UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
Date:______
I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:
It is entitled:
This work and its defense approved by:
Chair: ______
Korean-American Literature as Autobiographical Metafiction: Focusing on the Protagonist’s “Writer” Identity in East Goes West, Dictee, and Native Speaker.
A dissertation submitted to the Division of Graduate Education and Research of the University of Cincinnati
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
In the Department of English of the College of Arts and Sciences
2008
By Ha Young Choi
B.A. (KonKuk University, Seoul) 1997 M.A.(KonKuk University, Seoul) 1999
Abstract
This dissertation employs “metafiction” as a perspective to reread Asian-
American texts across the realist-postmodern divide, exploring subversive junctions the
texts in question betray. This dissertation rereads three Korean-American literary texts
with autobiographical or autofictional elements as a complementary move to critical
debates between Lisa Lowe and Jinqi Ling on realism and postmodernism in Asian-
American literature. Considering the works are autobiographical or autofictional, I read
each of the works as a metafiction in which a writer (author) writes about a writer
(protagonist) writing a work (text) a reader reads now. In this never-ending self-reflexive
structure, I observe some points where an authorial self encounters /conflicts with
fictional self, and explore how their encounter /conflict creates a rupture on the ideologically defined smooth surface of Asian-American “writer” identity, which has
been often overshadowed by their Asian American identity.
In Chapter 1, my analysis revolves around how Younghill Kang, the author,
(de)constructs Chungpa Han, the protagonist of East Goes West, as an Eastern scholar in
the West. The protagonist/author was wasted, I argue, as a tool for the imperial U.S. and
finally trapped into otherizing network of discrimination. I intend to reveal awkward but
brave moments when the author gazes at the deconstruction of the narratorial self in this
autobiographical novel. In Chapter 2, my argument is that Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
successfully constructs herself as a female Korean-American writer through Dictee. Cha
makes, I analyze, an “inventory of traces” to borrow Antonio Gramsci’s concept in order
to understand her paradoxical existence. The narrator is reborn as a diseuse in a circular,
womblike, space which she generates by curving linearly progressing history. In Chapter
iii 3, the main argument is that Henry, the protagonist of Native Speaker, is transformed from a technical writer, who is faithful to a marginal role a dominant society posits, to an
“ethical writer” who feels responsible and tries to take responsibility for what he writes.
In this autofiction, I explore how Lee, the authorial self, daringly exposes himself through
Henry, and takes advantage of metafictional apparatuses to involve readers in the transformative process.
iv
Acknowledgments
I express my deep gratitude to my committee members, Jana Braziel, Jay
Twomey, and Sharon Dean, whose insightful suggestions and astute criticisms made this dissertation possible. I especially would like to thank to Jana Braziel who has shown unwavering support through ups and downs of my study. I give my inexpressible thanks to my husband, who had to endure my absence for five years, and my baby son who came to consider his grandmother as mother. I thank to my mother, and especially my beloved father whose deathbed I could not attend.
v Table of Contents
Acknowledgments v
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Did East Go West? : Younghill Kang’s East Goes West 28
Chapter 2 Writer as a Diseuse: Inventory of traces, Counter-History, and 56
Ambivalence in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
Chapter 3 “The Arcana of Human Interpretation”: From a Spy to an 92
Ethical Writer in Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee
Conclusion 121
Bibliography 129
vi INTRODUCTION
In my dissertation, I reread three Korean-American literary texts with
autobiographical or autofictional elements: Younghill Kang’s East Goes West (1937),
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982), and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1996). In
my reading, first of all, I intend to focus on the protagonists’ writer identity, which has
been often overshadowed by their Asian-American—not even specifically Korean-
American—identity: how he or she becomes or fails to be a writer; what kind of writing
he or she desires to write; with what problems he or she struggles as a writer; and what
purpose his or her writing serves. Alongside the consideration that the works are autobiographical or autofictional, which assumes that the author is writing about himself or herself, I attempt to read each of the works as a metafiction in which a writer (author) writes about a writer (protagonist) writing a work(text) a reader reads now. In this never- ending self-reflexive structure, I will highlight some points where an authorial self
encounters /conflicts with a fictional self, and explore how their encounter /conflict
creates a suture on the smooth surface of ideologically defined Asian-American life
writing, Asian-American identity, and Asian-American writer identity.
I limited my selection to Korean-American literary texts when there are great
autobiographical or autofictional works with metafictional elements from a different
Asian-American ethnic heritage, such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior,
Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Michael Ondattje’s Running in the Family. Among the Asian-
American texts which can be included in this category, I find Korean-American novels
have been even less read from a perspective which problematizes the relationship
1 between fiction (fictional self) and reality (authorial self), with the exception of Dictee which is most obviously postmodern and metafictional in terms of form; therefore, I assume that I can contribute to the discussion by adding how these three Korean-
American literary texts —to which I could relate most instantly because of a shared cultural and historical background with the writers— invent or fail to invent a creative, subversive, and ever-opening relationship between fiction and reality.
A Brief Survey of Korean-American Literature
Immigration of Koreans to the U.S. began in the early 1900s, mainly as laborers for sugar plantations in Hawaii. In terms of beginning period and scale, Korean immigrants were behind their East Asian counterparts, Chinese and Japanese immigrants.
Compared to the Chinese and Japanese immigrant population, students and scholars were larger constituents of the Korean immigration group until 1968 when the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act) allowed more immigrant entry to the U.S.; peculiar political and economical insecurities—representatively, colonization by Japan and the Korean War—in Korea provoked or compelled the Korean intelligentsia to leave the homeland (Kyhan Lee 63; Jung Ha Kim 4). From the 1930s on, this group of intellectuals, which consists of students and political refugees, has produced literary works, telling their own American experiences, as well as speaking for their compatriots’
American experiences, those who had not the proficiency in the English language and leisure needed for literary production. Younghill Kang, Yong Ik Kim, Il-han New, No-
Young Park, and Richard Kim are representative writers of the beginning period of
2 Korean-American literature.1 The male writers, most of who are from Korea’s elite class,
Yangban, created mainly autobiographical materials. Later, children and grandchildren of
the first-generation immigrants from the labor class, intellectual groups, and post-1968
immigrant group began to create literary works after 1980, reaching the “Renaissance of
Korean- American literature” in the 1990s (Yu 3).
Younghill Kang (1903-72) is a representative Korean immigrant writer of the
1930s and is considered a pioneer of Asian-American literature. Kang’s literary career
summarily displays the main issues with which Korean-American writers have wrestled.
His first novel Grass Roof (1931) is a nostalgic review of his childhood in Korea. One
preoccupation of ethnic American literatures has been an ethnographic representation of
their old country to U.S. readers (E. Kim 1997, 159; Kyhan Lee 64). Korean-American writers felt a tremendous responsibility as “cultural ambassadors” to introduce their
homeland correctly, which is obscurely located in the far, far Orient (or East Asia) and
was colonized by the fellow Asian country Japan from 1910 to 1945 (Kyhan Lee 64). To the majority of Americans, Korea was conceived as a country of poverty and war, as the
television show M*A*S*H suggested to American viewers, until the 1980s. Even after
Korea achieved some economic development during and since the 1970s, the distorted
image lasted, or was replaced by another negative image as an “economic animal”2 or
1 For the discussion of the writers and their works, see Elaine H. Kim “Korean-American Literature” An Interethnic Companion to Asian-American Literature. Ed. King-Kok Cheung. pp.156-91.; Kyhan Lee, “Younghill Kang and the Genesis of Korean-American Literature” Korea Journal. Winter 1991 pp63-78; Esther Mikyung Ghymn The Shapes and Styles of Asian-American Prose Fiction.
2 Originally the phrase “economic animal” came into use in the 1970s, derogatorily referring to the Japanese whose country accomplished compact economic development from the ruins of the World War II. The phrase reflects Westerners’ complicated feeling about the fast economic development in Asia; combined with established racial prejudice, it reveals a Western consciousness that Japanese/Asians would remain short of the Western standard of a human in spite/ because of their impressive economic development. For more discussion of this phrase, see Shichihei, Yamamoto. The Spirit of Japanese
3 “Oriental Jews”3 as the films Do the Right Thing (1989) and Falling Down (1993) reveal.
Due to the scarcity of resources, American readers found Korean-American novels to be a
good source of information about Korea (Yim 8), and Korean-American writers have
tried to correct the distorted image through their works. While the role of Korean-
American novels as ethnographic guides is meaningful and welcomed by American
readers, it is dangerous if they are confined only to such use, gratifying the readers’
curiosity for the unknown and exotic, without exploring shared human issues with which
non-Korean-American readers are involved. In fact, every ethnic American writer is
destined to walk an intellectual tightrope, exposing himself or herself to the danger of
becoming the victim of topical exoticism. While it can be said that all Korean-American literature serves this purpose to some extent, whether intended or not, the following are representative examples of works introducing Korean culture and history to U.S. readers:
Il-han New’s When I was a boy in Korea(1928), which describes the author’s childhood memory regarding traditional Korean holidays, food, entertainments, and housing; Yong-
Ik Kim’s “The Wedding Shoes,” which is about a star-crossed love between different
classes, a butcher’s son and a shoemaker’s daughter; Richard E. Kim’s The Martyred
(1964), which is a story about martyrs and traitors set in the Korean War period; Mira
Stout’s One Thousand Chestnut Tress (1996), which is a story about a second-generation
Capitalism and Selected Essays. Trans. Lynne E. Riggs and Takeuchi Manabu. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1992.
3 I borrowed this phrase from Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, in which a rich lady whispers to her friend in a grocery store owned by a Korean-American immigrant (53). Overlapping with the firmly established racial stereotype of the Jew, the slur creates another racial stereotype of Korean immigrants as successors to the “racially stereotyped” Jew. Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing impressively shows the circulation of racial slurs among Korean-Americans, Latin-Americans, African-Americans, Italian- Americans, Anglo-Americans, and Jewish-Americans, stimulating viewers to consider how we are used to those “floating signifiers,” to borrow Stuart Hall’s explanation, without deeper understanding based on historical and social analysis. See Stuart Hall: Race, the Floating Signifier. DVD. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 2002.
4 Korean-American visiting Korea and tracing back to family history overlapped with
Korean history; Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student (1998), which is about an interracial
love between a Korean student and an emotionally damaged American girl set in the
1950s’ American South ; Linda Sue Park’s Seesaw Girl (1999), which is about a 17th century Korean girl; The Kite Fighters( 2000), which deals with two Korean brothers’ competition for Kite Fighting; A Single Shard (2001), which deals with a boy who has a passion for pottery making in 12th century Korea; and When my name was Keoko: A
Novel of Korea in World War II (2002), which deals life under Japanese colonial rule in
1940s’ Korea; Sook Nyul Choi’s Year of Impossible Goodbyes (1991), which deals with a
girl’s experience of World War II under the Japanese colonial rule; and Echoes of the
White Giraffe (1993), which follows the girl’s life during the Korean War as a sequel to
Year of Impossible Goodbyes.
Another great interest of Korean-American writers is, as Kang’s second novel
East Goes West (1937) shows, the portrait of immigrant life in the U.S. East Goes West
follows the footsteps of a FOB (“fresh off the boat”) immigrant from Korea, Chung Pa
Han, describing his fascination and disillusionment with America. Most Korean-
American literature, more or less, deals with the identity construction/conflict during the
point of immigrant arrival. Whatever the reasons for their movement were, Korean
immigrants came to the U.S. dreaming of a better life, and they struggled to survive and
prosper in their newly adopted country. They longed to be American and settle down in
this country psychologically, politically, economically, legally, and culturally; however,
as the hyphen existing between Korean and American implies, they ineluctably find an
inalienable distance between mainstream America and themselves. In “Hyphen-Nations,”
5 Jennifer Devere Brody points out the “ever-emergent space” between “supposedly
oppositional binary structures” that the punctuation mark, the hyphen, denotes and
negotiates (149). The hyphenated space is both recognized from within and from without.
Hyphenated immigrants have confronted discrimination from all the possible areas of the
mainstream society: economy, law, education, culture, and religion, and, because of these objectively existing barriers, they have felt alienated, withdrawn, and estranged.
East Goes West (Younghill Kang 1937), Clay Walls (Ronyoung Kim 1986), Native
Speaker (Chang-rae Lee 1995), Dictee (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 1982), The Fruit’N
Food (Leonard Chang1996), “Yellow”(Don Lee 2001), to list a few, are works that explore the shadows and lights of Korean-American immigrant life, while the style, form, and perspectives of these literary texts vary significantly.4
Realism vs. Postmodernism Discussion in Asian-American Literary Studies
As the title of Elaine Kim’s landmark work, Asian-American Literature: an
Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982), credited as the first book-
length study on Asian-American literature, reveals “traditional” Asian-American literary
studies have emphasized a sociological reading of literature (Goellnicht 1989, 287; Ling
1998, 20). As Goellnicht points out, Claudia Tate’s observation that “African American
literary criticism has been mimetic, in that it has described, explained, and evaluated the
degree to which a black literary text truthfully represents its cultural, social, and historical
4 Clay Walls deals with the struggle of a Korean immigrant family set in the Los Angeles area between the 1930s and 1950s. The Fruit’N Food is a story of Thomas Pak, 26-year-old Korean- American, who works in a grocery store in Queens, New York, run by Rhees Family. ‘Yellow,’ as a collection of short stories, deals with mainly middle-class Asian-Americans’ lives among white society, set in Rosaria Bay, fictional area near San Francisco.
6 reality” could be applied to Asian-American literary criticism (qtd. in Goellnicht 287).
Goellnicht provides Kogawa’s Obasan, which deals with internment of Japanese
Canadians during World War II, as a case in point: “All the reviews I have seen praise
Kogawa’s poetic style, which establishes truth as more than mere facts, but then go on to
thank Kogawa for correcting history, for revealing what ‘really’ happened, for
resurrecting a piece of Canada’s heritage, for setting the record straight” (287). While
appropriate representation is an urgent issue for Asian-Americans—as with other
minorities who have been underrepresented, oppressed, and forgotten— this kind of
traditional, mimetic, or “liberal humanistic” (to borrow Linda Hutcheon’s phrase)
criticism has been challenged by the critics who have accepted the “postmodern turn”
(A.R. Lee 112); the later critics, with postmodern doubt on representation and language,
make the criticism that the traditional critics ignore irreducible individual difference to
produce a unified subject for the purpose of representation and assume language as
“transparently referential”(Goellnicht 287) without considering the constructing,
manipulating, and performing power of language (Gates 1984; Spivak 1988; Lowe 1996) .
For example, Lisa Lowe, in her discussion of Dictee in Immigrant Acts (1996), argues
that realism, especially in the nineteenth-century European novelistic tradition, is a
typical form which represents Western Enlightenment spirit which assumes one-to-one
equivalence between signifier and signified. In opposition to realism, avant-garde or
postmodern form, she endorses, almost automatically guarantees resistance to
colonialism or racism, as she shows in the analysis of Dictee. Emphasizing Dictee’s non- developmental and non- realistic form, she argues:
7 Dictee stands in contrast to Asian-American novels of formation such as
Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart (1943), Monica Sone’s Nisei
Daughter (1953), Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), or Maxine Hong
Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975). Its formal deviations from the
genre [realism] allegorize the practical importance of recognizing
heterogeneities of national origin, language, generation, gender, and class
within the Asian-American constituency. (211, n.1)
While I agree with her that there exists an ideological assumption about “correspondence, mimesis, and equivalence” behind the aesthetics of realism, and avant-garde or postmodern form was developed as a reaction to the “unities and symmetries” (130) that realist aesthetics intends to construct, I insist that employment of a form does not decide aprioristically what a work in question performs or how the work will be read. While an extremely experimental avant-garde work can be consumed as an intellectual entertainment for the bourgeoisie, a conventionally realistic work can support or even perform a subversive discourse. Jinqi Ling, in Narrating Nationalism: Ideology and
Form in Asian-American Literature (1998), criticizes Lowe’s negative understanding of realism as ideological rather than theoretical, an understanding which fails to consider
“the multiple forms and heritages of realism as an internally complex and contradictory representational strategy historically, or [ ] the sophisticated reworking of realism since the 1920s by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gérard Genette, or
Hayden White” (19). Pointing out that a realist narrative is not easily “paraphrasable” and
8 “susceptible to reductive generalizations” because of the “realist detail” of the work (21),
Ling argues,
[A] realist narrative unavoidably rewrites the material world temporally,
linguistically, and ideologically, offers no easy access to its origins, and
interpellates the text within social and cultural forces that do not yield
easily to interpretive reconstructions. Thus realist narratives do not
necessarily produce “mimetic” results or intellectually less demanding
meaning for readers, nor do they have to be seen for this reason as natural
accomplices of bourgeois nationalist totalization (21).
Ling rereads, in this context, five Asian-American texts written between 1957 and
1980—John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), Frank
Chin’s plays, The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and The Year of the Dragon (1974), and
Kingston’s China Men (1980). While Ling says, through this rereading, that he attempts to “intervene in two related tendencies in current Asian-American literary criticism,”
“traditional” and “contemporary,” proposing “a reconceptualization of the relationship between the past and present” (21), he seems to be more interested in reinventing or resuscitating realist narratives from the pre-1980 era which have been considered simple, conventional, content-driven, and “intellectually less demanding” (21). Because of his motivation, he seems to betray a self-contradicting antagonism against “postmodern” text; whereas he argues, “realist texts such as Eat a Bowl of Tea or No-No Boy are no more transparent in meaning than postmodern narratives such as Dictee or Dogeaters, and their interpretation demands that readers adjust their ideological assumptions and
9 become receptive to alternative meanings attainable only through unconventional glosses of their discourses”(22) , he inadvertently criticizes, “the subversiveness of texts such as
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee is often a theoretical construct, and that overemphasis on the ‘materiality’ of such subversiveness not only increases the distance between theory and practice but also works falsely to justify ahistorical tendencies toward avant-garde celebrations of difference”(9). While Ling apparently attempts to “problematize the arbitrary nature” of the differentiation between “traditional” and “contemporary” texts and criticism, his critical assumption leads to presumption of “materiality” in realist texts—when they are texts as much as “postmodern narratives” are—and valorization of difference between “realist” and “postmodern” texts. As a complementary move to
Lowe’s and Ling’s critical efforts, I employ “metafiction” as a perspective to reread
Asian-American texts across the realist-postmodern divide, exploring subversive junctions the texts in question betray. While “metafiction” has been understood mainly as an invention of postmodernism, I employ it as a way of reading under the assumption that every fiction has self-consciousness about its fictiveness (artificiality) whether it is obviously expressed or hidden under the mirror of mimesis. I add a brief critical explanation of “metafiction” before I specify my argument.
Autobiographical Metafiction
William Gass, credited as the inventor of the term, defines metafiction in Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970) as a “fiction which draws attention to itself as artifact to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (25) through various
10 apparatuses, such as employment of author as a character, invitation of reader’s
participation, a novel about writing a novel, a novel within the novel, parody, and so forth.
While Robert Scholes, in Fabulation and Metafiction (1979), endorses this “new and
more fabulous kind of fiction” with enthusiasm, he does not conceal the literary fatigue
and crisis consciousness about the “realism that had seen its best days and was being
perpetuated in a trivial and often mechanical way” (1). John Barth, in “The Literature of
Exhaustion,” more frankly expresses the fatigue and crisis consciousness, proclaiming
“the novel’s time as a major art form is up” and contemporary writers are fated to “the task of creating new stories through the retelling of the old,” in order to keep the endangered form alive (28). While this kind of “usedupedness” is central to the consciousness of the “mainstream” theorists, critics, and writers of metafiction, critics of minority literature—for example, feminist, African-American, Asian-American—seem to see alternative possibilities of resistance and subversion in this kind of fiction; their
stories have not been told enough to be used up. For example, Madelyn Jablon, in Black
Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature, says, “Parody that issues from the black vernacular is not a consequence of literature’s exhaustion but is instead a consequence of the abundance of stories, the interplay of storyteller and audience, and the
continuously evolving form of the story itself. Unlike the parody prompted by the
literature of exhaustion, parody that often culminates in satire, signifyin(g) culminates in
‘mutation which renders the original obsolete’” (181 n.2) Linda Hutcheon reconnects
metafiction, which is “self-conscious about its literary heritage and about the limits of
mimesis” to “the world outside the page”(McCaffrey 264) through a critical invention of
“historiographic metafiction,” which is “metafictionally self-reflexive and yet speaking to
11 us powerfully about real political and historical realities”(5). In this genre, “the hard-won textual autonomy of fiction is challenged, paradoxically, by self-referentiality itself. If language, as these suggest, constitutes reality (rather than merely reflecting it), readers become the actualizing link between history and fiction. . . .Historiography . . . is really a poetic construct; novels. . . are historically mediated forms. Historiographic metafiction, therefore, works to situate itself in history and in discourse, as well as to insist on its autonomous fictional and linguistic nature” (Narcissistic Narrative, xii). Metafiction is reinvented in the critical study of minority literature as a tool to “render the original obsolete” (qtd. In Jablon 181 n.2) and “problematize the entire question of historical knowledge” (“Pastime,” 55).
