Kichung Kim: Filling In the Blank

“Filling In the Blank: Depictions of Koreans in American Literature”

Kichung Kim

I began my research as soon as I was asked to look into “How Koreans are depicted in American and Korean American literature.” I searched the Internet under a number of headings including, “Koreans in American literature,” but found little directly related to my topic. Only when I broadened my search as “Koreans in America,” did I get more promising leads to a number of bibliographies. But even these leads produced little of what I was looking for, depictions of Koreans in American literature. Assisted by librarians in San Jose and San Francisco, I found more bibliographies. Finally I turned to a friend in Seoul who specializes in the study of Korean American literature, and he referred me to American Images Of by Craig S. Coleman.

In his survey of approximately 2000 Americans between 1988 and l997 on their image of Korea and Koreans, Coleman found that the respondents‟ initial response to even simple questions about Korea and Koreans was “shocked silence” and “intellectual emptiness.” The top 20 images of Korea and Koreans, according to Coleman, by the respondents following their initial “shocked silence” were: “Hardworking Kimchi/spicy Food/Korean BBQ Strong Economy/Trade Aggressive/Rude/Negative Personality Family Oriented Taekwondo/Martial Arts Korean War DMZ/38th Parallel/Divided Country 1988 Seoul Olympics M*A*S*H Student and Labor Demonstrations/Riots L.A. Riots Koreatown/Korean American Small Business Owners Hyundai/Kia Automobiles North Korean Terrorism/Nuclear Weapons Issue North Korean Famine/Economic Difficulties Short/Dark Oriental People Eat Dog Meat Colorful Traditional Clothing

1 Kichung Kim: Filling In the Blank

Poor/Backward Nation” 1

Most Americans, Coleman concludes, regardless of their level of education or occupation, possess very little factual knowledge of Korea or Koreans, little more than what was “printed on a single page in [their] U.S. or world history textbooks covering the Korean War.”2 What this paucity of knowledge about Korea and Koreans on the part of most Americans suggests is that historically Korea and Koreans had been of little concern to the American public, and that for most Americans Korea had not been part of what they knew of the world, since Korea and its people had been largely outside their conscious knowledge. It is not, therefore, difficult to understand why Koreans had been rarely depicted in American literature before the advent of Korean American writers. It was Korean American writers, starting with Younghill Kang, who began gradually to fill in what had been mostly a blank in American literature with serious, in-depth depictions of Koreans in America.3

For this presentation I have selected the following four works of fiction by Korean American writers: Younghill Kang‟s East Goes West (1937); Ronyoung Kim‟s Clay Walls (1987); Chang-rae Lee‟s Native Speaker (1995); and Don Lee‟s Yellow (2001). I chose these works mainly for two reasons. First, I wanted to discuss those works in which the main characters are Koreans living in America, and second I wanted to discuss those works which together would span most of the 20th century from the early to the last decades, for we might discern through them an evolution in literary depictions of Korean Americans. Additionally, since these works are located in both the East and West coasts of the U.S., we may also be able to detect some regional differences in the experience of Koreans living in America.

As various as Korean American writers are, so too are their depictions of Korean Americans. Because it would be impossible to detail all the various ways Koreans in America are depicted in Korean American literature, I have decided to focus on one or two thematic concerns in these depictions. As I have mentioned, my discussion is limited to Koreans living in America.

In his autobiographical novel, East Goes West (1937), the first significant work of fiction by a Korean American writer, Younghill Kang focuses on the most serious impediment to Koreans‟ entry into American society during the early part of the 20th century, the l920s and 1930s. Every Korean character of this novel, being an “Oriental” in white America, has to confront his and her more or less permanent outsider status in America, consequently experiencing a profound sense of alienation from American society. Put in another way, although he is in America,

2 Kichung Kim: Filling In the Blank he is not of America. To borrow Elaine Kim‟s phrase, his life in America is like that of “a blind man outside the door” looking for “an unlocked doorway into American life.”4

Chungpa Han, the protagonist of the novel, first experiences this outsider status on a college campus in Canada in the form of America‟s racial and cultural hostility toward the “Oriental.” It is his first day at Maritime University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he is a one-year scholarship student. As he stands alone apart from the other students, he senses the “racial, national and religious homogeneity” all around him, which however clearly excludes him. This feeling of being an outsider to all those standing about him is exacerbated when he overhears one of the students, a “narrow faced, tender-skinned boy with dark eyebrows,” call him “this yellow dog we have to live with,” a deliberate insult obviously meant to be overheard. No wonder, Han says, the first impression he has of his fellow students is “an unforgettable impression of smugness and shut-offness” which he felt was “in the back of the minds of all.”5

This first encounter racism, even though focused on the racial and cultural hostility of a single nasty white youngster, it is significant because it represents the visible tip of what lies hidden below the surface, the pervasive racism and hostility of the larger American society toward “Orientals” during this time.

