East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  “May we not say . . . that the hour of Spiritual Enfranchisement is even this: When your Ideal World, wherein the whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to work, becomes revealed, and thrown open; and you discover, with amazement enough . . . that your ‘America is here or nowhere’?”16

  The “rebirth” of Kang’s hero—or rather, the death of the state of exile—comes from the realization that the spiritual home he had come to America to find would by necessity be a place of his own making, not an impossible ideal.

  Illuminating though it may be, Kang’s Guggenheim application lists only intentions. When Kang submitted it in the fall of 1931, he was still eager to join the intellectual ferment around him and confident of his ability to do so. It seems appropriate that the tone of his proposal resembles the self-assurance expressed by Han at the end of The Grass Roof: “And there are many more dreams within me, greater and greater, also going to come true soon through my own act” (3:376). But, after all, defining oneself is only half the struggle. How society defines you is not, for most, a matter of choice—even more so when you are an Asian immigrant living in the America of the twenties and thirties. It is hardly surprising that the portrait of an extremely complex man—driven by equal parts ego, intelligence, and idealism—that emerges from Kang’s characterization of himself as a poet contrasts sharply with the good-natured, somewhat naive “Oriental Yankee” that his reviewers and critics saw in him.

  In the intervening half-decade between the Guggenheim proposal and the actual publication of his second novel, Kang’s aspirations for the limitless agency of the individual matured and darkened. The New York Times book reviewer who wrote that Kang “is no cynic. He never picks up a big stick. He merely tells us what happened, good and bad, the sad and the merry, and always alive,” could not have been more mistaken (100). Kang was in fact quite skeptical about the rosy promise of assimilation and success advertised by the American dream. However, such a reading only becomes possible when East Goes West is looked at as a novel and not as autobiography. Splitting the figure of Chungpa Han from the presumed identity of Younghill Kang proves to be a liberating act: it restores Kang’s creative muscle, and a more radical and more subversive critique of American modernization is revealed.

  From the beginning, the process of Americanization for Han is both a process of marginalization and an initiation into the rigors of materialism. Starting off at the main office of the Y.M.C.A., Han hopes that a letter of introduction from a missionary will secure him an entrée into the bustling world of opportunity and work embodied by the Y.M.C.A. office itself—“high up in a skyscraper, [it] seemed one of the busiest places to judge by the typewriters all about . . . clickety-clacking at enormous speed” (2:16). He is disabused of this notion “with businesslike finality” by the organization’s president, who refers him to the Harlem Y.M.C.A. (2:16). There, in turn, he is told that the only available position must “not be given to a Negro or an Oriental . . . precisely because [this] branch was up in Harlem” (2:18–19). Having unwittingly spent almost all his remaining money on a haircut and shave, Han ends up in a flophouse, an experience he describes as being comparable only to the extreme deprivation of a Japanese prison cell. The flophouse is even worse in some respects: unlike the Korean revolutionists, who had been placed in jail “for a single integrated feeling, a hard bright core of fire against oppression,” the homeless bums of New York with whom Han spends the night are “like pithless stalks, and the force that swept them here, the city’s leavings, was for the most part . . . a personal disintegration” (2:21).

  Han might still be charmed enough by the possibilities of American individualism—“where individual disintegration was possible, as well as individual integration, where all need not perish with the social organism”—to brush off the flophouse misery, but as this first day draws to a close, he is jobless and without clear prospects for the future (2:21–22). The situation becomes desperate: “I had known the famines of poor rice years in Korea. Now, in utter solitude with a chilling heart, I feared pavement famine, with plenty all around but in the end not even grass to chew” (2:30). Around him swirls a world of commerce and exchange, but it is mechanical and unsustaining. Alone in his unheated room, Han tries to eke out some spiritual nourishment by reading Shakespeare, but finds himself unable to concentrate—“Even in the midst of Hamlet’s subtlest soliloquies, I could think of nothing but food” (2:30).