Since Hutcheon read several Asian-American literary texts in the context of
“historiographic metafiction,” such as Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men, critics of Asian-American literature have, if not many, commented and appropriated the concept for their reading. For example, Donald Goellnicht employs “historiographic metafiction” as a central theoretical frame for reading Joy Kogawa’s Obsan in “Minority
History as Metafiction: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan” (1989). Based on Hutcheon’s critical assumption, “History—both private and public—is discourse: so too is fiction”
(Narcissistic Narrative, xiv), Goellnicht analyzes how Kogawa attempts to rewrite history from an “ex-centric, minority position” with a self-consciousness of the manipulative and constructive power of language. He argues that the self-consciousness of Kogawa and Naomi—the protagonist of Obasan—about “the uncertainties in epistemology” and partiality of their discourse is a strength which differentiates the fiction from the mimetic approach he criticizes (294).
12 While Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” is in many ways the starting point
for my project, I diverge from her frame in that I emphasize the “autobiographical” or
“autofictional” qualities of the works I reread. In A Poetics of Postmodernism: History,
Theory, Fiction (1988), Hutcheon discusses Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as a representative “historiographic metafiction,” alongside Gabriel García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude, Grass’s The Tin Drum, Fowles’s A Maggot, and Rushdie’s
Shame ; she points out how Kingston links “the postmodern metafictional concerns of
narration and language directly to her race and gender”(70). While Hutcheon designates
The Woman Warrior as a hybrid genre, which is “fiction/autobiography/biography” (70), she unconsciously identifies Kingston with the female narrator, “the young Chinese
American girl”(70), without making an effort to differentiate an authorial self from a
narratorial self and observing how they converge with or diverge from each other. While
Hutcheon analyzes how Kingston / “the young Chinese American girl” attempts to
rethink, revise, and rewrite history, Kingston’s or the narrator’s writer identity is
inundated with too strong an “ex-centric ethnicity” (71). In Goellnicht’s reading of
Obasan, I find that he, also, problematically identifies Kogawa with Naomi (the
protagonist) and does not consider a possible rupture between the authorial self and
narratorial self. I find the rupture between authorial self and narratorial self an interesting
point where subversion and resistance can be imagined, but which has not been explored
appropriately. In Asian-American literary studies, while the question of negotiating a
subversive racial identity as an Asian-American has been one of the issues which enjoyed
the spotlight (Lowe 1996; Palumbo-Liu 1999; Cheng 2001; Chiu 2003; Chen 2005), the
protagonist’s writer identity, especially in terms of self-reflection of the author’s identity
13 as a writer, has not been given the attention it deserves. Even if a protagonist is a writer,
whether it is expressed directly or only metaphorically, critics of Asian-American literature tend to focus on his or her Asian-American identity rather than a writer identity.
The Asian-American writer has frequently been defined as an Asian-American who
writes rather than a writer who is an Asian-American. While an Asian-American identity
is one of the critical factors which defines an Asian-American writer, as Don Lee (a long-
time editor of Ploughshares and author of “Yellow” and Country of Origin) points out, an
Asian-American writer is finally a writer who struggles with his or her Asian-American
identity and many other issues rather than one overwhelmed by his or her racial identity.
With my study, I look to find interesting and enlightening tension between
intimacy and distance when I explore autobiographical or autofictional Asian-American
works from a metafictional perspective. While autobiography or autofiction assumes
authentic knowledge and intimacy with the materials it deals with, metafiction imposes a
distance by repeatedly invoking the fictiveness of the world it describes. The rupture
arising from the tension, I argue, creates a metafictional space in which narratorial self
(fiction) encounters/conflicts with authorial self (real), and the boundary becomes
problematized; as an answer to Audre Lorde’s powerful question—“Is it possible to
dismantle the master’s house with his own tools?”(110) — I argue this space as an effect,
where readers are invited to explore what we can do with the master’s tools—language, discourse, literature, and culture—in our hand. In Hutcheon’s explication of
“historiographic metafiction,” I find her comments that “readers become the actualizing link between history and fiction” useful for my reading (Narcissistic Narrative, xii).
14 Back to the discussion of Lowe and Ling, I argue subversion exists as a way of reading,
“the actualizing link,” not in a form, whether it is realistic or postmodern.
For my project, I have chosen three Korean-American novels with
autobiographical or autofictional elements to explore from a metafictional perspective:
Younghill Kang’s East Goes West (1937); Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982); and
Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995). Each protagonist of the works, as Joan Peters
points out about Gayle Greene’s study on “feminist metafiction,” is “a developing writer
who must find a way to overcome the dictates of inherited literary codes in order to locate
[his or] her own voice and devise [his or] her form” (Peters 1). While these three works
are differently metafictional in their method and extent, they commonly reveal a rupture
where the author’s self-consciousness as a writer conflicts with, or at least encounters,
protagonist’s writer identity. While East Goes West appears to be a typical immigrant
narrative produced in the emerging period of Asian-American literature, when read from
a metafictional perspective, it reveals a parody of the genre of autobiography, tension
between protagonist (autobiographical self) and authorial self, and, thematically,
ambivalence between “claim America” and “disclaim America.” Dictee, which is most
obviously a metafiction in that it repeatedly reminds readers of its being an artifact
through diverse apparatuses such as non-linear narrative, parody of generic conventions, and juxtaposition of heterogeneous genres, is above all a story about a writer who struggles to recover, discover, or (re)invent her own voice; while Dictee is the record of the process, journey, or inventory, it is the story itself told by the new-born writer. Native
Speaker, about which a parody of the spy novel genre is frequently pointed out, is also a story about a writer who “tr[ies] to hide by telling other peoples’ stories,” but recognizes
15 “the more that [he] speak[s] about others, the more [he] begin[s] to tell the story of
[himself]” (Chang-rae Lee 2006, 111). My project, benefiting from a chronological approach, intends to examine how modes of identity construction among Asian-American writers have changed over time.
In Chapter 1, my analysis revolves around how Younghill Kang, the author,
(de)constructs Chungpa Han, the protagonist of East Goes West, as an Eastern scholar in the West. In spite of the protagonist/author’s ingenious talent, diligent effort, and lofty ideals for integrating Eastern traditions with Western ones, the period, which ranges from1920s to 1950s, did not allow the protagonist/author to settle in the country he desired to know. The protagonist/author was wasted, I argue, as a tool for the imperial
U.S. and finally trapped into an otherizing network of discrimination (to be specific,
Orientalism and racism). I intend to reveal awkward but brave moments when the author gazes at the deconstruction of the narratorial self in this autobiographical novel.
In Chapter 2, my argument is that Theresa Hak Kyung Cha successfully constructs herself as a female Korean-American writer through Dictee. The narrator defines her position as a diseuse, a woman speaker who mediates between the living and the dead; she shows a process in which a diseuse learns to embrace numerous voices which want to speak through her. Cha makes, I argue, an “inventory of traces” to borrow
Antonio Gramsci’s concept, in order to understand her existence; through her imaginary inventory, she is connected to Yu Guan Soon, a female Korean resistant against Japanese
Colonialism; St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a Catholic nun from the late 19th century; Jeanne d’Arc; Demeter and Persephone, a goddess and her daughter in the Greek myth; Princess
Pali, a good daughter figure in a Korean folktale; and many others across time, culture,
16 and religion. The narrator is reborn as a diseuse in a circular, womblike, space which she
generates by curving linearly progressing history. Cha uses language to create the space
with a combination of modern trust and postmodern skepticism of the tool.
In Chapter 3, the protagonist of Native Speaker, Henry Park, is a second generation middle-class Korean-American man. While he is beyond the economic instability and apparent social discrimination that the first generation immigrants had to suffer, he still finds himself on a border line. The protagonist does not feel himself to be legitimately or fully a Korean or an American. Such psychological instability is metaphorically presented in his job, a private spy, for which his invisibility is an appreciated asset. The main argument is that Henry is transformed from a technical writer,
who is faithful to a marginal role a dominant society posits, to an “ethical writer” who
feels responsible and tries to take responsibility for what he writes throughout the novel.
The transformation costs Henry dearly, but provides him a place where he can confront
the otherizing gaze by which he has been penetrated. To explain an “ethical writer,” I
draw on Richard Rorty’s “edifying philosopher” who seeks a solidarity with other human beings as an inevitable option to be ethical, not that he believes in an irreducible
“essence.” As an autofiction, a hybrid genre synthesizing autobiography and fiction,
Chang-rae Lee the author is overlapped in many ways with Henry Park, a spy-writer;
Asian-American identity, interracial marriage, death of a mother from cancer, experience of language transition from Korean to English in childhood, etc. Henry’s transformation reflects Lee’s attitude toward writing and Asian-American writer identity. In the process
of reflection, I intend to explore how Lee, the authorial self, daringly exposes himself
through Henry, and takes advantage of metafictional apparatuses to involve readers in the
17 transformative process.
In Conclusion, I intend to explore reception of Korean-American literary texts in
Korea. As one who plans to settle in Korea, I am interested in how Korean-American
literary works are received and interpreted in Korea. For example, what does it mean to
read Korean-American literary works in Korea? Are they received as part of an American
literature or an extension of Korean literature? How differently do Korean readers
respond to a Korean-American work from American readers or Korean-American
readers? In what context could Korean-American literature be taught in a classroom of
Korea, especially in terms of alternative discourse? I will discuss these questions in the
continued context which I have discussed from the three texts in the previous chapters,
that is to say, reading as an “actualizing link between history and fiction.”
Personal Context in which the Study is situated
Korean-American literature, as have Koreans within the Asian-American group, has remained an amalgamated constituent of Asian-American literature rather than standing on its own. Explaining one of her characters, “Ta Jan the Korean” who is a hippie-inspired liberal, Willyce Kim—Hawai’i born, third-generation Korean-American writer—says, “When I was a child, I remember that Koreans were sometimes classified as ‘others’ or lumped with Chinese or Japanese. I wanted Ta Jan to stand out as a Korean and not just a generic Asian-American”(qtd. in E. Kim 1997, 173). While it is imperative that Korean-American literature, or literature of any given minority, stand on its own, there exists the aesthetic and political need that each sector of Asian-American literature
18 be understood under the wider spectrum of Asian-American literature. As Sau-ling
Cynthia Wong points out in Reading Asian-American Literature: From Necessity to
Extravagance, while Asian-American writers share “literary motifs such as food, the
doppelgänger, mobility, and art” with mainstream ones, the literature “form[s] distinctive
patterns,” which are attributed to the “race-specific American historical experience of
people of Asian descent”(Wong12). These historical experiences are significant and
informative ones. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, anti-miscegenation laws, Japanese
internment during World War II, the murder of Vincent Chin by automobile workers in
Detroit in 1982, and the post-9/11 hate crimes against Asian-Americans are some
examples of the “race-specific American historical experience” that Asian-Americans
share. Lisa Lowe, in Immigrant Acts: On Asian-American Cultural Politics, points out
that while the U.S. allowed Asian-American immigration because the U.S. needed their
labor in order to build the nation, it refused to grant Asian-Americans citizenship and to acknowledge them equal rights with Anglo-Americans and European-Americans, that is to say, “white”5Americans. To deal with the contradictions resulting from the influx of
Asian immigrants, two conflicting rhetorics that ultimately served the same purpose
emerged and were used contemporaneously: the “model minority”6 and the “yellow
5According to thinkers of critical white studies, including Toni Morrison, Cherríe Moraga, Eric Foner, and Noel Ignatiev, as much as other racial “color” signifiers—black, yellow, red—are historically constructed and manipulated, “white” is a fabricated concept for the purpose of political, cultural, economic, and ideological convenience and favor. Noel Ignatiev, in How the Irish Became White (1995), analyzes how Irish immigrants, who were considered non-white in the 19th century U.S., achieved entry into white race, that is to say, white privilege; he argues the Irish could get accepted into white race by siding with the pre-established white value, which historically meant oppression of free blacks and support of slavery.
6 First used by sociologist William Peterson, in “Success Story: Japanese American Style,” written for New York Times Magazine (JAN 1966) this phrase has been in popular currency to applaud economic, academic, and social accomplishment of minorities, especially East Asian-Americans, achieved in spite of prejudices and discriminations. While it had been generally considered complimentary by Asian-American themselves, more and more critics emphasize the stereotyping, even if it is a good one; inferiorization of
19 peril”7 (Palumbo-Liu 3). While the uniqueness and distinctiveness of each cultural group is encouraged within Asian America more and more due to the emphasis on hybridity, heterogeneity, and diaspora, it is still significant to maintain “the designation of ‘Asian-
American’ literature” so that still marginalized voices could be heard (Cheung 5).
There seems, however, to be one critical barrier to be overcome in the study of
Asian-American literature, especially for someone like me, a Korean who grew up in a racially homogeneous—which turns out to be another “purity” myth under closer examination—and strongly Western aspiring society. To most Koreans, or even first- generation Korean-American immigrants who had lived in Korea, it is an awkward, uncomfortable, and eye-opening experience to find that they are seen as one who belongs to a minority (along with other minorities, such as Chinese, Indians, Latinos and others) by the dominant “white” eyes. Koreans have internalized a white gaze, soaked in the culture so inflected with Euro- and U.S.-centrism throughout politics, economics, education, literature, film, music, arts, et cetera.8 In a proudly self-acclaimed “racially
other minorities—especially blacks—as a strategy of “divide and conquer”; downplay of existent discrimination in the U.S. behind the phrase. (www. Modelminority.com)
7 This phrase was used to describe mass immigration from East Asia, and the threatening influence the immigrants’ cheap labor brings to “white” economy. The term repeatedly has surfaced to explain depression, inflation, lay off, and other crises of American economy and culture, obliterating exploitations and discriminations the immigrants suffer (Frank H. Wu Yellow : Race in America beyond Black and White 13-4; Gina Marchetti Romance and the "yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction 2). The simultaneous employment of these conflicting rhetorics, “model minority” and “yellow peril,” is a typical means of domestication and otherization.
8 For example, HongJoon Yu, a former president of the Korean Cultural Heritage Administration and author of bestselling series My Field Investigation of Korean Cultural Heritage, which sold over 2.2 million copies and instigated a sensational enthusiasm for Korean cultural heritage among Koreans, half jokingly and half seriously regretted his westernized sensibility, after he explained differences between two contrasting pagodas located in Bulgook temple, Dabo and SuKka, from the Silla dynasty in the mid 8th century, drawing on two Hollywood actresses, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly.
20 homogeneous nation,” little opportunity exists to mingle with people of various
ethnicities and to consider oneself under parallel comparison with them; within this homogeneous national paradigm, only masterly “white” gaze prevails, which is identified with cultural, economic, social, and political privilege. Interestingly, while the identification with an imaginary white gaze was tremendously encouraged in Korea, contact with Anglo-Americans in real life was less frequently encouraged or even considered taboo, especially for young women. This double standard reveals a dilemma in which Korean society has been located where colonial, postcolonial, and xenophobic values conflict. In Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations,
Katharine H.S. Moon analyzes how the Korean and the American governments have
allied to control prostitutes, “keep[ing] the girls well so that they can continue to be
degraded”(114-5), around U.S. military camp towns (kijich’on) in Korea since the 1940s.
While the prostitutes were praised as precious dollar winners by the Korean government, they were exhaustively alienated from society, let alone their offspring borne to the U.S soldiers.9
The more deeply one internalizes this identification, the more comfortably he or she can appreciate what the white-value dominating society offers.10 The recognition that
9 Elaine Kim points out social prejudice and ostracism the wives of U.S. servicemen and adopted children have experienced in Korean and Korean-American society after immigration (156, 180-1). For the discussion of Korean adoptees, see “Asian Bodies Out of Control: Examining the Adopted Korean Existence” Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. 2007) 177- 200.
10 Chungmoo Choi, in “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea,” points out, “modernization and decolonization in contemporary South Korean society meant a privileging of Western culture, English language, world history, and finally ‘an admission of one’s own cultural inferiority’. It created a ‘subaltern climate’ in which the ‘postcolonial’ Korean elite distinguish themselves as members of the privileged class by meticulously acquiring Western, that is, American culture”(82)
21 they are seen as avatars of Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, or “dragon lady” in white people’s
eyes does not happen until they directly experience being watched, seen through, put in
parallel with other “yellows” by a dominant U.S. white gaze he/she has been identifying
with. For example, most Koreans have had no problem in enjoying a film which derogatorily describes Asians or Asian-Americans, as long as they are not designated specifically as Korean. Until then, as Frantz Fanon poignantly points out, “[Asian]11 men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect” because “white” man is considered the only bearer of value and authority
(Fanon 12).
Let me confess my own personal history in identification with a white gaze.12
Growing up in a small local city of Korea, I used to cruise abstruse but fascinating titles of World Literature Series from my father’s bookshelf, which was a popular decoration item for the middle-class home in the 1980s. Excited with the film version of Gone with the Wind, I read the novel and was enchanted by Scarlet O’Hara’s beauty as a Southern belle, particularly as portrayed by Vivien Leigh on screen, and especially her almost foolhardy optimism about life. The black slaves, who were picking cotton in a field while their white masters were having a barbecue party in the garden of a plantation mansion, were just background existence, in my eyes then, to set the heroine’s beauty and boldness off against their ugliness and timidity; they looked so to my teenage eye, and I naturally chose to stand on Scarlet’s side. It was after I read the revisionist novel Wind Done Gone
11 I have substituted “Asian” for “Black” in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.
12 While I share my experience in a context of “personal criticism,” as an attempt to “examine my relationship to the object of study,” and “theorize personal experience,” I do so with Linda S. Kaufman’s admonition in mind: “Writing about yourself does not liberate you, it just shows how engrained the ideology of freedom through self-expression is in our thinking” (qtd. in Smith and Watson 33).
22 that I could pay my attention to Mammy, Scarlet’s nanny, who was stereotypically
portrayed as loyal to her capricious master throughout highs and lows, and other
nameless black people who remained in the background throughout the novel—some of
whom, as Wind Done Gone appropriately reveals, may have been a half-brother or a half-
sister to Scarlet. To take another example, Jane Eyre also dominated my adolescent romantic imagination, the heroine serving as a role model for an iron will and independence; on the other hand, Bertha, Mr. Rochester’s mad wife from the Caribbean, was a necessary obstacle to elevate the white romance to the sublime. Until I read Wide
Sargasso Sea, Bertha, or Antoinette, was just a monster, not a human being who wanted her just portion of happiness, and for whom the tragic disappearance did justice for my dear Jane. While reading served my construction as a racial and racialized subject, I find it can work to deconstruct the subject of colonial sensibility, or, to borrow Gayatri
Spivak’s expression, to “unlearn the process” ( Spivak 1994, 91) of the subject construction. Recalling titles from the shelf, they were not really World Literature Series; it was just a collection of canonical works of the Western literature, beginning from
Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad and ending at Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I intend to ask, as one still in the unlearning process, How does this unlearning become possible? What alternative works will I read? And how will I reread the canonical works which constructed my racial identity?
Mistaken as Chinese and teased by not particularly malicious white boys, mimicking “Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh”13 neither they nor I understood in the night
13 When Shaquille O'Neal, a legendary NBA player, presently, for Miami Heats via Orlando Magic and L.A. Lakers, publicly described Chinese language with this racial slur in 2002, organizations of Chinese-Americans expressed their resistance and received an official apology from him. Brett Ballantini, “Shaquille O’Neil: the Ugly American—From Courtside ” Basketball Digest Mar. 2003.
23 streets of Cincinnati, I came to see my face and body from a totally different perspective.
Rather, it would be more proper to say that I have never previously watched my body from other people’s perspectives. Under this new illumination, I could see that I possess the same body as the presumably and pejoratively slow-witted Chinese servant played by
Willie Fung in Red Dust (1932), rather than his considerate macho master, played by
Clark Gable, who condescendingly endures the servant’s noisiness, idiocy, and above all
Pidgin English. Even though it is the servant who takes care of the household, cooking, cleaning, and worrying about the unfavorable weather, when the master is busy flirting with a tomboyish woman played by Jean Harlow, the servant is described as something certainly inferior to the white couple and a stock character who possesses no individuality.
