East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  21. In an April 20, 1986, letter to the New York Times, Lucy Lynn Kang would hint at political difficulties as well: “My Korean-born father, Younghill Kang, a writer . . . sought American citizenship and political freedom; he, too, could only live as part of a free society. . . . During the McCarthy era, when people were blacklisted for expressing such sentiments, my father, along with countless others, suffered adversities” (118).

  Notes

  In preparing the text of East Goes West for this edition, we attempted to match Follett’s 1965 reprint, which both corrected a number of typographical errors from the original Scribner’s edition and introduced some of its own. While we corrected obvious errors and imposed some standardization (such as the consistent capitalization of “Westernized” and “Machine Age”), it was a priority to retain Younghill Kang’s unique and often idiosyncratic style. We also retained markers of Kang’s times, such as frequently hyphenated compound words and archaic spellings.

  1. In the Scribner’s edition, the dedication reads:

  DEDICATED

  TO

  FRANCES KEELY

  who has saved my life from the fate of exile

  and collaborated in the making of this book

  2. Younghill Kang spells the name of his protagonist inconsistently, alternating between “Chung-pa” and “Chungpa.” We chose the spelling that appeared more often, “Chungpa.”

  3. “Fusan” is the romanization of the Japanese name of Pusan. Since Kang was writing at the time of the Japanese occupation of Korea, we retained the Japanese name.

  4. Inexplicably, the quotation in the Follett reprint, which we republished here, is completely different from that in the first edition. In the Scribner’s version, Kim’s hero is not Li Po but the Sung painter and poet, Su Tung-p’o, and the poem is given only in translation:

  The flower’s center rises from a black halo

  And all the beauty of Spring flows from the brush.

  Let its shape take form out of mist,

  Let it spread in a manner wholly natural.

  A bending lotus tells of the wind’s force,

  A rotting apricot indicates the rain.

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  *“When the Japs March In,” The American Magazine, August 1942: 42–43, 110–11.