The key to understanding the problem “Orientals” faced in America, as the author sees it, is neatly summed up in an advice Kim, Han‟s friend and mentor in the novel, gives him on how to conduct himself in Boston where Han is working while attending college. In his advice to Han, Kim tells his younger and much less experienced compatriot: “. . . professors in Boston have great sympathy for any adopted Oriental child. As long as you are willing to be docile and obedient.” 6 So long as an Oriental remains a docile and obedient child, in other words, so long as an “Oriental” does not become grown up and encroach upon matters of real and substantive importance to white America, in other words, so long as he does not challenge white men in economic or social life of white America he will be tolerated. This means, as it develops in the novel, so long as he is satisfied with earning his livelihood doing menial work and stay away from respectable white women, he will be tolerated. The careers of the three central characters in the novel, George Jum, To Wan Kim, and Chungpa Han, illustrate the limits of tolerance white America has set for “Orientals.”

As a 2nd generation elderly Korean American woman living in San Francisco recently told me, the first decades of the 20th century were the time in America

3 Kichung Kim: Filling In the Blank when educated Asian men – regardless of their training or education – could get work only as houseboys, valets, waiters, and the like. As Han points out in the novel, in one Chinese restaurant in New York, eight out of nine waiters have either Ph.D.‟s, MA‟s, or BA‟s or BS‟s, and the one without a college degree is an accomplished painter in the Chinese style from Shanghai.7

George Jum, another of Han‟s mentor-friends, has fully accommodated himself to the limits white America set for “Orientals.” Even though he is well educated and fluent in English, he is content to work as a cook just to make enough money to live comfortably and squire around a part-Chinese white woman who is a Harlem night club dancer. He shows he understands well enough the limits of what is tolerated for “Orientals” in white America in his choice of work and of female companionship. By dating a part-Chinese white night club dancer, he knows he is safely within the limits set for an “Oriental,” but even then he doesn‟t escape white censure altogether.

When he comes to Boston with his girlfriend, George visits Han, while Han is a lodger in the home of Mr. Lively who employs him as one of an army of ill-paid sales agents peddling worthless encyclopedias door to door. When Mrs. Lively, who professes to be a pious Christian, chances to see George walking in the park with his white looking dancer girlfriend, she is horrified. She complains to Han about his friend‟s unacceptable behavior:

“„And I can tell you,‟ she [Mrs. Lively] burst out again, „it is not wise for an Oriental boy to go round with an American girl. He should marry his own kind, and she should marry hers.‟”

Mr. Lively, reinforcing her point, tells Han what he thinks of the matter:

“My dear boy, see here, 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 [his daughter] marrying an Oriental. And all decent people are like that. It is not as the Lord intended.” 8

If an “Oriental” consorting with a part-Chinese white night club dancer should cause so much moral consternation, we can easily imagine how much more would have been the disapproval, had the woman been more “respectable.” Such is precisely what befalls To Wan Kim, Han‟s mentor and friend. Though artistically talented, well educated and well traveled in the East as well as the West, Kim has no need of a job, menial or otherwise, since he lives on “Eastern bags of

4 Kichung Kim: Filling In the Blank rice,” money sent to him by his wealthy landowning parents in Korea. But unable to find an entry into the world of American art and intellect because of the limits set for “Orientals” by white America, he seeks another avenue of integrating himself into American life. He and Helen, a wellborn daughter of an old New England family, are in love, but her family is set against the union of their daughter with an “Oriental.”

In no uncertain terms Helen‟s family let Kim know Helen is not for him. The family send Helen off on a “round-the-world cruise,” forcing her to defer her decision about Kim until after a long separation. And her father writes to Kim that if he loves her as her family do, then he should show it by staying away from her, for barriers “have been passed that were never meant to be broken.” The letter further urges Kim “not to write, not to force himself upon her „sisterly affection and Christian charity‟”9 This prohibition eventually leads to Helen‟s death in an institution and contributes to Kim‟s suicide.

The author places the career of Chungpa Han, the novel‟s protagonist, at a mid- point between those of his friends George Jum and To Wan Kim. Not only is Han more serious-minded than George about joining American intellectual life, he also has stronger instinct for self-preservation than his mentor Kim. He tries his utmost through study and work, attending colleges and universities while working in all sorts of menial jobs at night, devoting himself determinedly to scholarly and intellectual pursuits. By the end of the novel, through the help of one of his professors at Columbia he secures an editorial job at Encyclopedia Britannica overseeing entries on Asia, thus achieving an entry of sorts into American intellectual life. He has raised himself from the level of menial work to work more commensurate to his education and training. With something of an entry into American intellectual life, he now tries for what his mentor Kim had tried but failed in: the love of a wellborn white woman that would have formed the necessary complement to his professional start at the Encyclopedia Britannica. Through a mutual acquaintance he is introduced to Trip, an attractive young white woman attending an elite women‟s college in the East. He believes he is in love with her. Trip, on the other hand, doesn‟t take him seriously. When he recites from memory Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Browning, and Ruskin to the applause of her and her house-mates, he is utterly oblivious to what Trip and her friends might actually be thinking of him and of his performance. When he takes Trip to Chinatown for dinner, Trip is stopped by a police detective who suspects she might be the target of an abduction attempt by a Chinese gang. Trip is thrilled by the incident, for she had never been stopped by a police detective before in her life. But after that Han cannot get in touch with her again, and at the end, even though

5 Kichung Kim: Filling In the Blank he does manage to obtain Trip‟s Boston telephone number, he dare not call her, fearing what happened to Kim might also happen to himself.