Being an international student enrolled as a graduate student at a large public state university in the Midwest for five years, I was surrounded by symbolic systemic portrayals that defined my “foreignness” and “Asianness,” often speciously eulogized as
“internationality,” but more importantly associated with “inferiority,” whether it was open or surreptitious. It was painful, while awakening, to accept the fact that I was no more than an object exposed to a white gaze in the mirror of which I had believed myself to be the holder. For the five years I lived as a foreign student, what propped me up through the time of alienation and frustration was, ironically, the self-consciousness of my
“foreignness” that I do not belong here. To describe my mindset, I repeated to myself, “I have a place to go back to; I am only a sojourner, who doesn’t have to or is not entitled to be really involved in what happens here, whether that ails me or not.” While I struggled not to give up the pursuit of the degree in spite of whatever hardships I encountered, I did
24 not plan to, or rather to be more exact, I gave up on the idea of finding a permanent job
and settling in the U.S. As soon as I finish my study, I desire to go back to the place
where I belong; that was the setting of my mind, which made it possible for me endure
(or escape) the terrible feeling of isolation, but at the same time, made it impossible for
me to acculturate more than to a marginal extent. To evaluate the choice I have made,
even though I want to insist on the inevitability of the choice, attributing it to the
restrictions in which I was situated, I would confess the mindset was an escape, not a real solution to the challenge I faced. Had I been faithful to the myth of the American dream—overcoming barriers of language, culture, race, and gender— I could have enjoyed more opportunities in terms of society and career. The successful examples of acculturation, especially in academia, I witnessed here and there aroused in me a combined feeling of envy and frustration.
Observing the mainstream society with a feeling of half-loser and half-outsider, I have recognized many minority students and scholars experience similar feelings during the process of their settlement. Many immigrants who struggle to be acculturated also suffer from alienated feelings; often, they pacify the frustration of being “nobody” in the mainstream by being “somebody” in an ethnic community, as Wong points out in
Reading Asian-American Literature: from Necessity to Extravagance. That seems to partly explain why there are so many Korean churches around every Korean or Korean-
American community, and they choose to be divided relatively easily when they face conflict within a given congregation.14 Considering the frustrated feelings that I have
14 The Korean-American community is almost the only Asian-American community of which organization and activity is mainly based on Christianity and church. According to the 2000 census, 75% of Korean/Korean-Americans in the U.S. turn out to be affiliated with a church. Considering another statistic that only 3% of Korean/Korean-Americans are affiliated with an American church, it can be said a little
25 experienced despite the psychological shield of a sojourner, the issue of acculturation would be a life and death struggle for immigrants who ultimately decide to take root in
the U.S., removed from the possibility of going back to their home country. While it
cannot be denied that there are some people who make their way into the mainstream
society, overcoming whatever barriers and feelings of alienation like John Kwang in
Native Speaker, the select few should not be a standard against which the rest are evaluated. Standing on the threshold, neither completely in nor out, I could feel more
keenly the immigrants’ desire to acculturate and their frustration than the mainstream
observers, but at the same time I still maintain an observer’s position, not a complete insider.
less than three quarters of Korean or Korean-Americans gather around Korean churches (Facts). Church often becomes the only venue where Koreans, more than half of whom are self-employed or low-paid laborers, can exert social influence. “Facts about Korean-Americans” 16 Mar. 2005 (http://www.geocities.com/mokkim/kafacts.html)
26
27 CHAPTER 1
Did East Go West? : Younghill Kang’s East Goes West
Younghill Kang (1903-72) is the first Korean-American writer who wrote
professionally, published his work at a mainstream publishing company (Charles
Scribner’s) and succeeded in terms of commerce and renown; therefore, he is considered
to be a frontier of Asian-American literature and role-model for Asian-American writers.
Kang’s second autobiographical novel1, East Goes West: the Making of an Oriental
Yankee, published in 1937, deals as the subtitle indicates with a process through which a
FOB (“Fresh Off the Boat”) Korean refugee, Chungpa Han, struggles to be accepted as an American. At first glance, it seems to be a typical immigrant saga in which a self-made immigrant proudly and a bit sentimentally recollects what millions of hardships he/she encountered, with what spirit he/she persevered through the hardships, and what glorious
success he/she attained at the end of the hardships: that is to say, a myth of the American-
dream. Most of the reviewers in Kang’s time praised or criticized the work in that
context; for example, along with other criticisms and reviews in the decade, Katherine
Wood comments in her 1937 review, “Making of an Oriental Yankee,”
1 Asian-American literature has favored this genre dominantly. The preponderance can be attributed to a minority writer’s desire to record his/her life story or adaptation to the demands of the commercial presses, which seek an “optimistic [and] apolitical” assimilation story. One of the persistent issues arising from this genre is how much an author and a protagonist can be identified and separated. Sunyoung Lee, in her article, “The Unmaking of an Oriental Yankee,” criticizes Kang’s contemporary reviewers’ “sloppy journalism,” which mingles Kang’s life and fictionalized material under the author’s creative license. She argues that readers differentiate Chungpa Han the character from Kang the writer to appreciate “Kang’s creative muscle and a more radical and more subversive critique of American modernization” (383). While I agree with her argument principally and keep the stance throughout this paper, I had the liberty to see Kang as an extension of Chungpa Han when I discuss a time period East Goes West does not deal with, for example, Kang’s middle age and later life.
28 It is a candid record of “the making of an Oriental Yankee”: 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. (11)
In the same context, Maxwell Perkins, a renowned editor of Scribner’s suggested that
Kang make clearer a union between Han and Trip, an American girl with whom he is in
love, to make the work “more palatable for Euro-American audiences” who want a story
of “successful assimilation” (Lew 174). While Kang cut about 150 pages of the
manuscript according to Perkins’ editorial suggestion, he did not revise the ending,
leaving the relationship of Han and Trip only a potential one and a grim—and almost out-
of- context—basement ending scene still attached.
While Kang’s first autobiographical novel, The Grass Roof, published in 1931
was received more favorably at the time of publication, 2 East Goes West, his more
aesthetically ambitious work, seems to be getting more critical attention as time goes by
because of ambivalence and “the simultaneous claiming and disclaiming of both Asia and
America” that it successfully accomplishes (Cheung 10). Critics, however, did not really
begin to note the complexity of East Goes West until the 1990s. Elaine Kim, a pioneering
critic of Asian-American literature, in her essay “Searching for a Door to America:
Immigrant Writer, Younghill Kang,” originally written in 1977, criticizes East Goes West
2 The work received favorable criticisms from Pearl S. Buck, H. G. Wells, and Thomas Wolfe among others. There was even an offer about filming The Grass Roof in an attempt to take advantage of a favorable atmosphere achieved from the success of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth produced by MGM, while the contract was not eventually made. The work was translated into German (1933), French (1935), and Czech in his lifetime and sold steadily. See “Chronology.”
29 as a work that fails to represent the Korean community correctly—mainly because of the
author’s aristocratic birth, which is differentiated from the majority of Korean immigrants
in his time (E. Kim 1982, 34). According to Kim, because of the author’s enthusiasm for
the new land, Koreans and Korean-American society and their aspirations could not be
correctly represented while he is “hopelessly in thrall of Western culture” (42). Since the
1990s, Kim seems to appreciate more “the deftness with which Kang satirizes both the
misguided optimism and naiveté of his characters and the arrogance and ignorance of the
Americans who reject them,” but she still maintains her criticism on his proper
representation, which can be partly attributed to ‘an insider sentiment’ (E. Kim 1997,
159).
Stephen Knadler, in “Unacquiring Negrophobia: Younghill Kang and Cosmopoli-
tan Resistance to the Black and White Logic of Naturalization,” published in 2005,
evaluates ChungPa Han as a genuine cosmopolitan3 in that he sabotages the familiar but
problematic ethnic paradigm which presupposes “bipolar conflict between white and
nonwhite, Western and non-Western, native and colonizer, or Asian and American,” and
which excludes the various existence of other minority Americans (104). KunJong Lee, in
“The African-American Presence in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West,” drawing on the
immigrant narratives of Benjamin Franklin (Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography) and
Booker T. Washington (Up from Slavery), points out that Kang surpasses Franklin’s racial
3 Knadler quotes Pheng Cheah’s 1998 article, “The Cosmopolitical—Today,” to explain in what historical context he situates Kang by the term cosmopolitan. Cheah revisits prejudice about cosmopolitanism in the early twentieth century as “a detached bourgeois aesthetics deriving from an elitist perspective of global cultures as tourist commodities”(Knadler 101). Cheah argues that cosmopolitanism provided “appropriate communal responses to questions of political or social identity,” making involvement with social battle against discrimination more active through “coalition and affiliation,” not separation and distinction (101). For deeper study, see Cheah, Pheng. Inhuman conditions; on cosmopolitanism and human rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006.
30 exclusiveness embedded in his “optimistic, naïve, and progressive vision” (353) and
Washington’s revision of “the white version of the American dream with a black difference” (352), who “does not read Franklin with a critical distance but ultimately buys and reinforces the myth of the American Dream”(353). Kang, according to Lee, denies both narratives and criticizes the racial reality of his time in association with the fellow minorities, especially African Americans. In most readings of East Goes West since the 1990s, as articles by Knadler and Lee present, critics have pointed out how successfully, effectively, and poignantly the work criticized “a crystallized caste system, comparable only to India, here in the greatest country of the world” (Kang 273). While there have been consistent comments on the author’s “ambiguous and self-contradictory,” even self-Orientalizing attitude, the critics make an effort to reveal “his multiple subjectivities, which derive (among other things) from Kang’s complex relationship with his reading public,” that is to say, white readers (Lee 337-8). In this critical atmosphere, it becomes “only casual” or inadvertent reading if one evaluates Kang’s autobiographical novel as “insufficiently resistant to western European and Anglo-American civilization”
(Knadler 99).
While I agree with Knadler’s argument that critics of Asian-American literature should consider “the particular forms of social power and oppression faced by Asian-
American authors within their respective historical eras or situations” (99), the consideration should not be an excuse to condone a writer’s submissive adaptation or overestimate his/her resistance, which will contribute to making a dominant system seem falsely invincible or manageable. In that context, I intend to explore Younghill Kang’s life and East Goes West in terms of identity construction as an Eastern scholar in the West in
31 the 1920s and 30s when Orientalism was in its full bloom ideologically and
institutionally. Reading this autobiographical novel from a metafictional perspective, I
attempt to explore how Kang (authorial self) converges with and diverges from Han
(narratorial self), and how the differences between them betray racial and imperial U.S.
beneath a cover as “the greatest country in the world for youth, for a full life, and
ambitious enterprise” (352).
Kang is a good example of how “border subjects,” in this case the rare Eastern
scholar in the West, struggled to construct their identity in the racism-charged USA in the
early twentieth century. As Mitsuye Yamada’s poem “Guilty on Both Counts,” painfully describes, the existence on or across borders—whether they are called immigrant
/diasporic Asian /ethnic American—has been fated to the “painful alienation that renders oneself ill at ease within one’s own communities” (Cheung 10). In Yamada’s poem, a
Japanese American narrator finds herself blamed on both sides, by Japanese for the
Hiroshima atomic bombing and by Americans for the Pearl Harbor attack. As Said points out in Orientalism, the construction of identity presupposes the “construction of opposites and ‘others’ whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re- interpretation of their differences from ‘us’” (331). Kang’s identity construction in the
West involves a dilemma in which he recognizes himself as “other” in the society that he eventually came to belong to as part of the “us.” Consequently, as W. E. B. Dubois diagnosed, Kang becomes an existence with a “double-conscious” mind, one who suffers from an aperture between his self-image and social reception.
Said notes in Orientalism, drawing on Foucault’s theory about power, that the construction of identity is organically linked with “the disposition of power and
32 powerlessness in each society,” not just “mental exercises,” or “academic woolgathering”; the process involves “such concrete political issues as immigration laws, the legislation of personal conduct, the constitution of orthodoxy, the legitimation of violence and/or insurrection, the character and content of education, and the direction of foreign policy, which very often has to do with the designation of official enemies” (Said
331). In this enveloping siege, my argument is that Kang fell victim to the monstrous panoptic network4 of Orientalism, even though he struggled to find a patch of refuge from the thorough gaze of Orientalism; for example, he did not achieve American citizenship in spite of repeated appeals to the Congress; he drifted from lectureship to lectureship without a permanent job; and he was subjected to and suffered from surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The subtitle, The Making of an Oriental Yankee, seems to be an innocuous variation of the title.5 Unlike the words with relatively neutral nuance, East and West, however, the words Oriental6 and Yankee,7 from today’s perspective and their
4 I borrow this concept from Foucault, which he used metaphorically in Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison to explain disciplinary social system and internalization of surveillance. Foucault borrowed this concept from Bentham’s model of the panopticon, of which design allows the guards to observe the prisoners without their knowing whether they are being watched or not, perpetuating the state of surveillance. See Danaher, Geoff et al. Understanding Foucault xiv.
5 For instance, Sunyoung Lee, in her article, “The Unnmaking of an Oriental Yankee,” attached to the new edition of East Goes West, published in 1997 by Kaya production, (a New-York located Korean- American run publishing company), comments on it as “an antiquated version of today’s term “Asian- American.” (395) Instead, she focuses on the word “making” in the subtitle, and converts it to “unmaking” because the novel shows in fact “the process of deconstruction—of simplistic nationalism, of naïve faith in America’s gleaming promise, of a stable, color-blind identity—that is implicit in the construction of a new sense of home” (395).
6 According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word “Oriental” began to be used in the late Middle Ages, circa 12th century; it came via Old French from Latin orientalis-, which derives from the word orient, the present participle stem of oriri “to rise”; the basic meaning is “belonging to or situated in, that part or region of the heaven in which the sun rises” (“Orient” OED). It sounds like a completely
33 juxtaposition reveal the dilemma in which hero-narrator, Chungpa Han, is situated.
Instead of calling himself Asian, or designating his specific nationality (Korean) he identifies himself as an “Oriental.” As an “Oriental,” he is on his long way to becoming a
“Yankee.”
While etymologically there was no derogatory meaning in the word Oriental, the negative connotations accrued as the need to subjugate the Orientals to the profit of the
“Occidentals”8 increased. As Said points out in Orientalism, Orientalism served the
Western project of creating the Orient to their economic, political, and cultural favor under the mask of science. On the other hand, while the word Yankee initially had a dero- gatory nuance, because it was circulated within the same race and consequently referred to the dominant group of people—a habitant of New England, a Union soldier, and an
American—, it became a nickname friendly enough to be self-employed. innocuous definition, which is based on objective geographical information. Interestingly, however, while the OED gives detailed historical explanation of the word, it never clarifies that the word has been used with derisive or derogatory connotations.
7 The OED makes clear the derisive origin of “Yankee.” While there are several statements as to its origin, its most plausible one, “Yankee” came from the Dutch Janke, diminutive of Jan (John), derisive nickname by either Dutch or English in the New England States. First, in its narrowest usage, it referred to a native or inhabitant of New England; more widely, of the northern States generally; during the Civil War, it was the nickname for the soldiers of the Federal army applied by the Confederates; most widely, it applied to a native or inhabitant of the United States, generally, by English writers and speakers (“Yankee” OED). While, without doubt, the word came into use as a term of ridicule or reproach, it survived its derisive origin and achieved a neutral or, almost, proud, position. No one doubts political correctness of New York Yankees while they feel uncomfortable about Washington Red Skins or [sports team names needed]. Even the catch phrase, Yankee Go Home!, which is written on the sign picketed by anti-America demonstrators, who insist on the evacuation of U.S. army camps or oppose the visitation of the President of the U.S., does not deliver the derogatory meaning the demonstrators intend; it would have been dramatically different if the slogan was Orientals Go Home!
8 As a counterpart to Oriental, Occidental was used to refer to Westerners. Xiaomei Chen explores how Occidentalism, a manipulated image of West as a counterpart to Orientalism, has played a double role in post-Mao china; one as an official Occidentalism, which oppresses resistant discourses, and the other as an unofficial Occidentalism, which resists the oppressing power. See Chen, Xiaomei Occidentalism: a theory of counter-discourse in post-Mao China (Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)
34 Considering the ironies and conflicts that the juxtaposition of these two words
creates, the Oriental Yankee that Kang proclaimed as his new identity in the new land is
peculiar enough to invite a wide spectrum of interpretations, ranging from praise for his
creative and constructive combination to harsh blame for his self-Orientalizing gesture to
fit into the American mainstream.9 In defining this hybrid being, he himself expresses
ambivalent feelings toward his new existence:
The Westernized Oriental is the child of the nineteenth century….In vast
perspective he sees three different times [past, present, and future]—not
only intellectually but sympathetically. Nor can the nineteenth century be
either accepted as final or spurned in inevitable reaction toward the new,
for in his struggle to reach the faraway boundaries of modern thought, the
recapitulation of an eternal embryo is necessary for him, and the past
becomes his transient stepping stone…. (128)
His struggle “to reach the faraway boundaries of modern thought,” which his ancestors could never dare to do, is heroic, but hued with a tragic dilemma in that he can neither fully accept nor fully reject the century in which he was born and that produced him as a “modern” if also alienated subject. While he claims the vast perspective from which he can look out upon three different times— past, present, and future— the past, which is expected to serve as his stepping-stone, is transient; the present is despicable; and the future is uncertain.
9 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong criticizes Kang’s approach as “merely a subtler, more elegant version of food pornography,” which means “making a living by exploiting the ‘exotic’ aspects of one’s ethnic foodways”(55). Kang’s identity as an Eastern scholar, like “a Western man approaching Asia”(Kang 276-7), necessarily involves “self-alienation” by adopting “the foreigner’s gaze” (Wong 62). From Reading Asian- American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993).
35 With Chung Pa Han, the author’s persona, at center, Kang places various types of
the “Oriental Yankee” as contrasting shadow characters: Doctor Ko, George Jum, Hsu
Timous, and To Wan Kim. Doctor Ko is “a Korean Confucian to the marrow of his
bones,” in spite of all the Western learning he achieved (352). George Jum represents a
type of figure who is enchanted with the material splendor of the West and decides to
seek material success, forsaking the Eastern tradition. Hsu Timous, as a Chinese
intellectual, is a figure who is full of enthusiasm to engraft Western learning on the
Eastern tradition and solve the Asian problem. Finally, To Wan Kim, as a sort of
dopplegänger figure for Han, represents an Easterner lost in the West in spite of his
knowledge of both worlds. (The reason I call Kim a dopplegänger of Han will be
discussed in detail later.) Arriving in the U.S. at the early age of 18, just before “the law
against Oriental immigration was passed,”10 Han is full of optimistic desire for the West
and Western knowledge even though “[he] brought little money, and no prestige, as [he]
entered a practical country with small respect for the dark side of the moon” (5).
On the first day of his arrival, he swears to himself, sitting on a bench in desolate
Battery Park in New York City: “Yes, if it took a lifetime, I must get to know the West”
(7; italics mine). It is interesting that the author posits his persona in terms of epistemological purpose: “to know the West.” While it is partly attributed to the scholarly tendency of the hero, it also represents an Asian atmosphere which sought a solution to
10 It refers to The Immigration Act of 1924, which included the National Origins Act, Asian Exclusion Act or the Johnson-Reed Act, which prohibited immigrants from the Asian area entirely, while it allowed limited immigration from Southern and Eastern European areas by setting quotas, which falls on 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890, according to the Census of 1890 (http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/ Immigration_Act_of_1924 ). Younghill Kang was smuggled into the U.S. in 1921 with the help of a Canadian missionary he came to know in Korea during his education (“Chronology”).
36 the problems of their homeland or an almost unconditional Asian aspiration toward the
West; it was plainly differentiated from the purpose that Westerners sought in their travels and in their relations to the so-called East. According to Said, in the period between 1800 and 1900, “the Eastern travelers in the West were there to learn from and to gape at an advanced culture; the purpose of the Western travelers in the Orient were, as we have seen, of quite a different order” (204). While Western travelers intend to construct their superior identity by appropriating the knowledge of the Other, the East, this innocent
Eastern traveler, Han, is anxious to “[wash] off the dirt of the Old World that was dead”
(12) in “the avid desire for Western Knowledge” (112). Between these two conflicting orders, clever tactics, or strategies are required of an Eastern scholar who has decided to survive in the West; as a walker on the tightrope, one step amiss and he is wasted and forgotten.
In the world he came to know, Han experiences permeated racial prejudice and distorted oriental image radiating from Orientalism, contradicting his romantic infatuation with the West. At the first interview he had with the Harlem YMCA branch
(on the recommendations from an American missionary in Korea), he is told that he is not qualified because the available job cannot be given to a Negro or an Oriental “precisely because [the] branch was up in Harlem”(19). When he was enrolled in Maritime
University in Canada, he was an “inexorably unfamiliar” being throughout his stay, causing two extreme treatments—too kind or too cruel. Han confesses, if possible, “[I]t seemed to me better to miss the kindness and not to have the cruelty” (126). These two extremes are based on the Orientalist view of the “Oriental”: “as a stock character he is either a cruel and brutish heathen with horrid outlandish customs, or a subtle and crafty
37 gentleman of inscrutable sophistications” (Kang 209; italics mine). For North Americans
who dismiss Asian immigrants as Oriental, they are typically regarded as a subhuman
being with intractable bestiality; even at their best, they are still “inscrutable.” The
critical point, above all, is, according to Said, the fact that Orientals can be given a “stock
character.” They are bare existence which can be classified into a fixed category, a being denied the possibility of movement and change.