  Significantly, Han is aided in and saved from this hand-to-mouth existence by fellow outcasts—first a bum, then a Chinese restaurant manager, and finally his friend George Jum. On the margins of New York’s unrelenting efficiency, other models for social interaction exist. During another hungry period of his life, Han notes:

  [I]f I wandered through the streets of Chinatown about nine o’clock at night—the dinner hour for Chinese waiters and restaurant men—some waiter was almost sure to see me and call out, “Come on . . . Dinner time!” Always they cooked enough to be elastic either way—five more or five less made no difference—and if I joined them, they just brought out another bowl and chopsticks. Such was the Chinese custom. They had a psychology which would seem strange to American businessmen. A spiritual treat for a material, a material for a spiritual—they saw no difference (2:77).

  Such generosity is hardly characteristic of Han’s encounters as he seeks to join the mainstream of American life. As he continues in his adventures, Han comes to realize that as a person of color, his difficulties always begin when he steps outside the narrow boundaries of acceptable, unthreatening behavior. So, for example, his stint as a houseboy with one American family ends when the father, Mr. Lively, encounters George Jum and his white girlfriend and begins to suspect that Han might be romantically interested in his teenaged daughter. “‘My dear boy, see here,’” Mr. Lively admonishes. “‘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.’” Han’s surprise is complete: “I was very solemn and silent and unable to open my mouth to say anything” (2:146).

  For the non-white populations of this time, making one’s way in the U.S. becomes a matter of negotiating around racist—and often ludicrous—misassumptions. Anti-miscegenation laws still held force in California, and for an Asian man to even be seen with a white woman often meant trouble. Stereotypes dictated the very conditions of life in other ways as well: in one Chinese restaurant, eight of Han’s nine fellow waiters have college degrees—three of those also have Ph.D.’s from Columbia University. Han’s friend George Jum, formerly an ambassador to Washington from Korea, makes his money as a cook (2:70).17 Wagstaff, another friend who works as an elevator man while getting a law degree, asks, “‘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’” (2:268–69). Han asserts that “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,” but in fact he has been learning this lesson since he first set foot in the United States (2:269).

  If Han seems naive initially, he is also a quick study. Leaving the scene of his first New York encounter, he notes:

  [S]oon I became convinced that everyone in New York felt the same way as this dry-voiced, kidding man I had first met . . . the need of sustaining a role, a sort of gaminlike sophistication, harder and more polished than a diamond in the prosperous classes, but equally present in the low, a hard shell over the soul of New-World children, essential for the pebbles rattling through subway tunnels and their sun-hid city streets (2:16).

  Cultivating a persona, Han realizes, is a necessary survival tactic, especially in a society where you are almost entirely subjected to distorted expec
tations. At one point, Han complains to his more cynical and experienced friend, To Wan Kim, about Boston. Kim replies,

  “You will get along somehow. . . . Boston has treated you well on the whole. . . . Professors in Boston have great sympathy for any adopted Oriental child. As long as you are willing to be docile and obedient.”

  “That’s just it!” I agreed indignantly, and Kim smiled. “I hate being nicey-nice.”

  “Well, I’m afraid we cannot do much against Boston,” said Kim. “Morals and manners are greater strongholds than fortifications . . .” (2:251).

  Through his experiences, Han comes to understand this lesson quite well. The disjunction between the circumstances that Han finds himself relegated to and the lofty hopes he fosters for his adopted land is not bitter irony, it is an inevitable by-product of America’s racist culture. For an interloper like Han, the trick is to figure out how to negotiate those expectations without capitulating to them.

  Perhaps the most revealing instance of the pragmatic survivalism Han develops can be found in the series of dinner parties given by Miss Churchill, an elderly Quaker woman who “used to entertain in a quiet way all kinds of people, particularly young people and many of them from foreign lands, such as India, Japan, or China.” At first, Han is one of many guests, often accompanied by “the Hindu student Senzar, or the Japanese Miyamori.” What follows is in essence a detailed explanation of how Han alone of the three foreign students manages to secure his place at such gatherings (2:289–90).