Near the end of the novel, when Senator Kirby, with whom Han hitches a ride from Maine to New York, tells him to declare he‟s an American rather than a Korean, he points out to him that by law he is barred from becoming an American, which seems to be the perfect emblem for the barriers that stand in the way of Chungpa Han‟s – and all like him -- entry into American intellectual and social life.10

Although Kim Ronyoung‟s Clay Walls (l986) takes place about the same time as East Goes West (1937), from the l920s to 1945, its story differs markedly from that of the earlier novel. While East Goes West takes place in the American East, mostly in New York, Boston, and Nova Scotia, the events of Clay Walls take place mostly in California, within a small, though growing, enclave of Korean immigrants in Los Angeles. More significantly, while in East Goes West the principal characters are three unattached single men, in Clay Walls the main characters are a newly married couple, Haesu and Chun, and their three American- born children. As Chung-Hei Yun says of the novel, “It begins with the saga of the first-generation Korean immigrants and ends with the emergence of the second generation.”11 It is thus the story of Korean immigrants and their children putting down their roots in the American West, and in this sense its story is quite unlike that of East Goes West.

Of course, there are similarities, too. As it is with Chungpa Han in East Goes West, the only work the newly married Haesu and Chun can obtain in Los Angeles is menial work, that of a houseboy for Chun and cleaning woman for Haesu. As a yangban (wellborn) woman Haesu cannot bear the humiliation of cleaning up other people‟s “filth,” and she quits her job on the first day of work, whereas Chun, “just a farmer‟s son,” says, it‟s just a job, “Work for pay.”12 And when they look for a place of their own, they discover most white landlords wouldn‟t rent to them, and a few who are willing would do so only at an inflated price. It‟s the same when they try to buy a house. So they end up renting and buying not in their own name but in the name of Chun‟s business partner, a white man. After their children are born, finding her boys are often taunted by racist epithets (“Chinks”), Haesu attempts to enroll them at a private school (Edwards Military Academy) in a better neighborhood, but once again she runs into a wall of racial discrimination. She is told in no uncertain terms by an official of the “academy” that the academy is for Caucasian boys only, and her sons, though American-born and Christian, are not acceptable. 13

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The effect of racial discrimination on Haesu and Chun is not however quite as devastating as it was for Han, Jum, and Kim in East Goes West. For one thing, unlike Chungpa Han of East Goes West, Haesu and Chun had not left their homeland dreaming of America. Instead, they had been forced out of their homeland against their wishes by the Japanese Occupation. Of course, they, too, are “outsiders” in America as were Han, Jum, and Kim, but they are outsiders within a community – however small -- of outsiders like themselves with whom they share much in common, an intense longing for their lost homeland, their language, foods, memories as well as their and their children‟s pains, hopes, and dreams.

Another mitigating factor, at least initially, is that Haesu and Chun think of themselves as temporary sojourners in America rather than immigrants, determined to return to Korea as soon as they have saved up enough money. Finding her life in America devoid of any meaning, as she performs menial tasks in other people‟s homes, Haesu asks in anguish, “What are we doing here? As soon as we make enough money, we are going back to Korea. We don‟t belong here. Just tell me, what are we doing here?‟ 14

But several years later when she returns to Korea with her children, she realizes Korea is no longer her home, not only because of Japanese occupation but more because of the changes she herself had undergone during the years she lived in America. She finds herself “out of sorts in her homeland, homesick in Korea without being homesick for America.”15 As for her children, the issue is even more clear-cut, as her second son John blurts out upon their arrival in Korea, “I don‟t know this place. . . L.A.‟s my home.”16

And it‟s as a visitor from America in her own homeland that Haesu gains an insight into the real nature of her so-called yangban privileges, what she had so long treasured as her precious birthright, as the real significance of the “clay walls” dawns on her:

“As a young girl, she had been hidden from view, required to cover her face whenever she went outside the walls. As her sexuality increased, the greater was her concealment. The higher the woman‟s rank, the more she was sequestered, and hers was of the upper class. Her country had fought for its own seclusion, struggling against the penetration of eastern invaders and western ideology. A futile struggle, she thought. Korean walls were made of clay, crumbling under repeated blows, leaving nothing as it was before.”17

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Not until after her return to America and after her husband Chun‟s business failure and death, does Haesu break out of her “clay walls,” figuring out the answer to her earlier question, “What are we doing here [in America]?” The answer is, of course, to raise her three children and help them grow up American, even if she has to accomplish the task single-handedly by doing piece-work embroidering year after year, fixedly stationed at the kitchen table. For it is as a widowed mother raising her three children single-handedly that she comes fully into her own as both the family‟s bread winner and a proud head-strong loving mother.