Said assumes two forms of discourse which Orientalists chose when they presented Orientals to fellow Westerners: vision and narrative. According to Said, most of the Orientalists have chosen the form of vision in understanding the Orient, rather than
that of narrative. The Orientalists subordinate “[their] ideas, or even what [they] see, to the exigencies of some ‘scientific’ view of the whole phenomenon known collectively as the Orient, or the Oriental nation” (239). Therefore, the terminals of the field devour the living Orient; nothing is expected beyond their visual definitions of the Orient. The field
“Orientalism” panoptically appropriates “the Orient.” In this structure, theoretically, there should be no area that the vision does not reach; however, the possibility for change that narrative inevitably brings creates a potential blind spot where the omnipotent vision does not inexorably penetrate. According to Said, “[n]arrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die,” and this power is extended to the dimension of community as
“the tendency of institutions and actualities to change” (240). Furthermore, the discourse of narration discloses that “the domination of reality is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history” (240). It is no accident, therefore, that Edward William Lane, the Orientalist of the 19th century and
author of Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, gave “the monumental form of
38 encyclopedic or lexicographical vision” to his information, avoiding the “linear shape” of
narrative. It is because, as Said notes, Lane was aware of the provocative power of
narrative.
Located in an inverse position in relation to Orientalists, as an Easterner seeking
knowledge of the West, Han is surrounded with prejudiced and prejudicial images against
Asians widely distributed through the operation of Orientalism. Han’s response to the prejudice is interesting; at first, he is baffled by it, but soon accepts it with humor, and
even takes advantage of the prejudice to his favor. For example, in the remote country of
Quebec where Han visits Ralph for Christmas, he finds himself alone and penniless at the
train station while Ralph is out of town not having known about Han’s arrival. Unable to
speak French, the main language spoken in that province, he is misunderstood as mute
and ends up getting an indefinite stay at a nearby hotel until Ralph comes and gets him.
Han is conscious of, and even enjoys, his status as “an object of mystery,” not bothering
to correct the misunderstandings and rumors around him. Misunderstood as a
“Chinaman” and a “mute,” he gets away with eating at a restaurant without paying the
bill. At an African-American church gathering, during another scene, he participates as a
testimony giver; his testimony causes surprise and excitement among the congregation only because “Chinamen can speak…” (338). He observes all the religious fervor and fraud with a stand-offish attitude and adapts himself to the situation to the extent that his
involvement does not undermine the integrity of his judgment.
In that context, it is controversial and open to various interpretations that Han
ends up working as a freelance writer for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which today
self-proclaims to be a global standard of knowledge, but on the other hand has
39 represented a fixed vision of the West toward the East. Near the ending of East Goes
West, Han is left to be responsible for writing and correcting errors on Oriental-related items for the 14th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.11
Han constructs himself as an Oriental scholar in the West—that is to say,
“Oriental Yankee”—throughout his experiences of traveling in the North American
continent including all the discrimination, frustration, and, ultimately his own
disillusionment with America. According to To Wan Kim, a pessimistic erudite in the
narrative who is read in both Western and Eastern classics, Kim himself has come to the
West “at a very unfortunate time, [when] [t]here has been little room for an Oriental
intellectual,” but Han came at a better time when the Westerners showed interest in the
Orient “scientifically and esthetically” (256). For Han to survive uneven competition as
an Oriental scholar in the West, Kim advises two things: “First you should get a good
Western foundation in education,” but “[d]on’t lose touch with your own classical
traditions” (256). Because there would be less competition for the knowledge Han could
carry due to his cultural background (the Yangban class in Korea) Kim prophesies that in
making a living Han’s Oriental scholarship may contribute more than his American
education. Kim counsels Han to approach the “Eastern” discipline, whether it is
Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, or Oriental history, with the “Western” mind:
“analyz[ing] scientifically” (257; italics mine). While Kim’s advice can be a practical
11 In fact, Younghill Kang wrote various Oriental-related articles for several Encyclopedias, including Encyclopaedia Britannica(14th ed): (“Bed[Modern Metal Bedstead and Eastern Beds],” “Dance[Dance of Japan],” “Dress[Far Eastern Dress],” “Li Po or Li Tai Po,” “Societies of Art,” “Tonghak or Chuntokyo”, “Tu Fu”);Commonwealth Encyclopaedia (1932ed.?): (“Changing China,” “Chinese Literature,” “Japanese Literature,” “Korea,” “Korean Literature”); and National Encyclopaedia (1954- 55ed.) (“Chinese Literature,” “Japanese Literature,” “Korea,” “Korean Literature,” “Tibet”). From “Chronology” pp418-9.
40 tactic for a transplanted scholar’s “happy surviving” (257), it is problematic, especially
from a present perspective, in that such an approach corroborates and subtends
Orientalism, rather than deconstructs it. The scholar seems to be, eventually, nothing but
a “cultural comprador” who “reif[ies] perceived cultural differences and exaggerat[es]
one’s otherness in order to gain a foothold in a white-dominated social system”(Wong
55). Han’s freelance writing job for the Encyclopaedia Britannica should be discussed in
the same context. Filling in the Orient-related items and correcting errors to the best of
his knowledge, Han could have been proud that he is fulfilling a responsibility as an
Oriental scholar in the West; however, its effect is dubious when critically considering the
system of knowledge that Encyclopaedia Britannica has represented. Encyclopaedia
Britannica was first published in Scotland in the year 1768, in order to compete with the
provocative French Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot (published 1751-1766), which
represents the highest accomplishment of French Enlightenment (Herman 64). While it is
evaluated as one of the most famous and enduring legacies of the Scottish Enlightenment
and proudly proclaims itself to be the most trustworthy source of knowledge,12 it doesn’t
take into account that its presumably objective knowledge could be already contaminated
with “racial theory, justifications of slavery, or arguments for colonial exploitation” (Said
13).13 For example, in the company history as presented on its current website, it declares that, through the efforts of one of its renowned contributors, Thomas Young, “the mystery
of the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone first saw light of day under the
12 Time article, which reported that the 14th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica was published, dubbed it “the Patriarch of the library.” “Patriarch revised.” Time 23 Sep. 1929: 66.
13 For more discussion, see Gillian Thomas, A Position to Command Respect: Women and the Eleventh Britannica (Scarecrow Press, 1992).
41 Britannica imprint” (“Company History,” “www.britannica.com"). Without contemplating how the research became possible and for what purpose it was performed, it emphasizes that Encyclopaedia Britannica embodies the scholarship wrought by
“scientific discovery and new critical methods” (“Company History”).This is, according to Said, the typical Orientalist way “by which contemporary scholarship keeps itself pure” (13).
It does not seem that Han’s job at Encyclopaedia Britannica caused him any conflict in the Saidian context; Han is simply glad to secure “an entering wedge in the professionally intellectual world, than as anything else” (354). Han’s dream girl, Trip, also congratulates him on having received the freelancing job, saying “Britannica?
……You certainly must have arrived” (361). Due to the temporary freelancing job, Han says, “New York loom[s] up powerfully again as the dream-come-true dazzling city”
(354). Though, in a Saidian framework, Han’s situation is similar to the dilemma of
Western missionaries who went abroad, mostly in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, with evangelical fervor. Han comments on this when he made an acquaintance with a retired missionary couple in Canada:
They [the missionary couple] were the perfect and celestial representatives
of that fantastical mysticism which has sent Christian missionaries far and
wide to the remotest pockets of the earth, face to face with all the varying
puzzlement of nature, breaking ground for ruthless, blindly selfish Western
forces, but they themselves all innocent and unconscious, returning at last
with delicate brittleness unbroken to such quiet native spots as this—
42 Stratford-on-Avon.14
With the keenest kind of insight, Han points out the ideological role of the Western missionaries: they performed as a pioneering tool of the colonizing Western forces in spite of their good will. This insightful criticism, however, boomerangs on him; in the magnanimous machinery of Orientalism, he is also consumed as a tool to corroborate the system.
As an Eastern scholar in the West, to borrow the author’s expression, “a transplanted scholar,” Han possesses an almost intuitive sense of the “exaggerations and prejudices” operative within both hemispheres, if only he keeps “a well-balanced” mind.
It is no small virtue for a scholar to possess a different cultural background (Asian) with
which he can compare what he observes or witnesses in the new cultural context
(American). For example, Said confesses his scholarly insight was made possible
traversing “the imperial East-West divide” (336). By crossing the border and, at the same
time, “retain[ing] some organic connection with the place from which [he] originally
came,” Said could develop his insight into the Western discourse toward the Orient and
make his findings known “both to Europeans and non-Europeans” (336). Trinh T. Minh-
ha, born in Vietnam and now a professor at University of California, Berkeley, suggests a
concept of “inappropriate other or same” who “necessarily looks in from the outside
while also looking out from the inside” (Minh-ha, 418; italics mine). Standing on the
14 It seems to be intentional that Kang named the place after the name of the village in which Shakespeare, who stands for the Western Civilization, was born.
43 threshold, this observer, “not quite an insider and not quite an outsider,” owns a privilege
to see both sides, while “undercutting the inside/outside opposition” (Minh-ha, 418).
To Wan Kim advises Han to keep developing his strength as “a transplanted
scholar”; if he becomes “broader and more elastic as a living being,” through the
discipline, Kim says, Han will “happily survive” in the West. But one must ask: What
does it mean to “happily survive” for an Eastern scholar in the West? The novel ends at
the point where Han becomes a freelance writer for Encyclopedia Britannica, and does
not show more of the career Han follows as a scholar. To answer the problematic
question, we should look to and observe Younghill Kang’s life, considering East Goes
West is an autobiographical novel: this Eastern scholar does not, despite his effort and
talents, seem to have “happily survived” in America. In spite of the critics’ laudatory
bustle, which praised Kang as an example of an achiever of the American dream, he
himself failed to achieve American citizenship; he could not secure a permanent job
throughout his life; he was tormented by the FBI’s suspicion about his being a
communist; and he died destitute and lonely.
In 1939, a bill which sought to naturalize Kang was introduced to the House by
Representative Kent E. Keller of Illinois and the Committee on Citizenship for Younghill
Kang. The bill included statements of support from many literary and cultural celebrities,
including Malcom Cowley, Pearl S. Buck, Lewis Mumford, Nicholas Murray Butler,
William Lyon Phelps, Maxwell Perkins, and his publisher Charles Scribner. After the bill was followed by another bill introduced by Senator Matthew M. Neely of West Virginia, both bills were rejected. The bills advocated Kang’s qualification for American citizenship based on the fact that he was a scholar, not a laborer, so he should be
44 exempted from the application of the exclusion law, the purpose of which was to prevent
competition with American labor. Stephen Knadler, in his article, “Unacquiring
Negrophobia: Younghill Kang and Cosmopolitan Resistance to the Black and White
Logic of Naturalization,” critiques the fact that the bills chose to deny Kang’s difference
based on his individual excellence, rather than insist on embracing difference itself
(Knadler 111). In an interview with Kang, conducted while he was waiting for the
Congress’ decision about the bills, he commented: “Whether my bills now pending in
Congress concerning my status are approved or not…this is my country[;] I married an
American, have two children born here. All my roots are here, and I must do everything
in my power for America….My one desire is to serve this, my country, when the time
comes” (qtd. in “Chronology “408).
After Kang came back from his stay in Korea as Chief of Publications for the
American Military Government’s (USAGMIK) Office of Public Information, extensive
investigations presided over by Edgar Hoover were performed, suspecting Kang’s pro-
communist tendency throughout the five years ranging from 1948 to 1953. While the
investigation was concluded in vain without any solid evidence about Kang’s communist
identity, it barricaded Kang’s reentrance to the mainstream American society. While in
Korea, Kang wrote reports for the U.S. military government analyzing Korea’s political,
economic, and cultural situation and suggesting what the military government should do
for the democratization and Koreanization of Korea.15 While Kang was a suspicious
15 Kang used this paradoxical expression to emphasize that the U.S. military government should leave Korean people’s fate in their own hands. He criticized the incompetence of the U.S. military government and the conflict between right and left wing it caused. From Kim, Jihyun “Long Island Variation of Korean-American writer Younghill Kang.” Shin DongA Dec. 2004: 635.
45 figure from the FBI’s perspective even before the reports,16 Kang’s reports solidified the
FBI’s suspicion because the bureau thought that the reports were “too objective,” without
prioritizing American interests as its primary and singular goal. It seems, however, that he
did everything in his power to serve America when the time came in his most ingenuous
way. Kang criticized the U.S., in the reports, suggesting that the U.S. caused Korea to
deteriorate into a ‘terrible police state’ against native Koreans’ hopes for democratization
and independence (Jihyun Kim 635). Kang’s criticism did not cater to the U.S.
government or to Syngman Rhee’s Korean regime. While Kang wanted to contribute to
both countries, the U.S. and Korea, he ultimately proved to be an annoying or dubious
existence for both countries because of his border or liminal status between the U.S. and
Korea. During this 16-month stay in his homeland, Kang consistently criticized the
regime of Syngman Rhee, who was the president of Korea for 13 years until he was
purged by mass demonstration in 1960, but he also critiqued U.S. foreign policy in East
Asia, such as the WWII atomic bombing in Hiroshima and the later onset of the Vietnam
War, throughout his life.
In the history of Asian-American immigration to the U.S., American citizenship
represents an ambivalent ideal. Even after the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality
Act amendments of 1965, which abolished the national origin quotas that had restricted
Asian immigration since the Asian Exclusion Act that was part of the Immigration Law of
1924, American citizenship was often the ultimate dream an Asian immigrant could
16 It was partly because of the tendency of the people who supported the bill for the citizenship of Younghill Kang. Many of the supporters, such as Lewis Adamic, John Chamberlain, Clifton Pediman, Roger Boldwin, Lockwell Kent, Dr. Frank Kingdon, Prof. Marx Lenner, Lewis Mumford, and Rev. Herman Lasik were allegedly involved with avant-guarde organization for communists. Senator Keller was also reportedly involved with communist activity. Kim, Jihyun “Long Island Variation of Korean-American writer Younghill Kang.” Shin DongA Dec. 2004: 640.
46 imagine. Beyond the status of resident alien, which permits one to live in the U.S., the status of citizenship guarantees an individual the right to vote or to serve as a public official; for immigrants, this is a political fantasy which signifies that they can be a perfect part of the country in which their life is rooted. Citizenship, however, was conveniently employed by governmental or civil organizations to allow or deny entrance to immigrants. Also citizenship does not guarantee political or civil protections; during
World War II, Japanese Americans were detained in concentration camps in spite of their
U.S. citizenship. In the case of Kang, he was not accepted to be an SIS (Special
Intelligence Service) agent for the FBI, for which he had an interview in 1943 arranged through Representative Keller; the apparent reason was that he was not a U.S. citizen.
His non-citizenship, however, did not deter the U.S. military from employing him as
Chief of Publications for the United States Army Military Government in Korea
(USAMGK). While the U.S. government did not grant Kang U.S. citizenship based on the Asian Exclusion Law that was part of the larger Immigration Act of 1924, it took advantage of him when it judged him to be useful to their Korean initiative, and he was simply discarded when his usefulness was fully expended by the FBI and the U.S. government. Since 1950, according to a witness—Christopher Kang, Kang’s son— his family not only suffered from extreme poverty, but also constant surveillance and wiretapping by the FBI. The elder Kang often worked as a temporary hand at the nearby farm in a coolie-like appearance, according to his friend’s recollection, when there was no lectureship to provide him a meager living(Jihyun Kim 644) . After Frances Keely, his wife, died in 1970, Kang often wandered downtown Huntington in the appearance of a typical “downtown character,” in 1920’s style trench coat bought from the Salvation
47 Army, and with a filthy necktie like To Wan Kim in his last stage of life: “so changed, his
shabbiness, soiled shirt, frayed clothes, broken shoes” (354). Chungpa Han, Kang’s
persona in East Goes West, worries about Kim’s spiritual transformation, observing his
physical transformation: “I seemed to be looking at the empty shell of a Korean, one not
so old in years, but broken in mood and in heart” (354). Ironically, Han’s description of
Kim seems to prophesy Kang’s own future in 30 years to come as an elderly, spent man.
While Han says he ran from Kim in dread of the effect “the empty shell of a Korean”
might exert upon him, the author could not ultimately escape Kim’s spell upon an Eastern
scholar wasted in the West: “Yes, I ran from Kim. A silent life, a motionless life, an
unpraised life, an unblamed life, and now a wholly undistinguished life at the end—a life that had lived in the ego and in the inner dream, that did not know if it was in inner dream or in outer reality, a life that had never accepted its real worldliness, did not know if it came once to be transplanted or was hopelessly in exile” (359).
Knadler, in his article, concludes that Chungpa Han (and by extension Younghill
Kang) was a genuine cosmopolitan who “left a fixed ethnic and racial identity for a life that constantly opens itself up to new additions, new affections for and affiliations with others” (116), unlike Takao Ozawa, a Japanese American who sought American
Citizenship 17 years before Kim’s case and insisted on his being an American based on his cultural identity, arguing that American is in the heart, not in the color of skin. While I
agree with Knadler that Kang possessed a cosmopolitan spirit which was not exclusively
confined to one national or ethnic identity, I am not sure that his appeal for an American
citizenship can be clearly differentiated from that of Ozawa’s. Kang’s appeal for an
American citizenship is based on Senator Kirby’s logic, the fictionalized character of
48 Senator Keller who initiated the bill for Kang: “it’s seldom I see anyone with as much of
the same spirit as I see in you. I tell you, sir, you belong here. You should be one of us”
(352; italics mine). Senator Kirby’s logic, like that of Senator Keller’s in real life, is not that different from what Frantz Fanon diagnosed and criticized as one that domesticates a colonial elite into part of a metropolitan system:
Rather more than a year ago in Lyon, I remember, in a lecture I had drawn
a parallel between Negro and European poetry, and a French acquaintance
told me enthusiastically, “At bottom you are a white man.” The fact that I
had been able to investigate so interesting a problem through the white
man’s language gave me honorary citizenship. (Fanon 38)
Considering that to whom Senator Kirby’s “us” refers, his idealistic belief in “the greatest country in the world for youth, for a full life, and ambitious enterprise” makes the statement even more problematic (352). Senator Kirby’s “us,” I argue, does not include
“the Negroes” or “Orientals,” even if he as an individual is the most unpretentious man
Han has ever seen, and a historic American in whom American Jeffersonianism and
American Puritanism is most harmoniously blended. The “us” is exclusively confined to
“white” Americans and those exceptional “others” who may find a honorary and exemplary place within America.
Then what strategy could Kang have successfully employed for his “happy surviving”? In addition to the “balanced perspective” with which To Wan Kim advises
Han to equip himself for his own survival, Kang could have applied “appropriate
49 distance” and the art of “role playing” that he himself describes in the scene of the party at Miss Churchill’s house. In that scene, Han reveals how he had become a regular for the
Wednesday party at Miss Churchill’s among other international students. In the case of
Miyamori, a Japanese student, his uncritical worship of the West decreased the hostess’ interest and her need to invite him. On the other hand, Senzar, an Oxford-educated East
Indian under British rule at that time, is socially sentenced to death at Miss Churchill’s because of his uneasy combination of English-influenced superiority toward American culture and his animosity toward colonial powers, which is expressed in a very Asian way, “with the whole body and heart.” In a social catastrophe that Senzar causes, Han proves himself to be an opponent of Senzar, saving the occasion, even saying, “You
Hindus are better off under the English than we are under the Japanese” (299). Through this effort, Han becomes a beloved guest, guaranteeing a seat at Miss Churchill’s every
Wednesday, and thereby gets connected to Trip, his future American girlfriend. Han knew how to maintain the Westerners’ interest toward himself as an Asian other who is both inside and outside both cultural logics—Asian and American. While an Asian who too willingly assimilates without any criticism is not exotic enough, another who expresses intellectual and moral superiority to the Westerner is also beyond their interest and patience. Han mediates these polarities and gains favor.
While Han understands Senzar’s animosity toward the English, he concludes that he was in “want of tact” (299) and thus was unable to successfully articulate his grievances appropriately. Instead of siding with him, Han chooses to act with decorum in order to more successfully blend into the mainstream American culture. Han’s comment to Senzar—“You Hindus are better off under the English than we are under the
50 Japanese”(299) — serves as a double-edged one, criticizing imperialism while satisfying its apparent purpose to demote Senzar to a lesser victim of colonialism in comparison to
Han. As he bears the social burden of silencing Senzar, driving his words and wrath toward him, Han confesses it is “not without enjoyment, too” (299) while the Westerners thought it was awful. Han was playing, and enjoying, a role of white knight regardless of what his real opinions were.
Kang does not seem to have applied, however, this skill to his own survival in the
West. The sudden and inharmoniously pessimistic ending of East Goes West foreshadows the agony and downfall that the author Kang would himself experience in his later life.
With the exception of To Wan Kim’s tragic suicide, Han’s life is beaming with rosy prospects both in career and in love; he is on the staff for the 14th edition of
Encyclopaedia Britannica and has succeeded in tracking the girl of his dreams, Trip.