  Miyamori, on the one hand, makes the mistake of admiring American civilization too uncritically. According to Han, “[Miyamori] frankly envied me as a more or less permanent exile, and advised me never to go home, since all was primitive and barbaric hell back there. Tall buildings, subways, autos, universal sanitation, great department stores . . . these seemed like Utopia to Miyamori.” For this fault, and for the fault of writing bad poetry to all his American friends, signed “Very respectably,” he is invited by Miss Churchill less and less (2:290).

  Senzar’s excision from the group comes about in a much more dramatic fashion. An “Indo-Oxford product . . . in America studying engineering,” Senzar seems “handsome, poetic and sad” as long as he keeps his mouth shut. (Such a characterization gives an apt depiction of Orientalism—the illusion of exoticism and mystery can only be maintained through silence.) Conflict arises one evening when he seizes upon Han, the only other non-white in the room, and begins berating Han’s American schooling, “unconsciously parodying the English-felt superiority of the English university man.” The complexities of a colonized mentality are clearly articulated in Senzar’s simultaneous identification with Oxford’s superiority and his rage at the second-class status it relegates him to. “‘You think you’re educated,’” mocks Senzar to Kang, “‘You don’t know how to talk English!’” The other guests, who had been “listening attentively to this, with sly glances of amusement and surprise,” are less entertained when the scope of Senzar’s tirade widens to include them—“‘Then, Americans are not sound,’ Senzar kept on, and the Americans and English began to get very uncomfortable.” Another Oxford man protests, and Senzar becomes even more enraged, excoriating the colonial system and exclaiming, “‘Soon we will drive you English out’” (2:290–92).

  Attempting to save the situation, Han jumps back into the fray, countering Senzar’s rant with the claim that “‘You Hindus are better off under the English than we are under the Japanese.’” The conversation goes on and on, but Han finally manages to engage Senzar’s attention once again: “I deflected his words and his wrath toward me. Not without enjoyment, too, I sought to stem that lava which Miss Churchill felt to be such a social catastrophe.” Afterwards, Han is “almost decorated for merit by the exhausted Westerners.” He comments matter-of-factly: “Senzar, for want of tact, was never invited by Miss Churchill again. I became a regular guest now, for dinner and the evening, every Wednesday” (2:293).

  The irony of all this is that the statements made by both Miyamori and Senzar are remarkably similar to ones made throughout the book by Han. For example, both Senzar and Han are critical of colonization. Han is diplomatic about his situation—“For me there was always special favor, special kindliness, special protection . . . the white-man’s-burden attitude toward the dark colonies. Ralph’s kindness . . . Leslie’s brutal cruelty . . . I weighed them in my mind, and it seemed to me better to miss the kindness and not to have the cruelty” (2:115)—while Senzar bristles with indignation at his: “‘So you think you know the English? No! This cold-blooded, thieving, wooden, two-faced race? Oh no!’” (2:292). Moreover, Han’s frustration with the disjointed, assembly-line instruction that passes for Western pedagogy parallels Senzar’s assertion that there is “‘Nothing to get from their education anyway. Only mechanical things’” (2:292). And both are aware of their own exiled status in the West. When Han describes Senzar’s attitude towards his native country—“Of course, he was a fanatic patriot, but his words were so much in the clouds, you could not make out whether he intended to go back to India or not”—he could be discussing his own conflicting sense of self-interest and love of country (2:290). Similarly, Miyamori’s reluctance to go back to the “primitive and barbaric hell” of “home” (2:290) is echoed in Han’s realization that he has become “softened somewhat by the luxuries of Western living” (2:361).