American-born children of Korean immigrants, although they think of themselves as Americans rather than Koreans, yet they remain outsiders though to a lesser degree than their parents had been. Faye, the teenage daughter of Haesu and Chun, remembers the many ways in which she “wasn‟t like other American girls”:

“No one at school spoke to me or behaved towards me as if I were like any American girl. Most of them were nice enough. I even considered Ruth Johnson one of my best friends until she told me, „You know, Faye, I don‟t think of you as being Korean anymore,‟ as if there was something wrong with being Korean. We never double dated. She went to school dances but I was never asked. If it wasn‟t for Miss Song [the Korean American social worker who organized a social club for Korean American girls], I wouldn‟t be anyone‟s girl.”18

Harold, Faye‟s older brother, too, is made to feel he wasn‟t quite like other Americans. With the start of World War II Harold quits his job and applies to the officer training program, hoping to help in the war effort. But even though he scores in the top 10% of the examination given to the applicants, he is turned down for the sole reason of being an Oriental.19 Harold is of course disappointed, but it‟s his mother who feels more deeply the sting of this reminder of anti-Oriental discrimination. She becomes literally ill and bedridden for a few days, traumatized by her loss of faith in America. The depth of her feeling of loss is summed up in her words of quiet resignation. She says to Faye, “The Americans are better people than our enemy,” but she adds, “No country is perfect.” She sounds as if she has just awakened from a dream.20

As second-generation Korean Americans grow into their maturity, they show how much they differed from their parents, especially in their feelings and attitudes. Born and raised in America, they are more American than Korean, and this aspect of their life surfaces in their attitudes and relationships, especially in their relation to Japanese Americans and what they suffer at the outbreak of WWII.

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In school Faye had become friends with Jane Nagano, a Japanese American, and even though her mother does not allow her to invite Jane to the house, she is allowed to go to Jane‟s house for tea, though not dinner. After the outbreak of the war, when the West Coast Japanese Americans are rounded up and sent off to internment camps, most of the first-generation Korean Americans feel no pity for the Japanese Americans. What they feel is a sense of relief for not being bundled up along with the Japanese to be interned. But it is different with Faye. As she walks onto the street where Jane and her family had lived, she feels the desolation of the neighborhood:

“An eerie bleakness had fallen over the street, empty of shoppers and people chatting, no one bowing to anyone. Shops were boarded up and the shades of homes drawn. Starred satin flags hung in some windows, silently signifying there was an American soldier in the Japanese family. “Had they cleared out already, I wondered. Hardly any time had passed since the date was announced. . . . The cement curb bordered a cemetery of homes.”21

Faye sees a truck loaded with people and their possessions starting to move away slowly, and then hears a voice calling out her name:

“‟Faye!‟ a voice from the crowd of passengers shouted. „Here!‟ A hand fluttered in the air. I searched for a face and found it. It was Jane. She was smiling. „I‟ll see you after the war,‟ she yelled. “A book slipped out of my arms as I tried to wave back. I stooped to pick it up. As I looked for Jane again, the truck disappeared around the corner. “I felt sick.”

Telling her mother what she had just seen, Faye says: “‟It was terrible Momma.‟ “She [Haesu] sighed. „Yes, but they‟ve done worse than that to us,‟ she said solemnly.‟ “‟Not Jane. Not Mr. Watashi.‟ “‟No, but innocent Korean victims, too.‟ She thought a moment then added, „Maybe it isn‟t as bad as you think. They‟ll be together and safe.‟ “‟Baloney.‟ “She picked up her sewing. „Well, there‟s nothing we can do about it. Just be thankful we didn‟t have to go with them.‟ “I had no reply to that. „Do you know what I think?‟ I said finally. “‟Some things are just plain bad with nothing good about them at all.‟”22

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Although I shouldn‟t have been surprised, yet it pains me to be reminded in 2007 that during the first half of the 20th century, these Korean American youngsters in L.A. had been utterly segregated socially from their white counterparts. There is no mention at all of an exchange of any kind between Asian and white youths, because there apparently had been none. Though born in America, they too had been outsiders in America. Hence the significance of the social clubs, the Mugunghwa and Cavalier clubs, organized by Miss Song, the social worker. In this respect Faye and her friends in LA had been more fortunate than Daniel Lee of Connecticut and others like him who had “never been to an event where so many people looked like [them].” 23

Monumental changes taking place throughout America and Asia from the l950s through the l980s profoundly affected not only how Americans viewed Asians in Asia but also how they perceived Asians in America, which in turn affected how Asians looked at themselves. The works of a new generation of Korean American writers emerging in the l990‟s reflect these changes. By the 1990‟s, with the rise in the socio-economic status of , racial and cultural hostility toward them had declined measurably. Henry Park, the narrator-protagonist of Chang-Rae Lee‟s first novel Native Speaker (1995), is a graduate of an East Coast university, while his father owns a string of successful grocery stores in New York and lives in a large home in an affluent suburban neighborhood in Westchester County. By this time, too, marriage of a Korean American with a white American woman, though uncommon, had become much less shocking or socially unacceptable. Such appears to be the situation with Henry Park and his wife Lelia.