“Softened somewhat by the luxuries of Western living” (367), he confesses, he will not feel at home in his homeland anymore. It seems he really arrived here, and now is settled comfortably. This seems to be a heyday of Kang’s life which will finally see a dramatic downhill as Kim’s did.
In a dream he describes at the ending, he recognizes that he is in a cellar “under the pavement of a vast city” with other “frightened-looking Negroes” (368). When “the red-faced men outside” used fire in an attempt to attack the cellar, Han wakes up from the dream “like the phoenix out of a burst of flames”(369). Many critics have noted the subversive elements in the ending. Han reveals class consciousness that, as an Oriental, he is located at the bottom rung on the ladder of American society, which consists of “a crystallized caste system, comparable only to India” (273), and the recognition is
51 expanded to the resistance against the entire racial hierarchy, in solidarity with other
minorities, here “frightened-looking Negroes.”: “I shut the door and bolted it, and called
to my frightened fellows to help me hold the door” (369). Then, he gives a far-fetchedly
optimistic interpretation of the dream: “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”(369). His comments about “the phoenix” and “rebirth and a happier
reincarnation” is linked with “an undying bird, [which ] forever lives, forever breathes,
forever, with its two wings fluttering (3)”an image with which Kang begins East Goes
West. The ending, in fact, while it seems to be out of harmony and sudden, is part of his
connivingly planned narrative and symbolic structure that looks back upon itself in a circular return.
While Walter K. Lew appropriately points out that the interpretation of the dream is “unconvincing or simply mystifying,” given the gravity of the dream, he attributes the reason to “[the] drive to make East go West” and blind and forcible extrication from the fatal racial conflict between Black and White “into which Han, misrecognized, had tumbled almost accidentally” (184). This is not a reasonable explanation considering how Kang described African Americans and racial injustices elsewhere in the novel.
While Han acknowledges, drawing on Wagstaff (an African-American law student), that
Orientals were “outside the two sharp worlds of color in the American environment,” it did not give excuses to Han to be exempt from the conflict or forsake solidarity with the fellow minorities. Lew’s interpretation overlooks the tension that Kang intentionally constructed between the dream and the nightmare, the dream and its interpretation. While
52 Lew notices “the tension” which is revealed in Han’s meditation on “time,” in the
beginning of East Goes West, he fails to notice the point that the narrator in the beginning
speaks in the same time spot as he does in the ending. The narrator, in his early thirties in
the beginning, recollects his life from the late teens, and when he ends, he is the same age
as the speaker in the beginning. The Phoenix motif is repeated appropriately at the
beginning and at the end. Considering this narrative return or chronological loop, we
may conclude that Kang intended the circular narrative contours of the novel, the return
at end to the beginning, the liminal and circular movements of East toward West.
The basement cellar in which he is with other Negroes seems to be the variation
of the flophouse in which he slept on the second day of his sojourn in the U.S. The
beginning smacks of romantic hope and humor in the description, coming from the status
of an observer, that is to say, “even though I am with them right now, this is not my
place.” There exists, then, claustrophobic fear and desperate solidarity with the fellow minorities in the ending; now he feels that this is the only place he is allowed in society.
Employing a circular structure, Kang seems to deny a fantasy of the American dream in
which linear or upward progress is considered desirable and possible for all the people on
U.S. soil. While he met a lot of people and saw much of the U.S. throughout his
American odyssey of over ten years, the place where he finds himself subconsciously is
the cellar “under the pavement of the vast city” with other minorities, in spite of all the
rosy prospects he has procured so far. An aperture between the realistic vision of the
dream and the unrealistic “Oriental” interpretation betrays his desire for perfect
assimilation and, sadly, the keen insight into its impossibility. That gap is deepened by the fact that most of what Han could achieve depended on individual benevolence, not
53 institutional support: Han met Senator Kirby on his hitchhiking trip to Boston, not through an official or political route; he obtained the freelance job for Encyclopaedia
Britannica through a professor whose class Han happened into accidentally; and many temporary jobs were secured through the benevolences of Anglo-Americans or other ethnic American minorities. While the benevolences and favors were critical to Han’s survival, the two most fundamental doors did not open finally for him: U.S. citizenship and a permanent job in the American academy. Actually, Kang was promoted from a lecturer to Assistant Professor at Washington Square College of New York University in
1937, but he gave up the professorship and his curatorial job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, to work for the U.S. War Department.
Kang accepted the governmental summon because he felt it was an opportunity “to serve this, my country,” and, ironically, this involvement with the U.S. Army and other government agencies blocked his reentry into the world into which he thought he had been accepted (qtd. in “Chronology” 408). As Han says about the racial conflict between blacks and whites, it seems “beyond the power of individuals to break through,” even for the man who possessed the most lofty ideal to integrate the traditions of East and West
(273). East never arrived West in spite of its Sisyphean labor.
Edward Said’s theories about Orientalism have been criticized for allowing no space of escape or subversion to “otherized subjects.” Conscious of the criticism, Said suggests a concept of “identity that includes other without suppressing difference” (Said on Orientalism [Video Recording]), drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “inventory of traces” (25). Through this concept from Gramsci, Said insists that the Orientalized subject track the traces inscribed in the process of identity construction; through the
54 tracking, one comes to recognize that identity is of a constructed quality, far from being naturally or inherently given, and that if it is a constructed one, it can be deconstructed.
While Younghill Kang heroically struggled to construct himself as an Eastern scholar in the West, the job seems to be ultimately transferred to later Asian-American writers, not accomplished by Kang himself, who sank gradually into the basement of American
“Others.” While Kang was lost and locked in the circular time frame, in other words,
“the perpetual merry-go-round of the universe” he aesthetically created (3), offers
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha offers a possibility for an alternative writer identity in a space where time does not pass, discussed in the following chapter.
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CHAPTER 2
Writer as a Diseuse: Inventory of traces, Counter-History, and Ambivalence
in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
There goes a crazy girl we miss, Goes, scything into the sun. Trampling on the shadow of the chaser, Goes, giving away wild grasses instead of guns and swords. Knocked down, eyes closed because of missing heart. Waiting only for spring night, with sickle up At dusk, with people, goes out to riverside She goes, cutting water with the edge. The blood of waiting, knotted tightly into the rope. Spilled on the petticoat chased, missing, Goes, finally goes the crazy girl we miss, Goes, kissing on every step of this earth.
HoSeung Chung –“Yu Guan Soon 1” (1976)1 –
Between Younghill Kang (1903-1979) and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), there exists about 45 years of separation: both between their years of birth and the publication dates of their representative literary works, East Goes West (1937) and Dictee
(1982).2 In spite of their differences in historical time period and in gender, they share in common the fact that both stood on the edge of his or her time and responded to the challenge of that time whether or not they ultimately succeeded. As Younghill Kang struggled to construct his identity as an Eastern scholar in the West, Cha struggled to explore her identity as an Asian American feminist artist, with the historical, racial, and
1 I translated this from Korean text, Sorrow addresses Joy(1976) by HoSeung Chung. 2 Dictee was translated to Korean in 1997 (trans. Kyung Nyun Kim). While the work was comparatively well received in the academy of Korea, general Korean readers found the work too difficult to be enjoyed. After it went out of print, it was republished in 2004 by a different press. The difficulty Korean readers complained about can be partly attributed to untranslatability of the work. According to Sumee Lee’s article which surveys Asian American literary studies in Korea 1994-2005, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is the third most studied writer, next to Maxine Hong Kingston and Chang-rae Lee; Dictee is the second most studied work, next to The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Lee, Sumee. “Asian American Literary Studies in Korea” YongoYongMunHak 51 (2005): 887-919.
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sexual burden wholly on her own shoulders. In this chapter, I intend to analyze how Cha portrays a process in which a woman speaker is constructed in Dictee through an
“inventory of traces,” to borrow Gramsci’s concept, and how this idea can be applied to the author herself. Cha, I argue, creates a circular space in which a diseuse (a woman speaker) is born by curving linearity of history; to curve the linearly progressing narrative of history, she re-members forgotten figures, re-writes inherited stories, and counters canonized versions of history.
For many writers, writing means a way to live forever, having readers remember that they existed here on earth. For female ethnic writers who are fettered by multiple elements of discrimination, not to be swept into the darkness of forgetfulness is a matter of more desperation than it seems to be for male ethnic or female mainstream writers.
Ronyoung Kim, the author of Clay Walls (1987), says, as a motivation to write the story,
“A whole generation of Korean immigrants and their American-born children could have lived and died in the United States without anyone knowing they had been here. I could not let that happen” (quoted. in E. Kim 169). As a strategy to escape the disappearance into the darkness or abyss of time, Cha, like R. Kim, elects to be remembered by remembering the forgotten in her own text.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born on March 4, 1951, in Korea. Cha’s family immigrated to San Francisco in 1964 via Hawaii. Cha’s family may have had a connection in the U.S. considering they could immigrate to the U.S. even before the Hart-
Celler Immigration and Nationality Act amendments of 1965, which abolished national origin quotas and contributed to a dramatic increase of Asian immigrants thereafter. In
San Francisco, she attended Catholic school, Convent of the Sacred Heart, which
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influenced her ambivalent attitudes toward religion throughout her life and her writing
career. Also, her study of French and the Western classics in this period formed Cha’s
intellectual foundation as a writer and as a performance artist. She graduated from the
University of California at Berkeley as a literature major in 1974 and earned a second
B.A. from Berkeley in art in 1975. She was especially drawn to avant-garde film theory
and later moved to Paris in order to pursue the study at a deeper level. After one year’s stay in Paris, she returned to Berkeley and continued her experiment in writing and performance, earning two more degrees, the M.A. and the M.F.A. in art in 1977 and 1978, respectively. After relocating in New York in 1980, she edited
Apparatus/Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings, which was one of the first anthologies of writings on avant-garde film theory. Not long after her marriage to
Richard Barnes, a photographer from Berkeley, and the publication of her first work,
Dictee (1982), she was tragically killed in the streets of New York by a stranger at the age of 31.
Since Dictee was published in 1982, the work has been notorious for its obscurity, mainly resulting from its fragmentariness and mixing of genres. Elaine Kim, one of the co-editors of Writing Self Writing Nation, a collection of essays dedicated to interpreting
Dictee, confesses that she was “put off by the book” (E. Kim 1994; 3). The work does not have any consistent narrative, does not stay within one genre, and uses multiple languages.3 The characters of the work range from Yu Guan Soon (a female Korean
resistant against Japanese colonialism) to St. Thérèse of Lisieux (a Catholic nun from late
3 She was greatly influenced by French (post)structuralist thinkers, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva. Especially, she includes Roland Barthes’ “Upon Leaving the Movie Theater,” which emphasizes viewer’s participation as an act to consummate art of cinema, as the head essay of the anthology about experimental film, Apparatus: Cinematic Apparatus: Selected Writings.
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19th century); Jeanne d’Arc; the narrator’s mother, Hyung Soon Huo; and the narrator, herself, who is an autofictional persona for the author. In terms of genre, it includes prose, love poetry, epic, epistle, diary, prayer, and dictation practice for language learning.
It also includes pictures, a captured scene from a film by Carl Dreyer, calligraphy by
Cha’s father, graffiti by an anonymous Korean laborer who was expropriated to work in the Japanese mines in the 1930s, and a map of the Korean peninsula. While English is the main language, Cha also employs French, Latin, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.
According to Lisa Lowe, who included a chapter for Dictee in her breakthrough work
Immigrant Acts (1996), Cha seems to have chosen this “nonlinear and discontinuous form as a means to destroy the assumption of equivalence between word and meaning” (Lowe
42).
While Cha’s attempt at evocation characteristically includes stories of Korean women because of her Korean heritage, it is not limited to Korean women.4 In fact, her evocation expands beyond the borders of race, time, religion, sexuality, and historical fact/myth. It is not just a restoration of voices from some privileged women. Rather, what
Cha reveals is the totalizing nature of the linearity of history that patriarchal and colonial narratives impose.5 She contends that the apparently smooth surface of history actually consists of numerous fragments, some connected with rough nodes, some separated by
4 In “Poised on the In-between: A Korean American’s Reflections on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee,” Elaine Kim emphasizes Korean heritage which is revealed in Dictee. Kim says that to ignore the Dictee’s Korean heritage is a reverse Orientalism, which offers exclusive options of “inferior difference and invisible sameness” (22). Against this move, Kirsten Twelbeck, in her article “Otherness as Reading Process: Theresa Hak Kung Cha’s Dictee,” criticizes Kim’s identification with Cha because it goes against Dictee’s continuous reminding of everyone’s different modes of perception, different conventions and codes of understanding (186).
5 As a woman of color writer, Cha, as Trinh T. Minh-ha points out, is fettered by double obstacles of being a woman and being a minority racially. Though, the obstacles provide her with specific vantage point from which she can observe, interpret, and participate in the world. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1989).
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chasm, and some crossed with junctures. By revealing the trace of suture, the narrator-
subject reveals the artificiality of the reality which has been considered natural, and
partiality of common sense, which has been counted as neutral. Finally, she suggests a circular structure, instead of the linear structure in which there exists no space at all. Past
“Nine”—Novena, Nine Muses or Nine Genres which each muse represents, Gow Gee Lin
Wan, “Ninth, Unending series of nines, or nine points linked together” (173), she arrives at a space which Chung Wai, “Tenth, a circle within a circle, a series of concentric
circles” creates (173).
Drawing on Korean national historical narratives, religious myth, folklore,
Christian martyrologies, and feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, Cha
adopts the figure of the diseuse to textually weave and unweave a linear notion of history,
progress, and time. In this chapter, I foreground Cha’s counter-historical deconstructions
of Korean national history and Korean-American experiences of the national (at a diasporic distance) through her postcolonial feminist revisions of the mother-daughter couple and her revisions of the ironic figure of the martyr. As narrator, and as writer, Cha becomes a diseuse who counter-historically remembers and rewrites these figures.
Theoretically, I adopt Antonio Gramsci’s notion of an “infinity of traces” and Edward
Said’s elaboration of its “inventory” as a way of interpreting and understanding the feminist postcolonial import of Cha’s revisions of the mother-daughter couple and the martyr figure through the narrative acts of the diseuse as understood and articulated in the
Korean national and diasporic contexts.
In the first section, I overview the theoretical models—materialist, poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonialist—that inform my literary interpretations of
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Dictee. Then, I establish Cha’s own conceptualization of herself as a writer, and her
autofictional presence in the novel as a narrator, as a diseuse who deconstructs, reconstructs, revises, and rewrites historical and mythic meanings in language and in image. In the final sections divided into two separate parts, I address Cha’s counter- hegemonic revisions of Korean myth/folklore through the textual presences of
Persephone (and her mother Demeter) and Princess Pali; and in second part of the final section, I address Cha’s counter-historical revisions of Korean history, primarily examining her rewriting of Yu Guan Soon as national heroine and martyr.
I. Theoretical Overview
In my critical reading of Cha’s experimental novel Dictee, I draw on the concept of an “inventory of traces” from Antonio Gramsci in order to consider the author’s invocation of various, seemingly scarcely related figures across different time periods, cultures, classes, genders, races, and religions. In the Prison Notebooks, which he wrote during his imprisonment under Mussolini’s Fascist regime, Gramsci writes, “The starting- point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory” (Gramsci 324; italics mine). Said, importantly dealing with the concept in his work Orientalism, points out that the only available English translation omits a concluding sentence in the original Italian text, which he translates himself: “therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory” (25). Said continues, “in many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose
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domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals”(25). Dictee, I argue,
is Cha’s attempt to inventory an “infinity of traces,” through which she negotiates her
status in history, deciphers wounds inscribed on her body, discerns and makes visible the
traces that construct her as a subject. While Said, to quote Aijaz Ahmad’s insightful
criticism presented in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures confines the traces to the
construction of “the Oriental subject,” or “colonial subject,” Cha focuses on the
infiniteness of traces. When the traces work organically to construct “the Oriental subject” (25) in the Saidian world, Cha dreams of a space in which the “infinity of traces”
moves, flows, remains, and waits with a little possibility for subversive agency. As
Maxine Hong Kingston, in The Woman Warrior, imaginatively links her identity with Fa
Mu Lan, a woman warrior from an ancient Chinese legend, Cha makes an imaginary
“inventory of traces” to construe her own subjective identity. The apparent hodge-
podgeness of Dictee reveals a Daedalusian labyrinth into which “infinity of traces” is
complicatedly woven. With Adriane’s red fleece ball in her hand, she goes on a journey to
construe herself as an Asian-American woman speaker/writer.
Cha’s project is, theoretically, also rooted in a poststructuralist deconstruction of
history, a postmodern planning which denies a “canonical” (or authoritative) version of
history, or which attempts to redefine the very concept of history itself. As Cha’s novel
reveals, and makes palpably clear, dominant powers—whether they are military, political,
economical, or cultural—have developed master narratives that justify their domination.
They manipulate the dominated to believe that the narrative that the established order
provides is natural and universal, and therefore the only right one. For example, history
that progresses in a linear fashion toward civilization has been a tenacious master
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narrative, at least since the Enlightenment or early modernity. In Foucault’s article,
“What is Enlightenment,” he articulates a radical critique of Enlightenment notions of history and totalizing historical narratives, particularly those informed by Kantian thought. Kant explains that Enlightenment offers “mankind a way out of, or exit from, immaturity into the improved condition of maturity” (qtd. in Foucault 34). Foucault raises, among many, three questions against Kant’s definition of Enlightenment. The first question is: “Are we to understand that the entire human race is caught up in the process of Enlightenment?” Based on a hidden assumption that “some human beings are more human than others,” Foucault argue the “Kantian conception of ‘mankind’ is prescriptive rather than descriptive” (Foucault 35). Kant’s “mankind” does not include “criminality, madness, disease, foreigners, homosexuals, strangers, women,” let alone the non-human world that Heideggerian being includes. The second question is, “who defines immaturity and maturity”? The third one is: Is only one way allowed “out of…immaturity into…maturity”? History, according to the Enlightenment consciousness represented by
Kant and Hegel, progresses automatically toward a programmed telos. Any movement that deviates from the regulated track is considered regress and anomaly. Alternative or resistant discourses after modernity have criticized this linear understanding of history and the exclusion of the other in the concept of the subject. Inheriting Nietzsche’s critique on “the myth of pure origins and the emancipatory myth of progress and teleology” (Gandhi 37), the critics of alternative or resistant discourses have emphasized the existence of an other that is not incorporated into the seemingly organic totality; for example, “Derrida’s name for these excluded Others is the ‘remainder,’ and Lyotard seeks their irreducible presence in the singularity and plurality of what he calls the ‘event’”
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(Gandhi 40). The hidden, “remaining” stories need to be exhumed out of the archive of history to challenge the oppressive totality. I find that this is what Cha does in Dictee.
Cha’s work also needs to be interpreted through the theoretical lens of counter-
historical narratives as understood by new historicists. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen
Greenblatt use the term counter-history to refer to the “spectrum of assaults on the grand
récits” which has been dominant from the past (53). Gallagher and Greenblatt themselves
borrow the term from Amos Funkenstein who traced the word to the rabbinical polemics against the Gospels and extended the use to the earlier stages of secular history (52).
Against the “convenient, self-justifying, official stories of priests and rulers,” a counter-
history stands on the side of “rebellion.” It is, however, open to the possibility of
becoming history, which could be countered by another counter-history. In this sense,
counter-history is also clearly related to and informed by the Gramscian term counter-
hegemony. The existence of a counter-history disturbs the myth of history as a linear
development and a unified entity in that a counter-history makes the emergence of other
numerous alternative histories possible. This concept of counter-history may also be
discussed in relation to Adrienne Rich’s re-vision or Homi Bhabha’s remembering. Rich,
in her essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision,” emphasizes the
transformative power of language. The imaginative transformation of reality, according to
Rich, is “in no way passive.” Rather, “It question[s], challenge[s], [and] conceive[s] of
alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment” (276). In
“Remembering Fanon,” Bhaba emphasizes the dynamic quality of the act of
remembering: “Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a
painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the
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trauma of the present” (193).6 In this context, Dictee attempts to counter the dominant
narrative of history.
Finally, the feminist theoretical lenses also shed light on Cha’s narrative project.