  In contrast to both Senzar and Miyamori, however, Han has learned to master the fragile balance of accommodation. If he is unwilling to remain silent and inscrutable on the fringes of conversation, at least he knows how to function within the strict rules of polite company. He is not, like Miyamori, overly eager to Westernize, thus making him uninteresting to a Western audience. He is also not, like Senzar, so flamboyant in his criticisms of Western culture that he is deemed uncivilized. Han’s deflection of Senzar’s attention away from the others, using Korea’s colonization as bait, is a classic middle-man maneuver; it might be disturbingly opportunistic, but it is also extremely astute, earning him the gratitude of his hostess even as it grates on our modern-day multicultural sensibilities. Because of this performance, Han is invited back again and again—an opportunity that gives him access to free food and the social connections that eventually lead him to his beloved Trip.

  In its dramatization of the racial politicking happening in the parlor rooms of American society, this episode is both more complex and more informative than it might appear to be at first: the dissonance between Chungpa Han’s persistent idealism and his clear-eyed observations of the hypocrisy around him is not mere inconsistency, it is a carefully constructed conceit, with Younghill Kang as its master architect and principal beneficiary.18 At the time Kang was writing East Goes West, America was going through a profoundly xenophobic stage, and to be an Asian in such a society—even one who operated in the oftentimes more progressive world of academics and intellectuals—required a certain decorum and polish, and an acute sense of survival. Kang the writer, like Han the character, needed to tread the middle ground between the extremes of honest expression and diplomatic restraint. Like Han, he could not afford to alienate his audience. And like Han, he was vying for a place at the table.

  For Kang, however, a place at the table meant access to American citizenship—that sense of home—that was denied to him by law. Like all Asian immigrants, Kang was prevented from becoming naturalized because of his race. “I know I am an American,” he would write, “[in] all but the citizenship papers denied me by the present interpretation of the law of 1870, under which a Korean is not racially eligible for citizenship” (33:63). Nevertheless, his previous successes had made him cocky about his ability to surmount these difficulties. Taking up the challenge voiced at the beginning of East Goes West—“Out of action rises the dream, rises the poetry. Dream without motion is the only wasteland that can sustain nothing” (2:5–6)—he set about trying to accomplish what even Thomas Mann had been unable to do—get a law p
assed through Congress that would make him a U.S. citizen. The bills that eventually came before Congress (H.R. 7127 in the House and S. 2802 in the Senate) were not introduced until the fall of 1939, but Kang had grasped the importance of pro-American boosterism long before. As Kim points out to Han, “‘In this country, in this age, art becomes the instinct for self-advertisement’” (2:160). Later in his life, Kang would conclude even more explicitly, “Artists are propogandists. They propogandize themselves” (110).

  Kang was ultimately able to scratch out a place for himself as a writer within the crippling limitations of the role assigned to him because he managed to subvert them. Just as Han uses his own history (i.e., Korea’s colonization by Japan) to get into the good graces of the assembled company, Kang played off the assumption that his book is autobiography to prove to his audience—the American public—that he was citizenship-worthy. He manipulated the misperception that he and Han are the same person. Han’s clever positioning of himself between the extremes of Senzar and Miyamori thus becomes both a lesson in survival skills—a description of how to stay afloat in the frigid waters of social acceptability—and a demonstration of Kang’s own balancing technique in East Goes West. Thus, the book’s harshest critiques of America’s bigotry and ignorance are placed in the mouths and actions of other characters, while Han narrates from a seemingly inoffensive fly-on-the-wall perspective. (As Han discovers in his very first job, “It was interesting in a sense, being treated just like a dog or cat. One could see everything, and go unnoticed . . .” (2:60).) Through Kang’s shrewd construction of Han as an amiable fellow who understands the rules of the game and who knows how to make himself useful (which in this case means making oneself palatable—not too strong and not too weak—very much like an acceptable dinner guest), he was able to negotiate between his ambitions for the book, his insights about American society, and his own political self-interest.19