang would write: “In practice an American and permanently located here, but debarred by the United States Government from naturalisation as an Oriental. I am not a citizen elsewhere, since the Korean Government was dissolved [by Japan] in 1910” (65).
A poet, Kang went on to explain in his lecture, is someone essentially solitary, someone who feels human sorrow. Kang had elaborated on a similar theme in his first novel, The Grass Roof, published in 1931: “[I]t seems to be that the poet alone has no home nor national boundary, but is like a man in a ship. His nearest kin is the muse up in the clouds, and his patriotism goes to the ethereal kingdom” muses Chungpa Han, the book’s young protagonist and Younghill Kang’s fictional alter ego (3:376). This realm of the poet, pregnant with the possibility of cultural mediation, is essentially one of expectation: and indeed, as Han considers it, he is himself on a ship, suspended between the faltering traditions of his native Korea and the seductive promise of American modernity. Now, more than ten years after penning those words (and more than twenty years after he himself had emigrated), Kang was back in the land of his birth—not as a returning hero, but as an American military attaché, gathering information for the U.S. Army while it presided over the simultaneous liberation and division of Korea.3 To the end of his life, Kang remained a man stranded—as much by historical circumstances as by early success and his own singular ambitions—in a state of profound exile.
* * *
• • •
When East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee was published in 1937, the success and modest acclaim generated by The Grass Roof had already begun to crest. Largely on the merit of that first book, Kang had become the first Asian ever to be awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship—an opportunity he used to travel with his young family to Europe and write. “He was young and successful and plucking the plums from the Western world into which he had entered,” remembers Lucy Lynn Kang (119). Kang’s most accomplished work, East Goes West is a unique and vividly realized account of the heady cultural mix taking place on the margins of early twentieth-century America’s growing prosperity. In its portrait of a young man’s fracturing idealism, it is also an extraordinary, if coded, critique of American materialism.
Chungpa Han, first introduced in The Grass Roof, is the precocious and much doted-upon eldest son of an eldest son who ventures forth from the rural seclusion of his hometown to look for his place in the world. The Grass Roof describes Han’s early childhood in northern Korea, and follows his exploits in Seoul and Japan. East Goes West picks up Han’s story where The Grass Roof leaves off. Having witnessed the destruction of his childhood’s bucolic tranquility by Japan’s brutal colonialism, and unable to envision a productive role for himself in Korea, Han decides to head West. He explains:
Korea, a small, provincial, old-fashioned Confucian nation . . . was called to get off the earth. Death summoned. I could have renounced the scholar’s dream forever (plainly scholarship had dreamed us away into ruin) and written my vengeance against Japan in martyr’s blood. . . . Or I could take away my slip cut from the roots, and try to engraft my scholar inherited kingdom upon the world’s thought . . . (2:8).
Han arrives in New York at the tender age of eighteen with little more than four dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare to his name. There, and in his subsequent travels throughout the United States and into Canada, he encounters prep school girls and Village bohemians, entrepreneuring salesmen and radical leftists, fire-and-brimstone preaching evangelists and stalwart Yankee farmers. He also meets, befriends, and is befriended by a rich diversity of fellow immigrants—Siamese, Italian, Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese among others—most of whom, like him, are forced to work a variety of menial jobs to make ends meet. Han’s closest and most constant companions, however, are to be found amongst his fellow Koreans. Most prominent among them are the eager-to-assimilate but ever self-possessed George Jum, with his nattily pressed pants, his elaborate theories on love, and his infatuation with a white Harlem nightclub dancer; and To Won Kim, the exquisitely educated artist and scholar whose self-imposed exile in the West ends in tragedy.