Not only was Cha an undergraduate and graduate student in the American academy
during the late 1970s and early 1980s, directly influenced by the second wave of feminist
thought in U.S. academic culture, but her project also invites materialist and postcolonial
feminist models of analysis as well. In the 1970s, as a backlash against the second wave
feminists’ “essentialist” definition of femininity, the recognition was increasingly
acknowledged that there was no such thing as generic “woman” and the existing feminist
theory was failing to address women’s various differences across class, culture, sexuality,
race, and other possible categories of identity. To deal with “the pressures to address
differences” existing among women (Hennessy xii), feminists were led to explore more
deeply how a subject is constructed, appropriating the arguments of postmodernism and
poststructuralism. For example, materialist feminists have been interested in the process
of “discursive construction of the subject” in order to deal with the problem of “who
feminism speaks for” (Hennessy xiii). Materialist feminists have made efforts to develop
feminist standpoint theory from which women can escape a watertight system in which
the “overly functionalist” subject is produced (Hennessy 75). According to Nancy
Hartsock, “A standpoint is not simply an interested position (interpreted as bias) but is
6 Homi Bhabha, in his introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition,” argues that Fanon’s address to the colonial experience is original and disturbing because “it rarely historicizes the colonial experience” (184). Bhabha argues, through image and fantasy only, without historicity, Fanon evokes the colonial condition most provocatively. While I do agree with Bhaba that historiography can contribute to “a unified notion of history” and “a unitary concept of Man,” it is not an effective strategy to avoid historicity itself. In Fanon’s case, his theory is deeply rooted in the historicized experience of colonialism in Algeria and Paris in 1960s. Dictee is interesting in that it “historicize[s] the colonial experience,” however, not as totality, but as fragments.
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interested in the sense of being engaged” (70). According to Hennessy, standpoint is “[a position] in society which is shaped by and in turn helps shape ways of knowing, structures of power, and resource distribution” (67). What the definitions of these two critics emphasize are dynamics between women’s lives [experiences] and interpretation thereof. The biological fact of being a woman does not automatically guarantee that the woman will see the world from a feminist standpoint. Because of the way ideology operates—in this case, patriarchy—which makes people forget that there are alternatives to existing arrangements, the feminist standpoint is the one to be achieved through struggle and education (Hartsock 71). Without this achievement of subversive standpoint, one ends up supporting a present system even if it is against one’s interest. Cha addresses a process in which an Asian American female subject with colonial memory procures a vantage point from which she sees, listens, speaks, and exists.
The question of “who feminism speaks for” has been a critical and controversial topic in the discourse of postcolonial feminists. Some scholars have argued that because representation is destined to distort the represented, the oppressed people should learn to express themselves. Other scholars have argued that the voiceless are voiceless because they cannot represent themselves, so representation is necessary. While Chandra Mohanty is a representative critic of the former perspective, Gayatri Spivak represents the second position. I find that Spivak’s argument is more appropriate for understanding Dictee, while Mohanty’s position still gives helpful insight on the work.
Mohanty, in her essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses,” describes how the Western feminists’ best-intentioned attempts to speak for third world women fall into the pitfalls of binary analytic, which is not essentially
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different from the rhetorical effect of colonialism. According to Mohanty, Western feminists create a monolithic image of “third world women” as a means of defining themselves. When first world feminists apply the universal and cross-cultural formula that third world women are “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, religious, domesticated, family-oriented, victimized” (199) without considering the specificity and historicity in which each of the third world women is situated, they go along with the primary qualities of the binary analytic: in the frame, the Western women preoccupy the place of the better, “educated, modern, as having control over their bodies and sexualities, and the ‘freedom’ to make their own decisions,” and, automatically, the inferior counterparts are assigned to the third world women (199). Mohanty, moreover, argues that this mistake is also applied to third-world scholars writing about their own cultures
(197). By the way, sometimes Mohanty seems to be complaining of the western scholars’ assigning of the inferior values to the third world, not of the binary itself; for example,
Mohanty writes:
She [Perdita Huston] writes, ‘What surprised and moved me most as I
listened to women in such very different cultural settings was the striking
commonality—whether they were educated or illiterate, urban or rural—of
their most basic values: the importance they assign to family, dignity, and
service to others.’ Would Huston consider such values unusual for women
in the west? (206-7)
Here, Mohanty criticizes Huston’s comment that she is surprised about the positive values she found in third world women, rather than critiquing Huston’s cross-cultural
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application. Mohanty, thus, seems to reveal her covert desire to be located in the superior
position within the binary analytic.
Contrary to Mohanty’s views, Spivak argues, in her paradigmatic essay, “Can the
Subaltern Speak?” that the “subaltern cannot speak” and that they should be represented
appropriately; however, her emphasis lies in the unspeakability of the subaltern class
rather than their appropriate representation. Spivak notes the phenomenon in which the
subaltern class—in her discussion, adivasis, “original inhabitant,” women of colonial
India—is doubly misrepresented: internally and externally by Hindus and the British. In
the example of sati, the self-immolation of widows, Indian women are locked between
two extremes without having their own voices: “white men are saving brown women
from brown men” and “the women wanted to die” (96). Spivak pays special attention to
the fact that sati was especially prevalent in Bengal where widows could inherit their
husband’s property. She explains that “what the British see as poor victimized women
going to the slaughter is in fact an ideological battle-ground”(96). She also notes that the
word sati itself was intentionally, or accidentally, mistranslated by a British colonizer.
While it originally has a meaning that equals the nobility of Heideggerian “being,” it was
translated to simply mean a “good wife” (100). The myth of Sati, the goddess Durga,
Spivak says, performs a similar function “while reversing every narrateme of the rite”
(103). In the myth, the goddess Durga is abused and killed by her father, and Siva, her
husband, avenges her. Finally, Durga’s corpse is dismembered by Vishnu and strewn
over the earth to be honored by the pilgrims. Spivak argues that to see this myth as
“proof of the feminism of classical Hinduism” is wrong because this myth inversely
repeats the mechanism of sati: “the living husband avenges the wife’s death, a transaction
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between great male gods fulfills the destruction of the female body and thus inscribes the earth as sacred geography” (103). Spivak concludes, “there is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak” (103). 7 To illustrate her argument, she takes an
example of a young Indian girl, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, who committed suicide during a
menstruation period to resist against the suspicion of a case of typical illicit pregnancy.
Lamenting that Bhuvaneswari’s death is not given an appropriate evaluation in spite of
her effort to represent herself, Spivak is confirmed again in her proposition that the
subaltern cannot speak. It is ironic to discover, while Mohanty falls into the pitfall of
simplification and unification she warns against, that Spivak restores Bhuvaneswari’s
original intention while she says it is not possible to represent by narrating what have
happened to Bhuvaneswari, and including such in her article. I plan to explore how the speaking subject of Dictee emulates Spivak’s paradox as a diseuse who relays for the voiceless.
Having overviewed various theoretical and critical lenses (poststructuralist, new
historicist, materialist feminist, and postcolonialist feminist) for interpreting Dictee, I
now turn to Cha’s own narrative figure of the diseuse as a key to interpreting and revising the text’s obscure recesses of counter-historical meanings.
II. Writer / Narrator (Mother /Daughter) as Diseuse in Dictee
In the journey that the autofictional narrator undertakes in Dictee, Cha the writer excavates the forgotten or hidden stories of women which remained as invisible traces in
7 In her essay, “How to read a ‘culturally different’ book,” Spivak corroborates her argument by analyzing how devadasi (temple dancer) is distorted by both the “native informant” and foreign scholars. “How to read a ‘culturally different’ book” Colonial discourse, postcolonial theory. Ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen. (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996) pp.126-50.
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history. Dictee describes the process of coming into speech of a subject who seems to have forgotten how to speak, may have been deprived of the ability to speak, or may have never been allowed a voice at all. Cha uses a rare French term, diseuse, to refer to the woman speaker, intending to pun on disuse or disease. She portrays how a subject becomes a diseuse who evokes people who have been forgotten in disuse or tabooed as a disease. Novena, or nine chapters of Dictee, named after the Greek Muses for the various genre of arts, is the record of the discipline required in the process of becoming a diseuse.
Going through the Novena, “the recitation of prayer and practicing of devotions during a nine day period”(19), the narrator-subject discovers an “infinity of traces” in herself.
She announces, “And it begins” (19) but is there an end to it?
Under the subtitle of DISEUSE, before the Novena (or the nine chapters) begins, the narrator describes a scene in which a diseuse tries to say something. This scene evokes multiple impressions. The pain accompanied by an enunciation evokes a woman in the process of “delivery,” portending various mother-daughter relationships to appear in Dictee. The diseuse gives birth to a word, a voice, and punctuation itself, “gasp[ing] from its pressure, its contracting motion” (4). On the other hand, the pain of the diseuse resembles that of an immigrant who practices speaking a foreign language, who
“Swallows, Inhales, Stutter. Starts. Stops before starts” to make a “Semblance of speech”
(75). This impression is supported by the translation practice questions appearing throughout Dictee. Above all, the diseuse Cha describes evokes an image of a spiritualistic medium, mudang,8 who mediates the living and the dead; she listens to
bitter stories of the dead and pacifies the resentment by relaying them. Numerous
8 Mudang, as a Korean word, refers to a woman shaman, who intercedes with spirits for the living.
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anonymous spirits struggle to speak through her: “She allows others. In place of her.
Admits others to make full. Make swarm. All barren cavities to make swollen. The
others each occupying her. Tumorous layers, expel all excesses until in all cavities she is flesh” (3-4). By overlapping several images on the diseuse, Cha creates a space in which historically and culturally diverse elements may cohabit. The narrative figure of the diseuse, as the speaking woman who creates and recreates in language, is also deeply entangled with the mother-daughter dialectic in Dictee. To reveal this entanglement, Cha draws on the mythic mother-daughter couples of Persephone-Demeter and Princess Pali
(and her mother), as well as autofictionally portraying her own mother-daughter relationship in the novel.
According to Cha, the mother is “inseparable from [that] which is [her daughter’s] identity, her presence” (Cha 49). She is “[her] first sound. The first utter.
The first concept” (49). To experience the moment of a mother’s delivery, as is described in the DISEUSE scene, as a daughter, she makes a circular space, “a series of concentric circles,” in which physical time, linear and progressive, is abolished. Cha extends this experience to other mother-daughter relationships in which one woman saves the other:
Demeter and Persephone, and Princess Pali in Korean folk tales (which I discuss at greater length below). In the Greek myth, the goddess of earth, Demeter, wanders all over the world from heaven to the underworld in search of her kidnapped daughter,
Persephone. Finally, Demeter finds her daughter in the Underworld, and by sabotaging
her power to harvest she makes Hades, the god of the dead, bring Persephone by the
order of Zeus. It seems that Cha is inclined to the myth in that a woman’s will is fulfilled
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through the exertion of very feminine power.9 The narrator, in the very beginning of
Dictee, invokes Persephone as her main muse.
O Muse, tell me the story
Of all these things, O Goddess, daughter of Zeus
Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us.10 (7)
The narrator seeks the goddess to begin the story wherever she wants, rather than narrating it chronologically from beginning to end. While Persephone is a daughter of
Zeus, who controls the world according to law and order, Cha invokes the goddess herself to inspire Cha to “write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve,” as Sappho (between 630 BC and 612 BC-570
BC), a legendary Greek poetess, wished, not confined to the linear development of a story.
Cha includes Sappho’s invocation as an epigraph to Dictee, and this epigraph is effective
in several ways. First of all, it signifies that her concept of writing is intimately involved
with body, especially a female body. As Cha says in the chapter of Thalia: Comedy, she
intends to “[follow] no progression in particular of the narrative but submits only to the
timelessness created in her body”(149). The epigraph also intimates that what Cha
9 Aristophanes’(ca. 456-386 BC) comedy, Lysistratē, is similar to the Persephone myth in that women terminated unwanted war—the Peloponnesian War—by sabotaging feminine function, withholding sex from their husbands.
10 This epigraph seems to be a parody of Homeric invocation in the Iliad: “Sing, O Muse, the rage of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures……” Whereas Homer implores the muse to invoke a story of war and heroes, Cha asks an anti-chronological story about women who are mothers and daughters.
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intends to say is something against the traditional thinking as Sappho represents in
Western history.11
The narrative figure of the diseuse is closely connected to the ironic figure of the martyr in Dictee; the writer (Cha) and the autofictional narrator (Theresa) become both the diseuse and the ironic martyr, as is exemplified in the narrative meditations on Saint
Thérèse of Lisieux(1873-1897). Cha adopts a rhetorical strategy of juxtaposition in representing the religious martyr/saint narrative of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. By juxtaposing
Thérèse’s story and prayers (on the odd numbered pages) with the story of the author’s mother, Hyung Soon Huo (on the even numbered pages), Cha aims to identify “Man-
God” (13) with Huo’s violent, patriarchal husband “who is unfaithful to her,” while he
11 While she was lauded to be elevated as a tenth muse in an epigram in the Anthologia Palatina because of her immense talent for poetry, she was, at the same time, a controversial subject because of her expressions of love for women in the poetry; lesbian, dating from the name of an island of her birth, Lesbos, and sapphic, which derives from her name, refers to homosexuality between women. According to Martin West, who restored and translated Sappho’s newly discovered poem about aging of body, “she has remained one of the most famous and evocative names from antiquity, a figure viewed by some with narrowed, by others with widened eyes; a socio-historical enigma, a litterateurs' Lorelei, a feminist icon, a scholars' maypole” (http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25337-1886659,00.html June 24 2005 )
According to historical and cultural contexts, Sappho’s homosexuality has been suppressed or emphasized. For example, Menander(ca. 342-291 BC), a Greek dramatist, mythologized that Sappho killed herself because of unreturned love for Phaon, a ferryman, who became young and beautiful through ointment given by Aphrodite; modern scholars interpret that this myth was invented to tame her subversive quality as a homosexual and to embellish her as a feminine model. During the Victorian era, Sappho was popularly consumed as a headmistress of a girls’ finishing school; this ahistorical move, “based more on conservative sensibilities than evidence,” according to Page DuBois, was an “attempt at making Sappho understandable and palatable to the genteel classes of Great Britain.” DuBois, Page, Sappho Is Burning, University of Chicago Press (1995). Contrastingly, in the modern feminist scene, her homosexuality is emphasized as a subversive quality against patriarchy.
John Cho, in his article “Tracing the Vampire,” imagines Cha’s tenth muse to be the female vampire, who exists “Outside Time. Outside Space”(Cha 28), transgressing “a primary societal directive for a woman[,which] is to bear children and propagate the population,” and violating natural concept of time. Coincidentally, while Cho does not point out, Sappho satisfies the vampiric image of the tenth muse; as a lesbian, she transgresses traditionally given gender codes, and, through her writing, she achieved immortality surviving several thousand years. Cho, John “Tracing the Vampire” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 3. 1996:87-113.
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demands faithfulness from her. St. Thérèse’s voluntary submission to God, accompanied by religious ecstasy and delight, is continuously evoked in the terms of marital duty to husband: “Her marriage to him, her husband. Her love for him, her husband, her duty to him, her husband” (103). While Thérèse’s authority as a sainted martyr is tainted by this juxtaposition, the author also describes her as one “who practiced a powerful discourse of her own,” which remains beyond martyrdom (Twelbeck 194). For example, Cha inserts
Thérèse’s saying,
I still cannot understand why women are so easily excommunicated in
Italy, for every minute someone was saying: “Don’t enter here! Don’t
enter there, you will be excommunicated!” Ah poor women, how they are
misunderstood! And yet they love God in much larger number than men
do and during the Passion of Our Lord, women had more courage than the
apostles since they braved the insults of the soldiers and dared to dry the
adorable Face of Jesus.” He allows misunderstanding to be their lot on
earth since, He chose it for Himself. In heaven, He will show that His
thoughts are not men’s thoughts, for then the last will be first. (Cha 105;
italics mine)
Thérèse, here, is far from her typical image: humility, obedience, and weakness. Thérèse, as the author Theresa (Hak Kyung Cha) does remember Thérèse, also remembers the anonymous women who “braved the insults of the soldiers” and “dared to dry the adorable Face of Jesus,” while the male apostles (whose names are recognized in the
Bible) hid themselves in fear. By punning on the “men,” even though that is not Thérèse’s
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intention, but Theresa Cha’s juxtaposition, which could mean either human being or just
male, Thérèse/a criticizes the structure in which “[women] are misunderstood” and “so
easily excommunicated” (105). In this context, “the last” could refer to women and “the
first” to men, and ironically, “His thoughts are not men’s thoughts” (105). Here, Thérèse seems to subvert earthly hierarchy between men and women, drawing on heavenly authority. The reversal of the binary opposition, on the other hand, is something only fully possible in “heaven.” In heaven, surely “the last will be first,” but on earth, Thérèse ends up implying, we should obey the given order in which the first is first, the last is last.
By juxtaposing the italicized part which does not originate from the same text with the earlier deitalicized part that is quoted, the narrator intentionally complicates the understanding of Thérèse de Lisieux, making it difficult to fix her as a subservient young
Carmelite, or a subversive woman hero.
Cha is equally invested in counter-hegemonic interpretations of Korean
myth/folklore and Korean national and colonial history. I begin by addressing Cha’s
revision of myth and folklore, focusing on her rewriting of two myths—that of
Persephone and that of Princess Pali—before turning my critical attention to Cha’s
revision of Korean history, focusing specifically on the counter-historical rewriting of the national/anti-colonial martyr Yu Guan Soon.
III. Cha’s revision of Korean Myth/Folklore and History
1) Maternal-Matyrological Counter-Hegemonic Revisions of Korean Folklore:
Princess Pali
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In Dictee, the mother-daughter relationship is explored as an alternative to the
oppressive and oppressing patriarchal ideology. Mother and daughter in Dictee constitute
an interdependent relationship, not a unilateral or hierarchical one. Dictee itself is a letter
written to the author-narrator’s mother. The narrator observes her mother’s life,
especially her experiences as a teacher at a primary school in Manchuria under Japanese
rule and her unhappy marriage with a typical patriarchal Korean husband, and
experiences her mother’s emotion as a medium, or a diseuse.
As with the myth of Demeter and Persephone discussed briefly above, Cha
incorporates a mother-daughter relationship from Korean folklore also. While the
Princess Pali story from Korean folklore reveals the global prevalence of oppressive
patriarchal systems across cultures and historical time periods (however divergent and unique), it also witnesses the specificity of an oppression that each patriarchal locale imposes upon different woman subjects. Interestingly, Cha changes some details of the tale at will to maximize the effect of the story. In most of the existent various local versions of the tale, Princess Pali travels to the Underworld to get medicine for her father or for both of her parents, not exclusively for her mother as appears in Dictee. In the original tale, Princess Pali is abandoned as a baby because she was a daughter begotten after a series of unwanted daughters. She serves nine years of domestic labor, gets married to an anchorite, and bears seven sons to him in order to procure the medicine for her father.12 Returning from the underworld, she revives the dead father, and, through the
order of the father king, she becomes a medium who mediates the living and the dead.
While it is not without subversive elements in the original, the tale is mainly about the
12 In a travestied version (Hamkyung Province version, north area of Korea), Princess Pali’s pregnancy is described almost as an unexpected mistake, which is attributed to the anchorite’s virile desire. It seems that this version betrays the patriarchal intention of the tale more frankly.
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strengthening of the patriarchal family and kingdom through a woman’s service and
sacrifice, namely that of the “dutiful daughter.” Pali serves several men who are
meaningful within the system of patriarchy—father, husband, and sons—through her
feminine power, and gets rewarded by becoming a medium only by means of the
patriarchal father’s order.
Cha changes some elements in her version of Princess Pali for Dictee: Pali travels
for her mother’s illness; Pali gets the medicine from a mysterious woman who draws
water from a well while asking for a bowl of water to quench her thirst; the medicine is
given as a simple gift without any condition except that Pali make no stops on her way
home and serve them in the bowl she was given. Through the changes, Cha attempts to
point out the overtly patriarchal elements of the original story and to subvert or parody
them. Cha’s Princess Pali story is almost a pastiche in which many heterogeneous
elements are mingled. The woman who draws water from a well reminds readers of the
Samaritan woman who met Jesus while she was secretly drawing water in fear of public
gaze (Holy Bible, John 4.5-30). In the Bible, Jesus provides spiritual water to the woman who has been searching for a thirst quencher throughout her entire life; her futile effort is represented by the five husbands she had. In the world created by Cha, the woman near the well is no more a passive being stricken with fatigue, fear, and shame. She gives a bowl of water to Princess Pali who “was very tired and thirsty” (169); listens to her story with sympathy and encourages her by smiling, nodding, and gently patting the girl’s head; and finally hands over a basket of medicine to cure the mother’s illness.
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She is described almost as a woman-turned Jesus.13 There are differences, however. Whereas, in the Bible, the hierarchy between woman as a seeker and Jesus as the holder of Truth is emphasized, in Cha’s story the similarity or solidarity among the women stands out. For example, both of the women have a white kerchief on the head
“to avoid the strong rays” and a smock or an apron over the skirt (167). As a young woman or young girl from the working class, they look alike and understand each other without lots of words. While a Samaritan woman reaches her salvation through a catechetical conversation with Jesus, the communication between the two Asian women of the Korean folktale is achieved mainly in stillness and quietness while they do not exclude verbal expression. It is more so because Cha describes what happens between the women in a sparse style even without having the direct voices from the women.