Still, as Faye pointed it out in Clay Walls, no one at school treated her “as if [she] were like any American girl,”24 and like Faye, Henry Park feels he is not quite like any American young man, particularly face to face with a young white woman. His sense of being an Asian which sets him apart from other Americans seems never to be absent from his consciousness. We notice it first at Henry and Lelia‟s initial encounter at a party hosted by a college friend of his in Texas. They are drawn to each other immediately, but after their first exchange of kisses Henry has to ask Lelia, “. . . if she had ever kissed an Asian before.” She laughs in response, and tells him no, and then adds, “You taste strange, but only because I don‟t know you.” 25

This contrast between Henry and Lelia, Henry‟s self-consciousness contrasted to Lelia‟s self-assuredness, colors their relationship throughout the novel like an ever-

10 Kichung Kim: Filling In the Blank present undercurrent. Although theirs is a marriage of love and affection, it is not quite an equal partnership, because to Henry as well as his father Lelia is special because she is an attractive white woman from an upper-class New England family. Henry‟s father likes the fact that she is white, and marvels “at how tall and straight she was, like a fine young horse,” whom he proudly introduces to his employees when she is brought to one of his stores.26 On the other hand, Henry imagines his mother, were she alive, would have advised against his marrying her, “the lengthy Anglican goddess, who‟d measure [him] ceaselessly while [he] slept, continually appraise [their] vast differences, count up the ways.” 27 Thus while Henry‟s father considers Lelia a prize catch for his son, his mother would have seen her as an ever-critical task-master requiring Henry to always prove himself.28

After ten years of marriage and after the loss of their only son Mitt in a tragic accident, Lelia decides to travel to Italy, alone, leaving Henry for the time being. As she gets ready to board her flight, she hands him a sheet of paper on which she has scribbled down her appraisal of his character:

“You are surreptitious B+ student of life first thing hummer of Wagner and Straus illegal alien emotional alien genre bug Yellow peril: neo-American great in bed overrated poppa‟s boy sentimentalist anti-romantic ___ analyst (you fill in) stranger follower traitor spy” 29

A mostly negative assessment, unflattering especially in the last four items directed at Henry‟s professional life. Employed as an analyst at an intelligence gathering firm, Henry has in fact been acting out the roles of “stranger,” “follower,” “traitor,” and “spy.” His job is to approach under false pretense a targeted person --

11 Kichung Kim: Filling In the Blank invariably an Asian immigrant -- undermining covertly the position, status, and even the life of the person.

As an immigrant from Korea, Henry‟s father had been limited in his choice of work. Even though he had been an engineer in Korea, trained at a top university, he had to give up his professional status and open a grocery store in order to make a living for his family. Henry says his father knew “the sky was never the limit.”30 Such a compromise is understandable for Henry‟s father. But Henry‟s situation differs from his father‟s. He is a graduate of a reputable American university; he is bright and young; he has a father who has become well-to-do; and he is a “native speaker.” His prospect is wide open, especially since racial discrimination in employment against Asians had become all but inconsequential. Why then does he take the job of an undercover intelligence collector, that is, a spy with a private intelligence gathering firm? As Jack, a colleague at the firm, says to him, “Why you find yourself here in this silly room with a man like me, rather than at home in bed with your beautiful wife. Why you are one of us [?]. I look at you and see someone who could have done whatever he wished in life. Any career.” 31

When Henry first spoke with Dennis Hoagland, his prospective employer, at the career services office of his alma mater, he thought the job “would be a brief affair,”32 but he had stayed on. Why? Is it because he was brought up well and has “a keen sense of accommodation,” as Jack says? 33 Is it because, he is, as he says of himself, “An assimilist, a lackey. A duteous foreign-faced boy. . . . every version of the newcomer who is always fearing and bitter and sad.”? 34

To possess and be possessed by “a keen sense of accommodation,” what is it but another way of saying what To Wan Kim tells Chungpa Han in East Goes West, that “. . . professors in Boston have great sympathy for any adopted Oriental child. As long as you [sic] are willing to be docile and obedient”? 35 In East Goes West, the main character‟s willingness to be docile and obedient was involuntary and enforced on him, since it was the price of his precarious toe-hold in American society. But in Henry‟s case none had forced on him “a keen sense of accommodation,” none had forced him to be “An assimilist, a lackey. A duteous foreign-faced boy. . . .” But perhaps self-compulsion is as powerful as compulsion imposed from outside. And, of course, neither Henry nor any one else, neither in America nor anywhere else, “could do whatever he wished in life,” as Jack said of him. To believe that would be to believe in the fantasy version of the “American Dream.”

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Henry thinks his father would have seen his son‟s career of “deceptions in a rigidly practical light, as if they were similar to that daily survival he [the father] came to endure, the need to adapt, assume an advantageous shape.” 36

Toward the end of the novel, having turned in to his employer the list of the illegals who had contributed to John Kwang‟s ggeh (money club), knowing full well what would be the consequences, Henry reflects on what has happened to his father, John Kwang and himself:

“My ugly immigrant truth, as was his [his father‟s] is that I have exploited my own, and those others who can be exploited. This forever is my burden to bear. But I and my kind possess another dimension. We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous. You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears. This is your own history. . . Here is all of my American education.”37

This, I think, is the sense of the book‟s title, “Native Speaker.” The author, I think, construes the immigrant‟s need and self-willed longing to make himself a “native speaker” to be at once a necessity and a trap. In other words, behind the seductive allure of achieving full assimilation, of fitting in perfectly, of becoming a “Native Speaker,” there also lurks the peril of self-diminution, and of self-betrayal.