With its keen eye for details, East Goes West is at once a picaresque adventure, an exploration of immigrant urban life in the 1920s, and a bitingly satirical critique of the hypocrisy and pretension behind America’s gleaming industrialized facade. Yet from the time of its publication until now, it has been persistently misread as little more than a charmingly informative memoir. A contemporary review, published in The New Yorker, reports that East Goes West “describes with much humor and charm the author’s difficulties in adapting himself to American life, and his succ
essful search for the formula that was to make him an ‘Oriental Yankee’” (91). In a New York Times review, this assumption of the book’s essential nonfiction becomes explicit: “[Kang’s] story attracts and holds the attention as if it were a novel. . . . But of course, East Goes West is not a novel. It is the candid record of ‘the making of an Oriental Yankee’ as its subtitle states; and its author has been so successfully Americanized as to become Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in New York University and a member of the staff of the Department of Far Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum” (100). In other words, Kang’s own life becomes proof of Han’s successful assimilation.
This fraying of boundaries between fact and creation is most starkly revealed in those reviews where events from Kang’s biography are carelessly leaked into the supposed contents of the book. For example, the Springfield Sunday Union & Republican blithely reports that “[East Goes West] concludes with [Kang’s] winning of an American wife and achieving the first rung of an intellectual career”—although it remains unclear whether or not the book’s hero, Chungpa Han, ever does win over Trip, his elusive idealization of American womanhood (100).4 Certainly, as Kang himself readily admitted, portions of the book were derived from his own experiences; it is, after all, an autobiographical novel.5 But to assume that this exchange runs in both directions—i.e., that Kang’s life could be read back into the book—is a slip that implies more than just sloppy journalism: it indicates a presumption of artlessness in Kang’s work.6
The potential damage of such a claim can be seen in the lengths writers such as Thomas Wolfe, Kang’s close friend and contemporary, went to address it. Bothered by criticisms that his work was little more than a recapitulation of his life, Wolfe included a note “to the reader” at the beginning of Look Homeward Angel that stated: “Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.”7 For Kang, an Asian immigrant, such allowance for creative license was hardly considered. The craft of East Goes West was diminished instead into the uninspired and impossibly bland “story of a human being among other human beings in an amazing diversity of human experience” (100). Kang the writer is replaced by Chungpa Han the character, and in the process, Kang becomes an early victim of the still-prevalent belief that the only contribution any writer of color could possibly have to make is the story of his or her own life.
Kang’s reviewers were joined in their assessment of his work by his editor Maxwell Perkins, the powerful Scribner’s institution who also edited Wolfe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and a host of other illustrious American authors. Introduced to Kang through Wolfe, Perkins’ starkly different attitudes towards both is revealing. In an introduction to Scribner’s reprint of Look Homeward Angel, he writes of Wolfe: “Many of [his reviewers] asserted that Wolfe could only write about himself, that he could not see the world or anything objectively, with detachment—that he was always autobiographical. . . . But all that he wrote of was transformed by his imagination.”8 This transformative power of the imagination is not in evidence in Perkins’ reading of Kang’s work. His attitude towards East Goes West is much more matter-of-fact. The Grass Roof had been quite successful, with steady sales, translation rights sold for several languages, and even a tentative offer for a movie option; and Perkins undoubtedly expected East Goes West to be a book along the same lines9—the relatively straightforward, marketable tale of a young man’s eventual acceptance into Western culture.10 Explaining his suggested cuts to the manuscript in a letter to Kang, Perkins wrote: “The principle I went on was that in the first place this was the story of a man, and in the second, of an Easterner in the West.” In an effort to emphasize this aspect, Perkins urged Kang to include more information about Trip “and to show definitely that you married her, because the fact that you did, makes one of the principal points of the book, in that the Easterner became a Westerner through this experience” (147: February 8, 1937).11
Such an approach to East Goes West seriously underestimates Younghill Kang. Certainly someone like Kang—who had mastered both Asian and Western traditions of poetry and philosophy, and who demanded in an assignment that his students “select for elaborate commentary a literary masterpiece which is chiefly notable for the ethical, social, or religious truth it presents” (64)—would have loftier ambitions for his second major work than merely recording his life. Nevertheless, most readers, including Perkins, continued to see in East Goes West what they expected from it: the candid account of a hardworking immigrant who, through his unwavering belief in the American dream, comes to attain it.