Interestingly and meaningfully, the scene in which Princess Pali asks for water of the woman resembles the moment when a diseuse as a medium is born:
She [Pali] opened her mouth as if to speak, then without a word, searched
for a shaded area and sat down. … She exhaled a long sigh. She closed her
eyes briefly….She [the woman] heard faintly the young girl uttering a
sequence of words, and interspersed between them, equal duration of
pauses. Her mouth is left open at the last word. She does not seem to
realize that she had spoken. (168)
13 In Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Caroline Walker Bynum points out feminine, especially maternal, attributes and imagery were repetedly used to explain qualities of Jesus and abbot in the Twelfth-century Cistercian community: “To Bernard [of Clairvaux], the maternal image is almost without exception elaborated not as giving birth or even as conceiving or sheltering in a womb but as nurturing, particularly suckling” (115). She argues, however, these maternal names and metaphors were a strategy to beat “a complex rhythm of renouncing ties with the world while deepening ties with community and between the soul and God” (166), not so much as influencing the community’s attitude toward women, or nuns. (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1982)
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Cha maximizes the urgency of the diseuse’s voice by juxtaposing it with the request for
water to quench an extreme thirst and fatigue. While it is painful for Pali to say in her
physical situation, it is more painful not to say, as Cha narrates in the beginning: “Inside
it the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say. To
not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak” (3). In terms of structure, the close linkage between the beginning and the Princess Pali episode in the last chapter of the
Novena, Polymnia: Sacred Poetry, makes “Chung Wai 중원,” “a circle within a circle, a series of concentric circles,” a space through which Cha aims to arrive through the nine days of prayers; rather, the space is made rather than arrived through bending the progressive line and connecting the beginning point and ending point. With a little twist, it becomes a Mobius strip, in which beginning and ending points subject to each other to become unfixable and indistinguishable one from the other. Now it becomes unclear which one is beginning or ending. The image of Pali’s “small palms wrapped perfectly the roundness of the bowl” (169) concisely visualizes the “Chung Wai,” “a circle within a circle”; in this “series of concentric circles,” physical linear time is abolished, and some who were not remembered in the progress of history will finally get a name. This space is compared to a womb in which a life is created. It is the space where the diseuse “relays the others,” “gasp[ing] from its pressure, its contracting motion. Inside her voids. It does
not contain further. . .The delivery” as in birth and speech (4-5).
As discussed earlier, Cha has an ambivalent attitude toward Christianity. The
princess Pali story reveals the ambivalence in more depth. While Cha criticizes the
oppressive nature of patriarchy and linearly progressing history with which Christianity
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has served as an accomplice, she also intimates the counter-historical possibilities of a
revised Christianity as a liberating discourse for women and oppressed minorities. In
Cha’s story, the container is given almost the same importance as the contents, whether it
is water or medicine. The bowl and the water which it holds together manifest or reveal a
counter-historical narrative that the two collectively share, but neither holds separately:
“The woman rested the bucket on the rim of the well and reached inside her apron
bringing out a small porcelain bowl. The chipped marks on it were stained with age, and
there ran a vein towards the foot of the bowl where it was beginning to crack” (168). The
bowl remembers whom it has served through the traces or wounds engraved in its body,
the chipped marks stained with age, and a crack which runs toward the base. It seems to
compensate for a historicity the water in the well lacks. Only when the water is paired with the bowl can it be handed to the thirsty. Likewise, the woman tells Pali that the medicine must be served inside the bowl (169). This inseparable pairing of the contents with container seems to affirm the Christian dogma that Jesus is the “word [which] became flesh,” the only legitimate container for the logos (Holy Bible, John 1.14). Jesus, with wounds inscribed on his body, bears witness to a paradoxical historicity in immortality. The bowl would be kept as a souvenir to evoke the time when Pali and the woman met even after the medicine was gone. In this nether-worldly setting where time seems to have stopped, the bowl embodies a paradoxical historicity. As Pali is a paradoxical being who travels to the world of the dead (as a living being) in order to obtain medicine for her dying mother, the bowl is a subject of paradox which embodies historicity in a space where physical time is abolished. The bowl seems to summarize a quality of a diseuse that Cha employs as a metaphor for her existence, an Asian (Korean)
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American woman writer; as a bowl mediates the water and the need (thirst or illness), she
is to deliver the voices of the voiceless relaying their sentiments, inscribing the pains and
wounds in and on her body.
The pains and wounds in/on her body are connected to the martyr image penetrating Dictee. According to the martyr narrative, he or she is not a martyr yet, but a
survivor until he or she reaches death from a suffering. Only when he or she fails to
survive, he or she succeeds in becoming a martyr: “For whoever wants to save his life
will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it” (Holy Bible, Matthew 16. 25).
Other scholars have noted and analyzed the ironic presence of the martyr figure in Dictee.
For example, Eun Kyung Min, in her article “Reading the Figure of Dictation in Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee,” points out the paradoxical status of a poet and martyr as medium: “She [Poet/Martyr] becomes visible to the degree that she is able to absent herself” (315). E. Kim observes that Koreans, historically, have been preoccupied almost to the point of obsession with this martyr narrative. According to E. Kim, the rare success of Christian missionary efforts in Korea can be attributed to this tendency of emphasizing the reciprocal relationships between spirit and flesh (15). The more tragic and impressive the death a martyr dies, the stronger the influence that the martyr can exert postmortem. The image of diseuse as a martyr in Dictee becomes more ironic, or therefore more meaningful, when we consider that the author Theresa Cha herself died a premature death at the age of 31, just one week after Dictee was published, leaving it her quasi-posthumous and only work.
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2) Maternal-Martyrological Counter-Historical Revisions of Korean History: Yu
Guan Soon
Reading Dictee involves reexperiencing the historical wounds of Korea through which the country and its people had to persevere ever since its modernization began. As
E. Kim suggests, while Dictee is not confined to ethnically limited material, it contains at the same time very Korean-specific background. Without knowledge about the modern history of Korea, of course, one can appreciate this work to an extent; however, for a deeper understanding one needs to have some basic, if not thorough, information about the historical ordeals Korea has been through, especially between 1894 and 1980. In
Dictee, Cha interweaves personal history with Korean national history, forcing her readers to see the one-sidedness of linear conceptions of history and historical narratives.
The three most outstanding historical events in Dictee are Sam Il (March 1)
Independence Movement in 1919, the first major national protest for Korean independence from Japanese rule; Sa Il Gu (April 19) Student Demonstration in 1960, pro-democracy protest against the first president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee; and the
KwangJu Democratization Movement in 1980, another pro-democracy protest against the military coup d’e tat by general Chun Doo-hwan. Sam Il Independence Movement, then, seems to be especially and most deeply rooted in the (un)consciousness of Korean immigrants as an identity-deciding element. In most novels by Korean Americans, the event is at the very least commented upon or mentioned; for example, it is mentioned in the autobiographical novel East Goes West by Younghill Kang, the novel The Comfort
Woman by Nora Okja Keller, and even in the novel Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee of which content seems to be far from the historical incident.
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The Japanese colonial legacies and the nationalist, anti-colonialist struggles against Japan are particularly salient in the Korean counter-historical imaginary. the official colonial narrative, which follows the linearly programmed telos, asserts that
“Japan would introduce reforms into the governmental administration along the line of the modern civilization of Europe and America, and that she would advise and counsel our people in a friendly manner” (Cha 35). It is not surprising that this narrative follows a logic presented by Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.”14
Take up the White Man’s burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
------
Take up the White Man's burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
14 Kipling, Rudyard. “White Man’s Burden” Fictions of Empire: complete texts with introduction, historical contexts, critical essays. Ed. John Kucich. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. 326-7. This poem originally appeared in McClure’s Magazine in February of 1889 as a response to the U.S. takeover of the Philippines after the Spanish-American war, encouraging the States to undertake imperial responsibility, as Britain and other European countries did. It is implying that Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice president and then President, to whom Koreans of Hawaii would send letter of petition for independence, made a positive evaluation of this poem, saying “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.” History Matters. 27 JULY 2005.
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And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to naught.
In this poem, a colonizer is described as a Promethean hero, who delivers a torch of
civilization to a “heart of darkness,” sacrificing his own safety, prosperity, and
convenience. According to the above narrative, in order to introduce benighted Korea to
the modern civilization, the Japanese advisers intrude far into the most private areas of
the Korean people’s lifestyles: the length of pipes, style of dress, the attiring of the hair of
the people, and above all alteration of the official language (Cha 29).
Dealing with the historical time period of the Japanese occupation of Korea from
1910-1945, Cha (in Dictee) remembers and counter-historically memorizes, as well as
revises, a 17 year-old female martyr Yu Guan Soon, who was tortured and killed because of her leadership in the independence movement. Cha parallels Yu’s narrative with several other narratives which compensate for, compete with, or contradict one another.
Cha, for example, juxtaposes Hawaiian-Koreans’ diplomatic petition to the American
President for independence with the physical resistance of the then-sixteen-year-old female student, Yu Guan Soon, who becomes a national martyr at the young age of seventeen. Revealingly, Cha compares Yu to Jeanne d’Arc and Ahn Joong Kun, another
Korean martyr who assassinated Ito Hirobumi, resident general of Korea in October 26,
1909, and who consequently was executed on March 26, 1910. Even though Yu was dissuaded from taking part in the mass demonstration of March 1, 1919 (because of her age and gender), her “conviction and dedication” made it possible for her to be one of the
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leaders in the movement (Cha 30). This is very rare considering the persistent patriarchal
tradition of Korea in the early 20th Century.15 When compared to Yu’s exhausting
physical efforts for national independence,16 the letter—“PETITION FROM THE
KOREANS OF HAWAII TO PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT(1905),” which petitions the
President of the U.S.A., Theodore Roosevelt, who positively evaluated the poem “White
Man’s Burden,” to “help our country at this critical period of our national life” (36) and which was signed by two male adults, P.K. Yoon and Syngman Rhee—almost seems to be another conspiracy to invalidate the Korean people’s enthusiasm, a people “who willingly [give] their lives for independence,” let alone the direct oppression from the
Japanese colonial government (30). It is no coincidence that after independence in 1945,
Syngman Rhee, one of the main petitioners, becomes the first president of South Korea and rules as a dictator under the auspices of the U.S. government for twelve years until he
is exiled to Hawaii due to the Sa Il Gu (April 19) Student Demonstration of 1960.
Considering Cha’s narration of the April 19 demonstration, in which her brother was
involved, the purpose of juxtaposing the activity of Yu Guan Soon and that of Syngman
Rhee seems to lend legitimacy to Yu’s actions. The elitist diplomatic effort for
independence counters the official colonial narrative of Japan, and the domestic mass
demonstration, represented by death of a young girl, Yu Guan Soon, counters both of the
narratives. Through this point and counter-point, this history and counter-history, to
15 According to statistics, the three months of the movement recorded 1,542 rallies, more than 2 million total participants, 7,509 deaths, 15,961injured, 46,948 arrested, 47 churches, 2 schools, and 715 houses burnt. 1,929 female students, which are not a few, from 10 schools in Seoul, capital city of Korea, participated in the rally. Such statistics, which reveals a wide spectrum of the participants and their spontaneity, qualifies the March 1st Movement as a civil revolution.
16 Cha narrates: “She is appointed messenger and she travels on foot to 40 towns, organizing the nation’s mass demonstration to be held on March 1, 1919” (30).
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evoke Gallagher and Greenblatt’s theoretical term, each of the narratives is subject to a newer interpretation and achieves ambivalence.
The main context in which Cha remembers Yu Guan Soon is that of the martyr
narrative. Cha emphasizes the martyrdom of Yu’s life by specifying the time of her birth
and death in the beginning of the chapter, Clio (history) in which Yu’s story is told:
“BIRTH: By Lunar Calendar, 15, March 1903 / DEATH: 12, October, 1920. 8:20 A.M.”
(25). In Cha’s imagination, Yu possesses the requisite courage to confront suffering and
even death with dignity by recalling the similar sufferings of other, older martyrs: “She
calls the name Jeanne d’Arc three times. / She calls the name Ahn Joong Kun five times”
(28). Jeanne d’Arc (c.1412- 30 May 1431) is a French martyr who was sentenced to death
by the religious court’s judgment that she was a heretic. Ahn, as already noted, is a
Korean martyr who assassinated Ito Hirobumi, resident general of Korea, and who was
therefore executed. While Cha attempts to recover Yu Guan Soon from history’s oblivion
and to evoke her exceptional qualities as a martyr-heroine, she too is well aware of the
danger that Yu’s life will be merely consumed as that of yet another martyr-heroine
narrative used to strengthen the dominant narrative, whether it is that of elitism,
nationalism, patriarchy, or Eurocentrism:
Guan Soon is the only daughter born of four children to her patriot father
and mother. From an early age her actions are marked exceptional. History
records the biography of her short and intensely-lived existence. Actions
prescribed separate her path from the others. The identity of such a path is
exchangeable with any other heroine in history, their names, dates, actions
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which require not definition in their devotion to generosity and self-
sacrifice. (30; italics mine)
The biography that the History records is a commodity to confirm the dominant system, not a record of originality; therefore, it is “exchangeable with any other heroine in
history,” while it emphasizes the separateness from the others, in other words, common
people.
Cha, in Dictee, thus warns against the possibility that the Yu Guan Soon martyr-
story (or martyology) becomes merely a Korean version of the Indian Sati myth
(discussed by Spivak) in which “a transaction between great male gods [Syngman Rhee
and the U.S. President] fulfills the destruction of the female body.” As Yu is sacrificed at
the altar of national independence, Syngman Rhee and other national leaders, “who
humbly lay before your Excellency [President Roosevelt]” (34) as “[his] obedient
servants” (36) prepared their paths to power, turning the future of the country to another
colonial power, the United States, which played a certain role in the division of Korea
(North and South) and the resulting military dictatorship that has existed for several
decades since nominal independence in August 1945. The South Korean government
neglected to purge Korean society of its colonial past—for example, to punish war
criminals and those who actively participated in the colonial rule—on the excuse that
there was no ready-at-hand manpower for a newborn government other than the ones
who served the Japanese rule. The betrayers who oppressed compatriots during the
Japanese colonial ruling still remained in power in the so-called liberated nation without
paying a price for their betrayal; rather, because of the absence of Japanese, they were
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promoted to the positions the Japanese rulers previously took. This experience of injustice distorted collective (sub)consciousness about justice and furthered opportunistic attitudes across the society. In 1967, Jung Hee Park, another dictatorial president who came after Syngman Rhee by means of coup d’état of 1961, tempted by financial support that Japan promised for economic development, resumed diplomatic relations with Japan in spite of strong opposition from citizens and students. Resuming a relationship with
Japan, Park’s regime guaranteed that they would not request compensation for the comfort women and laborers who were expropriated under the colonial rule between
1910 and 1945. This guarantee still functions as an excuse for the Japanese government to refuse to officially apologize or compensate the comfort women and the laborers for the savage war crimes committed against them.
In the frustrated Korean people’s subconsciousness, Yu Guan Soon is remembered as a ghost whose spirit cannot rest in peace rather than a patriot who died a courageous, if martyred death. In my school days in the 1990s, Yu Guan Soon was a popular heroine of school horror stories. One of its kind has it that “if you come to know all of the one hundred secrets of Yu Guan Soon, you will die.” Another version says that “if you look in the mirror at midnight, a reflection of Yu Guan Soon will appear, with a sword in her mouth.” Why is this national martyr represented as a ghost with han (a bitterness that has resulted from unresolved sorrow) in these children’s school-hovering stories?
Paradoxically, the stories seem to reveal a poignantly accurate portrait of the martyr, mutilated by the collaborating efforts of dominant historical narratives, whether they are imperial or national. Dictee, resisting the horror story that Yu’s life and death have
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regrettably become, attempts to restore the forgotten, erased, or distorted voices of Yu and
other violated spirits, and the tool is writing.
Dead words. Dead tongue. From disuse. Buried in Time’s memory.
Unemployed. Unspoken. History. Past. Let the one who is diseuse, one
who is mother who waits nine days and nine nights be found. Restore
memory. Let the one who is diseuse, one who is daughter restore spring
with her each appearance from beneath the earth.
The ink spills thickest before it runs dry before it stops writing at all. (Cha
133)
Evoking St. Thérèse, Jean D’Arc, Persephone, Demeter, Pali, Yu, and her own mother as
an autofictional presence in the novel, Cha herself is born as a diseuse in this womb-like
space of Dictee, which she herself created by curving the linearly progressing time, where a mother is a daughter and a daughter is a mother, and each one saves each other.
In this analysis, I have discussed the ways in which the narrator construes herself as a diseuse, who is a mother, a daughter, a medium, a martyr, and a writer. Through an imaginative “inventory of traces,” she embraces diverse qualities, even “remainder,”
“event,” or “residue of word” (177) what the conventional History put in disuse or tabooed as a disease. The writer, through a counter-historical perspective, resurrects what remains as a “fossil trace of word” (177). The narrator-subject says,
Why resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound. The past
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emotions all over again. To confess to relive the same folly. To name it
now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment by
each fragment from the word from the image another word another image
the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion. (33)
The term, resurrection, which would be Cha’s parallel for Rich’s Re-vision and Bhaba’s
Remembering, interestingly, has a meaning of “excavation,” along with its more common meaning of “rising from the dead.” The hidden narratives, which remained—or were abandoned—without being subsumed into the furnace of history, are released from their disuse through the agency of the diseuse, who meticulously “rummage[e] in the ruins below,” “collect[s] every relic [she] could find,” and “studie[s] them with love” (Eco
500). What she will have is “a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books” (500) as Adso of Melk, a narrator of The Name of the Rose (1980), says of the remains he could salvage from a library of a Benedictine abbey which had been destroyed by fire. While Adso feels sorry for this “kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one” as an incomplete, imperfect, and damaged one, Dictee’s narrator does not intend to reconstruct a complete whole from the salvaged fragments; she seems to be interested in the process of excavation itself and its effect on remembering and revision. Every time a small fragment is exhumed from the oblivion of the history, this female, Korean/Korean-American, postcolonial writer would claim that the history should be rewritten.
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CHAPTER 3
“The Arcana of Human Interpretation”: From a Spy to an Ethical Writer in Native
Speaker by Chang-rae Lee
The men below would keep at their work, steadily clipping away until dusk at the overgrowth—“man-a-curing” was Lelia’s reprise—showing no mercy to the thorny shrubs, the crapweeds and wild grasses, the tiny shoots of anything that rose up between the cracks of their meticulously land-scaped stones. (Native Speaker 35)
Recently, I happened to talk to a young Korean-American man in his early-thirties.
I met him in his father’s clothing store in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, who
immigrated to the U.S. thirty-five years ago, sent all three of his children to the ivy-
league universities: they earned degrees at Georgetown, Princeton, MIT, MBA at Harvard, and Law School at Harvard. The man with whom I talked, his father’s youngest son, was working as a computer programmer in San Francisco and had come back home for the
Christmas holidays. He was helping serve customers in his father’s store. The customers were mainly African-Americans from the adjacent downtown area, many of whom were dependent on social welfare checks. Compared to his father, who has run his store with
“iron attitude”(185) over the past 35 years, seeing his customers generally as adversaries who can turn into a thief or a robber at any moment, the son was much nicer and more respectful toward the customers. He seemed to feel embarrassed when his father called the customers derogatory names in Korean they did not understand, even if he had his own reasons for doing so: bounced checks, never retrieved layaways, the return of a pair of trousers with a broken zipper, and the list goes on and on. He would look at his father with an imploring face, saying “Appa, please” a Korean word for daddy, not father.
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When I asked him which city he liked best among the three cities in which he has lived—
Cincinnati where he grew up, Boston where he went to college and graduate school, and
San Francisco where he now works—he answered, with little hesitation, “San Francisco.”
When I asked the reason that he chose that city over Cincinnati’s affordable living cost
and Boston’s historicity and convenience, he simply answered, “diversity.” I wanted to
ask why the “diversity” factor should be so important to a person like him, American-
born, MIT-educated, and fluent in English. The man also said he was having trouble with
his parents owing to his relationship with a Chinese-American girlfriend. Because his
brother and sister married Korean-Americans, he said, it would take time and effort for
their parents to accept his Chinese-American girlfriend. I suggested that he read Native
Speaker: as a “real life” Henry (the name of the protagonist in Lee’s novel), he seemed to
be one of the readers who may most deeply appreciate the language of “fruit stand and
cash register” (280) the novel presents with love and hate. Then, it is not just his parents’
acceptance of his girl friend which the man should struggle with; with his “wide
immigrant face” (343), he should confront and reconcile with a society which seems to be
“barely tolerating [his] presence” (51).
In the present presidential campaign of 2008, I have noted that immigration—or
to be more precise, anti-immigration—is a greater issue than it seems to have been during
the time that I have resided in the country as a foreign student enrolled at the University
of Cincinnati. While diverse arguments compete about why this fact is so, it seems, as
John Kwang (another character) regretted in Native Speaker, written in 1995, “There is a closing going, slowly but steadily, a narrowing of who can rightfully live here and be counted” (274). While the word “ diversity” has become commonplace enough, perhaps
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even a commodity in today’s U.S. consumer culture that celebrates and markets
“difference,” as Kwang says, “[t]he underlying sense of what’s presented these days is
that this country has difference that ails rather than strengthens and enriches” (274). I
intend to explore how an Asian American subject negotiates his or her identity which is
never completely contained, to borrow Foucault’s vocabulary, by the “order of things.”