Not until the end when he is confronted with the sorry spectacle of John Kwang‟s fall -- the Korean-born New York City councilman and one time aspirant to the mayor‟s office -- does Henry realize John Kwang is his own immigrant half- brother. The epiphany comes as he tries to shield him from the blows and shouted abuses of angry residents of the city district John Kwang had once represented: “People are grabbing his shoulders, his hair. His bandage is torn from his head. Everyone is shouting. A hundred mouths shouting for him. “And when I reach him I strike at them. I strike at everything that shouts and calls. Everything but his face. But with every blow I land I feel another equal to it ring my own ears, my neck, the back of my head. I half welcome them. And at the very moment I fall back for good he glimpses who I am, and I see him crouch down, like a broken child, shielding from me his wide immigrant face.”38

Let me add that Native Speaker is the first Korean American novel I have read which provides us with a dramatic depiction of the rise and fall of a Korean American politician against the background of an emerging metropolitan “Koreatown.” There will surely be many more such depictions of Koreatowns and the multivarious lives of their inhabitants, since Koreatowns like those of Los

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Angeles and New York are already springing up in other large urban centers throughout the U.S.

Even as America‟s resistance to Korean immigrants‟ entry into American life becomes less pronounced and Korean immigrants‟ sphere of opportunities expands, still the problems and difficulties of Korean immigrants and their children seem to remain little changed. While they have become less racial, ethnic, and institutional, they seem to have become more personal and familial.

The title story “Yellow” in Don Lee‟s book of short stories by the same name focuses on the physical and psychological evolution of Danny Kim whose parents had emigrated from South Korea to California in l953. Born in a small town near San Francisco a year after his parents‟ arrival in America, Danny grows up a “skinny, gangly” boy, “his face spotted with acne,” feeling “unremarkable and unloved in every way,” and “always one of the shortest and skinniest in his class, a little kid who needed a bottom-row locker.”39

In addition to this sense of physical shortcomings, he had also shared in the humiliation and pain of his parents‟ fall in social status as new immigrants to America. In Korea his father had been an assistant professor of philosophy at SNU, the country‟s premier university, while his mother had been a “petite, elegant woman. . . privileged, wealthy, a radio announcer of brief renown.” But in America his father worked as a payroll clerk at the city hall and his mother as a part-time florist.40

Although the family did not often experience blatant racism because the population of the Bay Area is an ethnically mixed one, still the family hadn‟t escaped it altogether. Once at a convenience store in the Sierras, they had been humiliated by a big, florid drunk white man who mistaking them for Japanese had said to them, “I forgive you. . . Pearl Harbor. I forgive you Pearl Harbor.” Then adding to the insult, he “had kissed Danny‟s father on the mouth.” 41

What had appalled and humiliated Danny more than anything was his father‟s meekly “suffer[ing] this indignity” and for days afterwards, he “could not talk to his father, much less look him in the face.”42 It was to insulate himself from all such hurt and humiliation that Danny undertakes to remake himself both physically and psychologically. Three nights a week for two years he goes through a boxing program at the local Y, and at its completion he finds he has reshaped himself: he had “gained pounds. . . developed sinewy arms, biceps, the muscles on his back, legs, stomach, everywhere, hard and individually defined.” 43 He felt not only more

14 Kichung Kim: Filling In the Blank self-assured, he was now handsome, and women -- white women -- loved “the way he felt, the sleekness of his body, muscled and long, the face which was at once angular and smooth.” Besides, several of them had told him he looked beautiful unclothed, and he was immensely pleased, “pleased with the years cultivating each nuance of his personality, with the hours shaping his physique, with how distant he was from the image of himself as a teenager. . . skinny, gangly, his face spotted with acne. . . .” 44

He carries this air of invulnerability to college, and at U.C.L.A. he acquires a reputation for being a smart, cocky kid, even a little smug. He double-majors in engineering and English, intending to separate himself from the stereotype of Asian students who were thought to be “geeks and goofballs,” hopelessly “insular, provincial, and . . . square.” 45

Then he meets and falls in love with Jenny Fallows, a white co-ed, an exquisitely beautiful drama major from an affluent suburb of Minneapolis. When it appeared Jenny was pregnant – turns out she wasn‟t -- Danny proposes to her, but she puts him off telling him, “We have to finish school first and decide what we want to do with our lives.” 46