That Kang’s ambitions for this second book were much more complex than what his editor or his reviewers comprehended becomes evident in the fellowship application he submitted to the Guggenheim Foundation in October 1931. The book he hoped to write, tentatively called “Death of an Exile,” was to be a companion volume to The Grass Roof, though one “more mature in style and technique.” And unlike The Grass Roof, which “treated of the Orient,” it was to
treat of Orientals in America, being the reflection through the hero’s eyes of this mechanical age, of American civilization, and of the literary and cultural epoques he experiences here over a period of ten years; also a history of his spiritual evolutions and revolutions while love-sick, bread-sick, butter-sick, education-sick, he is lost and obliterated in the stone-and-steel jungles of New York City. . . . (65)
Kang staked out his literary territory very clearly: the book was to be both a novel of ideas and the portrait of an era. The issues he proposed to address might not have been strikingly innovative in and of themselves, but they were to be explored from the unique perspective of an Asian living in the U.S. with access to the literary, philosophical, and social conceits of two traditions. Through his travels, the “hero” was to experience “the various religions of mankind, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity,” as well as “the various philosophies, pragmatism, naturalism, humanism, neo-realism, etc.” Racism was also to play a formative role in the proposed book: “The theme of race prejudice recurs, in the lives of minor characters and in the life of the protagonist, and the whole alternates between the mood of satire and the mood of a stirring prose poem” (65).
The title Kang originally proposed for the book further attests to his conceptual sophistication. For Kang, “Death of an Exile” could be read in two ways. First, as a reference to the tragic character of To Wan Kim, “a beautiful and romantic spirit in exile,” who dies by himself in Greenwich Village “after many bitter experiences” and “being thwarted in love and ambition.” The deeper meaning of the title, however, is to be found in the philosophical underpinnings of the book, not its plot. “Death of an Exile” also alludes to “the idea of a rebirth in the soul of the hero, which had also been in exile. At the end of the novel, the romantic soul in him is dead, and the soul that remains and feels itself at home in the world is the soul that is facing life in the real sense, pragmatically.”12 The hero, having worked his way through quandaries both metaphysical and material, “finally identifies himself as a poet with a belief in the significance and hence immortality of the soul” (65).
This notion of the irreducible soul, purged of abstractions and living in itself, is a theoretical quote of, among other things, the literary source with which Kang closes out his proposal. He writes: “Grass Roof may be said to have been written in the mood of the Everlasting Nay of Carlyle; Death of an Exile may be compared to the mood of the Everlasting Yea” (65). The concepts he refers to are taken from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus [The Tailor Retailored], a book whose eclectic combination of autobiography, novel, and essay might have been an inspiration for East Goes West. “The Everlasting Nay” refers to the loss of faith that accompanies the difficult passage from certainty to uncertainty: “Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moults is sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash-off the old one upon rocks.”13
This description of crisis resembles the radical break with the past that Chungpa Han recounts at the beginning of East Goes West: “It was my destiny to see the disjointing of a world . . . I saw myself placed on a shivering pinnacle overlooking a wasteland that had no warmth. . . . And I felt I was looking on death, the death of an ancient planet. . . . In loathing of death, I hurtled forward, out into space, out toward a foreign body . . .” (2:4). Carlyle’s conclusion that “‘It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual Newbirth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism [a transformation by a flash of spiritual illumination], perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man’” becomes a fitting assessment of Han’s situation at the end of The Grass Roof and the beginning of East Goes West.14
“The Everlasting Yea” elaborates on the idea of release from incertitude through the assertion of individual freedom. It hinges on the notion of self-understanding—that you create your own circumstances and knowledge. “‘Fool!’” Carlyle writes, “‘The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself; thy Condition is but the stuff [out of which] thou art to shape that same Ideal. . . .’”15 In other words, wherever you go, there you are. Or, stop looking for answers outside of yourself. Early on in East Goes West, Han considers the aim of his journey to the U.S.: “This world, which had sucked me in by its onward, forward magnetism, must have that in it, too, to feed and anchor man in the old durability. . . . It was here . . . here in America for me to find . . . but where?” (2:4). A passage in Carlyle’s “Everlasting Yea” answers this question:
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