At Thanksgiving when he flies to Minneapolis to meet Jenny‟s family, it all falls apart. He discovers that even though Jenny‟s family like him and find him charming, “they didn‟t seem to attend to him earnestly, as if he were only Jenny‟s latest distraction. . . not as though he were a prospective husband for her,” and he could not help but conclude “this had to reflect Jenny‟s own attitude about him” as well. He realizes something is fundamentally amiss in their relationship, since not only had he never cared for Jenny to meet his family, neither had Jenny suggested it even once. 47

It is through this unraveling of his relationship with Jenny that Danny comes to see “how deluded he had been. He had believed – abstractly, quixotically – that he could be white. Colorless. He realized he was doomed. No matter what he did, no matter how much he tried to deny it, he would never get past his ethnicity. It was untenable, and the knowledge broke him.”48 After the breakup with Jenny, Danny crashes his car against the wall of the underground parking garage, his injuries requiring a facial reconstructive surgery. It is as though he needed to remake his face just as he needed to reorient himself psychologically.

A few years later at Harvard Business School, having grown out of his illusory sense of invulnerability and self-assuredness, he gains a better sense of who he is.

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He‟s an Asian, different and separated from his white classmates, most of whom had come through elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges. Now he keeps to himself and do not “socialize with his sectionmates.” Romantically, too, he becomes passive. To women who pursue him, he appears as cold and loveless, prompting one of them to tell him he is incapable of love.49 Eight months later he marries “a Korean American,” Rachel Chung, the daughter of his mother‟s classmate from Seoul, not for love but for companionship.

When Danny had broken up with Jenny, we are told: “Danny had promised himself that he‟d never risk being so vulnerable again. He had surrendered to the fact that being with an Asian woman was easier, safer. Maybe he hadn‟t been in love with Rachel in the beginning, but marriage was not built on infatuation, and he would come to be fond of her, he had believed. But along the way, he had sacrificed more than he‟d known. He had forfeited that part of himself which permitted the possibility of love.” 50

If he were not to forfeit “that part of himself which permitted the possibility of love,” he would have had to leave himself vulnerable to the pain and humiliation of racial discrimination and hostility from Jenny‟s family. So he settles for an easier, safer relationship, a necessary compromise, less than his heart‟s desire. And Danny and Rachel settle down to raising a family in the Boston area, even though they experience white racism toward Asians all about them. After several years Danny makes partner in his management consulting firm beating out a rival, a white American male.

It‟s been a long journey from l937 to 2001, from East Goest West to Yellow. In these works of Korean American fiction, do we discern an evolution in the perception of self and others, from being Korean to being Korean American? What changes do we see between Kim, Jum, and Han of East Goes West and Henry and Danny of Native Speaker and Yellow? Is there a gradual progression from a sense of uncertainty and insecurity about their place in America, from being “outsiders” in America, from feeling insecure and unwelcome to having a firmer sense of who and what they are in America, and to even a sort of cocky self- confidence in themselves, as we see most emphatically in Don Lee‟s “Yellow”? Conquently, do the Korean American characters no longer so urgently feel the need to become “native speakers,” whether the need is self-generated or imposed from outside?

Although it is foolhardy to generalize, it seems racism appears to remain at least in one area, in marriage between white woman and Asian man as it is highlighted in

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Don Lee‟s story “Yellow.” And even when marital union is achieved, the traditional husband-wife relationship appears altered a bit, as we see it in Lelia- Henry relationship. Whether or not these remnants of discrimination will eventually vanish as with other aspects of discrimination and in what manner, it is difficult to even speculate, and it is certainly beyond the scope of this presentation.

I cannot conclude this presentation without mentioning a few of those works I have not gotten around to discussing. Here I can do no more than give an annotated list of them:

Leonard Chang, The Fruit ‘N Food (1996): a novel which gives vivid ground-level observations and depictions of the gritty lives of inner city Korean American shop- keepers, an indispensable fictional counterpart to such studies as Abelmann and Lie‟s Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riot (1995) and Jennifer Lee‟s Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America (2002);

Bishoff and Jo, Seeds From A Silent Tree: An Anthology by Korean Adoptees (1997): this collection provides an extensive sampling of the unforgettable autobiographical writings of Korean adoptees;

Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America(2002): a study based on extensive personal interviews, it documents the seldom publicized lives of the Korean military brides in America; and

Gary Pak, The Watcher of Waipuna(1992) and A Ricepaper Airplane (1991998), and Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman(1997): these two Hawaii-based writers present the singular experiences of Korean Americans in Hawaii through their short stories and novels.

* I wish to express my appreciation to Prof. Yoo Sun Mo of Seoul and Ms. Park Jee-Young of San Francisco for their unsparing help given to me in preparing this essay.

Kichung Kim San Jose, California

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Notes:

1 Craig S. Coleman, American Images Of Korea (Hollym International Corp. Elizabeth, NJ, U.S.A., 1990), 222-4. 2 Coleman, American Images Of Korea, 3. 3 There were of course depictions and stories about Korea and Koreans in books by early Amercian Christian missionaries and occasional visitors to Korea: the Underwoods, Horace Allen, and others. See Coleman, American Images Of Korea, 47-71. 4 Elaine Kim, “Searching for a Door to America; Younghill Kang,” Asian American Review, vol. 30 (1976), 113, 107. 5 Younghill Kang, East Goes West: The Making Of An Oriental Yankee (First edition published by Charles Scribner‟s Sons in l937. The edition used here is by Kaya Production, Inc., New York.), 96-7. 6 East Goes West, 255. Italics added. 7 East Goes West, 81. 8 East Goes West, 150. 9 East Goes West, 265. 10 Younghill Kang the author had himself suffered from this legal prohibition, for despite publishing a best-selling novel and receiving a Guggenheim fellowship, he was never able to become a U.S. citizen. 11 Chung-Hei Yun, “Beyond „Clay Walls‟: Korean American Literature,” Reading The Literatures Of Asian America (Edited by Chirley Geok-lin Lim & Amy Ling, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1992), 86. 12 Kim Ronyoung, Clay Walls (The Permanent Press, RD2 Noyac Road, Sag Harbor, NY, 1987), 9-10. 13 Clay Walls, 51. 14 Clay Walls, 10. 15 Clay Walls, 125. 16 Clay Walls, 98. 17 Clay Walls, 104-105: emphasis added. 18 Clay Walls, 231. 19 Clay Walls, 270. 20 Clay Walls, 271. 21 Clay Walls, 265. 22 Clay Walls, 266-7. 23 Clay Walls, 296.

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24 Clay Clay Walls, 265.Walls, 231. 25 Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker (Riverhead Books, New York, 1995), 11. 26 Native Speaker, 53. 27 Native Speaker, 53. 28 This anomalous husband-wife relationship reflects the charged socio-historical context of interracial relationships in America. For men of color, white women had been both prized and forbidden, as it is suggested in Henry‟s parents‟s constrasting appraisals of Lelia. To this should be added the successes of the women‟s rights movement of the last decades of the 20th century on the relationship of a couple like Lelia and Henry. 29 Native Speaker, 5. 30 Native Speaker, 309. 31 Native Speaker, 153. 32 Native Speaker, 153. 33 Native Speaker, 152. 34 Native Speaker, 149. 35 East Goes West, 255. 36 Native Speaker, 297. 37 Native Speaker, 297. 38 Native Speaker, 318. 39Yellow (W.W. Norton & Co., N.Y., 2001), 199 & 202. 40 Yellow, 199. 41 Yellow, 201. 42 Yellow, 202. 43 Yellow, 209. 44 Yellow, l97-9. 45 Yellow, 221. 46 Yellow, 226. 47 Yellow, 230. 48 Yellow, 233-4. 49 Yellow, 233-4. 50 Yellow, 243.

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Works Consulted:

Abelmann, Nancy & Lie, John, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots ( Press, Cambridge, Mass. & London, England, 1995)

Bishoff, Tonya and Rankin, Jo, Eds., Seeds From A Silent Tree: An Anthology by Korean Adoptees (Panda Press, 1997)

Chang, Leonard, The Fruit ‘N Food (Black Heron Press, P.O. Box 95676, Seattle, Washington 98145, 1996)

Choi, Susan, The Foreign Student (New York: Harper Collins, 1998)

Coleman, Craig S., American Images Of Korea (Hollym International Corp. Elizabeth, NJ, U.S.A., 1990)

Fenkl, Heinz Insu, Memories of My Ghost Brother (New York: Dutton, 1996)

Jo, Moon H. Korean Immigrants And The Challenge Of Adjustment, Contributions in Sociology, No. 127 (Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut & London, 1999)

Kang, Younghill, East Goes West: The Making Of An Oriental Yankee (First edition published by Charles Scribner‟s Sons, l937. The edition used here by Kaya Production, Inc., New York.)

Keller, Nora Okja, Comfort Woman (New York: Viking, 1997)

Kim, Elaine, “Searching for a Door to American; Younghill Kang,” Asian American Review, 30 (1976), 102-116

Kim, Ronyoung, Clay Walls (The Permanent Press, Sag Harbor, N.Y., 1987)

Kim, Suji Kwock. Notes From The Divided Country: (Poems) (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2003)

Korean Women: A Struggle For Humanization, Edited by Harold Hakwon Sunoo & Dong Soo Kim (The Korean Christian Scholars, Publication No. 3 (Spring l978), Memphis, Tenn., 1978

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Ko˘ri: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Fiction, Edited by Heinze Insu Fenkl and Walter K. Lew (Beacon Press, Boston, 2001)

Lee, Chang-Rae, Native Speaker ( Riverhead Books, New York, 1995)

Lee, Don, Yellow (W.W. Norton & Co., N.Y., 2001)

Lee, Jennifer, Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)

Lee, Mary P., Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean American Woman in America, Ed. & intro. By Sucheng Chan (University of Washington Press, Seattle & London, co. 1990)

Pak, Gary, The Watcher Of Waipuna And Other Stories (Bamboo Ridge Press, 1992) , A Ricepaper Airplane (University of Hawaii Press, 1998) Patterson, Wayne, The Ilse: First-Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawaii, 1903- 1973, (University of Hawai Press, 2000)

Yuh, Ji-Yeon, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America ( Press, New York and London, co. 2002)

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