My main argument is that Henry Park, the protagonist of Native Speaker, is
transformed through the violent, unsettling events depicted in the novel from a mere
technical writer, who is faithful to a marginal role that the dominant society posits, into
an ethical writer, who feels responsible for his words and their meaning and tries to take
responsibility for what he writes. As a technical writer, he has been a “scribe”(204), “of
the most reasonable eye”(203), who “follow[s] like a starved dog the entrails of any
personal affect,” excluding “anything that even smacks of theme or moral” (203). As a
fly-on-the-wall, this status of a technical writer afforded him a place in which he can hide
his identity; instead, it demanded complete exposure of the subject in question. Henry has betrayed the subjects so that he could remain in the shadow. While the status of an ethical writer empowers him to choose what to expose or hide about the subject, it also demands that the teller “come out, step into the light, [and] bare himself” (204). The transformation from a technical writer to an ethical writer costs him dearly, but also provides Henry a place where he can confront the “otherizing”1 gaze that has penetrated
him and dissected him socially. Along the thread, I intend to explore how Chang-rae Lee
the author has Henry the protagonist go through the transformative process, through a
parodic employment of spy novel genre, and in terms of autofiction and metafiction how
1 I use this critical term to refer to the dominant power’s machination to separate the “other” from the “we,” making hierarchical distinction between them, especially in Foucauldian context.
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this debut work reveals a process in which Lee becomes a writer.
As a model for an ethical writer, I draw on Richard Rorty’s notion of the
“edifying philosopher” who seeks solidarity with other human beings as a necessary requirement for being ethical, not that he believes in an ineluctable “essence” which works as a foundation for everything. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), critically surveying the history of Western philosophy, Rorty contrasts the “systemic philosopher” from the “edifying philosopher.” According to G. Elijah Dann’s summary, the exemplary “edifying philosopher[s]”—such as Goethe, Kierkeggard, Santayana,
William James, John Dewey, the later Wittgenstein, and the later Heidegger— despite their philosophical diversity, share in common the following points.
First is their shared suspicion of the idea that the task of human
investigation is to know “essences.” There is secondly, a general distrust
for taking a successful methodology from one discipline and applying it as
an algorithm for all other disciplines to use in the hope it will grant similar
success. Thirdly, and related to the second, against the constructive
impulse of the systemic philosopher, the edifying philosopher is
suspicious of overly optimistic visions of vocabulary. Once one becomes
enamored with a particular vocabulary, what usually follows is the desire
to show how this way of speaking, in Rorty’s metaphor, mirrors nature.
(31)
That is to say, while “systemic philosophers” attempt to construct a grand narrative as a cure for all of which effects influence all humans and the entirety of nature, believing in
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ahistorical and irreducible “essence,” “edifying philosophers” with iconoclastic attitude
point out a partial nature of the grand narrative, disclose traces of suture on the apparently seamless whole, and “destroy for the sake of their own generation” (Rorty 369).
Interestingly, Rorty discovers what he thinks of “edifying philosophers” in “poets.” Like
“poets,” who are more interested in causing a “sense of wonder” (370) than correct representation, “edifying philosophers” focus on difference between words in meaning production, rather than referentiality of words to nature. Consequently, the “edifying philosophers offer satires, parodies, aphorisms” just as poets do (370).
*
While Native Speaker is not autobiographical in the way that East Goes West is, it certainly contains emotions and issues directly coming from the author’s life: take, for example, the difficulty and embarrassment Henry feels in the process of language transition from Korean to English in his childhood; alienated, he feels acutely his own status as a minority in U.S. society; the author and protagonist also share the death of their mothers during adolescence; Lee is also married to a white American wife as Henry is. Chang-rae Lee was born on July 19, 1965 in Korea. His family moved to the United
States when he was three years old and settled in New York City. After Lee graduated
from Yale University in 1987, he temporarily worked as an analyst on Wall Street. He earned a Master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Oregon in 1993 and
published his first novel Native Speaker in 1995. Native Speaker was hailed by critics as
a “brilliant debut and a tremendous contribution to Asian-American literature,” and was
awarded many literary prizes, including The Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award. Lee
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has since published two additional novels, A Gesture Life (1999) and Aloft (2004). Lee is also the director of the MFA program at Cornell University.
While Lee grew up in a relatively affluent family (his father a psychiatrist and his mother a housewife), he was a keen observer of the less fortunate lives of other Korean immigrants in his neighborhood in Flushing, New York, the second biggest Korean immigrant community in the U.S. following Los Angeles, California. Most of the Korean
Americans in Flushing rely on mercantile work— making their living out of a not-so- fancy grocery store, a dry cleaner, or a beauty supply store—and trying to send their children to expensive, renowned ivy-league universities. They hope that their children
would be able to leave the community without remembering or ever coming back.2
Native Speaker is a sensitive record on how these immigrant parent’s wishes form and
deform the offsprings’ identities.
In terms of time, Native Speaker is a recollection of what the narrator, Henry Park,
experiences and observes. The first two thirds of the story is written in the past tense,
while the remaining one third is narrated in the present tense—to be more specific, from
the point where Henry describes the killing of Eduardo in John Kwang’s election office.
The shift in tense, however, seems to be just a nominal move because the narrator
intimates a tragic termination of the political career of John Kwang, whom the plot
centers around. Describing the very first meeting with Kwang, Henry reveals what is in
store for this promising city councilman in the future. It is more ironic because the
2 Elaine H. Kim, in “Teumsae-eso: Korean American Women between Feminism and Nationalism,” notes Korean immigrants' desire for [re]entry into middle-class, which they lost during immigration, represented by enthusiasm for the education of their children: “Korean immigrant women electronics assemblers or hotel room cleaners, some of whom hail from South Korean middle classes and know very well the difference between MIT and Cal Tech as destinations for their sons” (312). Violence and the body: race, gender, and the state. Ed. Arturo J. Aldama. Bloomington, IN :Indiana UP, 2003. 311- 21.
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revelation is followed just after the description, almost idealizing, of his first impression
of John Kwang the politician:
Maybe it was the kind of light that emanated from him, or the way his
figure bent the light to a crucial incidence, but from any distance at all he
appeared to me as though he were ascending an invisible ramp that
magically preceded him. His warm-hued face was square, owning to the
eminence of his angular jaw, which carved out two perfect hollows on
either side of his chin. He still had those shadows of youth upon him. He
was clean-shaven, as always.
I think I will forever see him with that smooth face, almost glow, almost
pubescent, despite my memory of those final days of his shortened career,
when his true age seemed to besiege him all over and at once. (134)
Why does Lee have the narrator, Henry Park, blow the secret of the plot so early, spoiling
the suspense readers could have enjoyed and shattering the possibility that the work could be read as a generic spy novel? It seems to be an intentional move in order to make it
certain that his interest lies in pursuit of an inner identity of the characters, not in
suspense, which is sought in the typical spy novel. Tina Chen, in “Impersonation and
Other Disappearing Acts in Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee,” understands the “mask”
of a spy novel as a double move “to expose the formal limitation of narration of Henry’s
story but also to acknowledge the important role conventions play in dictating the stories
by which we know ourselves and others” (640). Lee secures the rhetorical space necessary to express his protagonist’s identity dilemma by adopting, but only partially,
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the spy novel genre. After this revelation, readers would anticipate Kwang’s fall in spite of his seemingly promising career and evaluate his personal and public attraction, or activity as a politician, considering a predicted denouement, not at face value.
Henry reveals that his job as a private spy on Kwang went awry in spite of its seemingly “a piece of cake” easiness:
I thought I could peg him easily; were I an actor, I would have all the
material I required for my beginning method. This is what Hoagland
meant when he promised the assignment would be simple, that I’d just
have to lurk close enough and witness the play of the story as we already
knew it. For ours, finally, were just act of verification. I would tick off
each staging of the narrative, every known turn and corner-turn. The what
and the what and the what. (139-40)
Here, Henry describes his spying job as if it were a role assigned to a method actor. For a person like Henry, who feels that he possesses “a string of serial identity” (33), this method acting3 is not a difficult task as long as he has enough material to draw on to perform the emotions and roles assigned. Then, why does Park say his work went wrong? Paradoxically, Park says it went awry because he, as a spy, saw too much of
Kwang, the object of scrutiny, surveillance, or investigation: “I believed I had a grasp of
3 Developed by the Russian actor, producer, and theoretician Konstantin Stanislavsky, this “Method” acting refers to the style of acting that actors draw on his or her personal “emotional memory” to express a character, not just observing the character outside. Some directors saw this kind of acting style as a threat because the stage could be unpredictable and uncontrollable because of an actor’s’ identification with a character (“The Method, or Stanislavsky System” Britannica.com).
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his identity, not only the many things he was to the public and to his family and to his
staff and to me, but who he was to himself, the man he beheld in his most private mirror”
(140). With an essentialist position, Henry defines identity as a final mask “that would
not strip off” after one’s many other social “faces fell away” (141).4 He sticks to the idea
that one’s true identity exists somewhere, kept intact, without being influenced by outside
elements, whether social or historical. While his conception of an identity is not
unproblematic, Henry as a spy does not have a plan to explore this hidden area of
sub/unconsciousness. For a person like Henry, a person of distance, the insight into one’s
innermost part is a threatening experience because he would be overwhelmed by it,
making an observer’s perspective impossible; at the same time, it is captivating because it
can be an exit from a hiding place to an agora where he can seek solidarity with other
human beings. In his previous assignments, Henry failed because he exposed too much
of himself to the subject, Emile Luzan, sympathizing Filipino psychiatrist. The reason
for Henry’s failure in the Luzan case is more understandable than it is in the Kwang case:
in the latter case, Henry fails because, beyond his duty and expectations, he could “spy
out those moments of his [Kwang’s] self-regard,” “peer through the crack of the door,” and “watch as he bore off each successive visage” when the appointed plan was “just to give a good scratch to the surface” (140-1). Through the two consecutive failures in the assignments, Henry is given his own assignment—one that “[he] had not thought to seek,
but will search out now for the long remainder of [his] days” (141). That assignment
4 In a similar context, Chen expresses this essentialist notion of identity as a “romantic” one, coming from Henry’s struggling with several dilemmas in which he is situated: “Henry must wrestle with the histories that shape him: the conditioning that teaches him his ‘truest place in the culture’(118) is as a spy; the practice of imposture that problematizes the authenticity he craves; and the difficult mastery of linguistic fluency”(639). Chen, Tina. “Impersonation and other disappearing acts in Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee” Modern Fiction Studies V.48 number3, Fall 2002. 637-667.
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seems to be a searching of Henry’s own identity in all its multiplicity. He becomes the one, against the advice of Jack Kalantzakos, Hnery’s mentor and colleague at the company, who “question[s] the rules too much” (Lee 288). As Rorty’s “edifying philosopher” violates “a sort of meta-rule,” which abolishes “representation” as a goal of philosophy, regardless of whether this is a correct or incorrect representation of how things are, Henry as an ethical writer refuses to write for the company, whether it is a good or bad writing for the ones he cares and himself. As an “edifying philosopher” is interested in taking part in conversations as a “love[r] of wisdom” (372), not making an inquiry as a scientific seeker of truth, Henry gets less obsessive with the correctness of his language and learns to use the language as a means for connection with other human beings in spite of its imperfection as a tool.
*
Language as a site of self-doubt and self-affirmation
Native Speaker is a novel that deals with the seemingly obsolete issue of how an
Asian American man “claim America.” In fact, as King-Kok Cheung appropriately points out in her introduction to An Interethnic Company to Asian American Literature, the emphasis in Asian American literary studies has moved from identity politics—to summarize “claim America5”—to heterogeneity and diaspora, which is more concerned
5Critics of Asian American literary studies have taken diverse positions toward the “claim America” issue. Editors of Aiiieeeee!, representatively Frank Chin, expressed their commitment to this cause in a most extremely way, defining “Asian American cultural integrity” based on “American birth, speaking English, and masculine ethos”(Chin et al. xxxviii), raising, paradoxically, an awakened feminist
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with “forging a connection between Asia and Asian America” (1). As she correctly adds,
however, it cannot be said that the latter “replaced” the former, because they are not
really different issues; while they seem to be two opposing sides, both of the sides
compose Asian American identity, to borrow Cheung’s phrase, “as a dialectic” (1).
According to Cheung’s summary, Sau-ling Wong finds “location” or “nation” as a
necessary element in political struggle; on the other hand, Shirley Geok-lin Lim criticizes
the effort to “claim America” as another assimilation narrative, which “feeds American
national pride and prejudice” (qtd. in Cheung 9). Cheung takes an eclectic position,
arguing that Asian Americans should appropriate both identities dialectically: “An Asian
American consciousness fueled by the urge to claim America has allowed some writers to
rupture a racist and patriarchal definition of an American national identity. . . Similarly,
an exilic or diasporic identity can enable others to contest the exclusiveness of state or
cultural nationalism”(9). Lee, as an author, seems to situate himself within Cheung’s
notion of dialectic between “the simultaneous claiming and disclaiming of both Asia and
America” (10); this ambivalent position partly explains his almost paradoxical statement that his authorial interest lies only in language, not in Asian American identity. Henry, the protagonist, also seems to fall within the dialectic between “claim America” and hybridity in that he criticizes the exclusivity of both communities, mainstream America and Asian America, while expressing a desire to belong to both. In terms of an immigrant’s assimilation narrative, Henry is a “model minority”: as a hard-working immigrant’s son, he is ivy-league educated, married to a white wife, and now stably belongs to the educated middle class. Despite all of these securing elements, Henry feels
consciousness from Asian American women writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston.
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deeply insecure about his identity as American, Korean, or Korean-American. The insecurity he feels is most clearly revealed in his obsession with language, both the
English and the Korean. While he can be said to be bilingual, though he is more fluent in
English, Henry does not feel himself to be a “native speaker” of any language. As
Cheung rightly points out, “even American-born Asians are not immune to linguistic self-
doubts” (6); the American-born Asian Americans experience language transition in their
childhoods from a movement between the private realms—those of family and ethnic
community—and the public ones, mainly kindergarten and elementary school. The
trauma of transition from private to public continues to leave “linguistic self-doubts,”
causing Henry, like others who are fully acculturated, to be always “listening to himself,” carefully “taking in the sound of the syllabus” (Lee 12). The trauma influences Henry to be a technical writer who sticks to the established rules without having his own judgment.
Henry vividly describes the embarrassment and pain he feels in these moments of transition:
I thought English would be simply a version of our Korean. Like another
kind of coat you could wear. I didn’t know what a difference in language
meant then. Or how my tongue would tie in the initial attempts, stiffen so,
struggle like an animal booby-trapped and dying inside my head…In
kindergarten, kids would call me “Marble Mouth” because I spoke in a
garbled voice, my bound tongue wrenching itself to move in the right
ways. (233-4)
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Unlike young Henry’s expectation, language, whether it is English or Korean, is not a coat one can wear or take off at one’s convenience; while it is a tool for communication, it influences, regulates, and determines how one thinks, says, behaves, and exists at both level, physical and metaphysical. Once one gets clothed in a coat of a language, it would
“color [him] funny, mark [him]” (21). Whether it is by “too much institutional frustration or goodwill,” as Henry cynically recollects, those struggling children are usually sent to
“Remedial Speech” class, separated from other normal students, in order to officially belong to the groups of “school retards, the mentals, the losers who stuttered or could explode in rage or wet their pants or who just couldn’t say the words” (235). At an early age, Henry has the idea indelibly inscribed in his mind and in his psyche that to speak a foreign language is to have a disease that should be cured or remedied, along with other marginalities.
In Henry’s case, self-consciousness about language develops into an enchantment with and even an admiration for apparently perfect speakers of the language: Lelia and
John Kwang. In his first meeting with Lelia, Henry, as “a linguist of the field,” closely listens to her and finds “that she could really speak”(10) : “ She went word by word.
Every letter had a border. I watched her wide full moth sweep through her sentences like a figure touring a dark house, flipping on spots and banks of perfectly drawn light. The sensuality, in certain rigors”(10-1). Henry’s instant attraction to Lelia seems to be adult version of the awe and inferiority he felt as a child toward the one girl who used to sneer at him when he left for the Remedial Speech class; he recollects that she spoke so punctiliously that he tried to invoke how she spoke during his practice. He even says that she lorded over us with that “even, lowing rhythm of ennui and supremacy” (234). While
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Lelia’s speaking ability greatly contributes to Henry’s attraction to and affection for her, it exacerbates his own psychological complex about the language, rather than mitigating it.
For example, he was not really hurt by the words on the list of who he was that Lelia
gave on the day she left for Italy during their separation, in which some harsh and
relentless evaluation is mixed with objective description of him: “surreptitious, B+
student of life, first thing hummer of Wagner and Strauss, 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” (5). What really hurt him was the one he accidentally found beneath their bed,
“False speaker of language” (6). What Lelia indicts, though, through the phrase “False
speaker of language” is not that he speaks English poorly or with an accent; what she
cannot bear about “the Henryspeak”(6) is his use of language as a mask to hide his
emotions, not as a bridge to connect to others. As a native speaker, Lelia’s language
comfortably delivers her feelings—whether she is hurt, angry, or happy—while he cannot
help locking it up, especially when he feels in trouble, holding his mouth “so straight
across and firmly set” as if saying “’You won’t get to me. Don’t try. I’m immune.’”
(220), or reversely, playing “positively Edwardian” (200).
John Kwang is another person who enchants Henry with his perfect—“beautiful,
almost formal”(22) — command of English; it causes all the more wonder because
Kwang’s ability is the one Henry did not think possible for a Korean-American of
Kwang’s age. Watching several hours of video-tapes of Kwang’s political speeches,
Henry even suspects there was “a mysterious dubbing going on” (179), reflecting his own
self-consciousness of the doubtful response he imagines that he gets from the native
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speakers he encounters in everyday life: “when I would speak to strangers, the checkout girl, the mechanic, the professor, their faces dully awaiting my real speech, my truer talk and voice” (179). Therefore, the problem is not so much one of fluency as an internalized prejudice about the ownership of a language. According to the prejudiced narrative,
English, as political power, is a white privilege; to the faces of other colors than white, whether it is yellow, black, brown, or red, it is a borrowed language, contaminated with various accents; the prejudiced narrative assumes a technical assistance or machinations when the people with the “difficult face[s]”(323) speak native speaker’s language.
What saves him from this linguistic self-doubt, though it seems commonplace enough, is an affirmation of multiplicity Henry painfully begins to learn through the disastrous events in his private life—the deaths of both his son and his father, the separation from his wife—and failures in his spying job, which will be discussed later in this chapter. Through these events, as Chen points out, Henry recognizes ‘technical’ writing which does not reflect his own voice and expression, “perpetuates his lack of agency”(642) while it provides a cozy place where he can keep a “secret living”(175) he has lived so far. Even after Henry discovered ugly truths about Kwang, he sees something
“moving and beautiful in him” in that Kwang was “unafraid to speak the language like a
Puritan and like a Chinamen and like every boat person in between” (304). This statement boldly claims, as Rachel C. Lee points out in “Reading Contests and
Contesting Reading: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Ethnic New York” that mainstream WASPs were once boat people too, like other immigrants whom they now consider as alien “others” (R. Lee 349).6 What Henry finds enchanting about Kwang is
6 Lee appropriately interprets the failure of John Kwang’s political experiment to represent the undocumented as “a failure of American political rhetoric, evident in those living breathing working people
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how he invests his whole self in confronting “a primary ethical dilemma,” between “[the
nation’s] promise of equality and its economic imperative of inequality,” regardless of
Kwang’s doubleness as a victim and a criminal (348). Even though Henry confesses that he “will still shatter a little inside,” when he hears “the strains of a different English,” now he can listen to “the ancient untold music of a new comer’s heart, sonorous with
longing and hope” (304). This change leads to the affirmation of what he has felt
embarrassed about and could not really accept: “old laments of [his] mother and [his] father, and [his] as a confused school boy, and then even the fitful mumblings of our
Ahjuhma, the instant American inventions of her tongue” (304).
*
How an Ethical Writer is Born
In a way, Native Speaker is, like Cha’s Dictee and Keller’s Comfort Woman, a metafictional novel, which describes the process by which one becomes a writer. Rocío
Davis explains how a metafictional emphasis on the act of writing is strategically used in
Asian American autobiographical and autofictional texts, for example in Maxine Hong
Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, to structurally support “the development of selfhood”; however, as Ondaatje acknowledges,
in New York who—in the logic of American citizenship—cannot be represented in the public sphere”(349). Lisa Lowe’s argument in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics confirms Lee’s point with a more historical perspective: “Since 1950s, undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Latin American have provided much of the low-wage labor in agriculture, construction, hotels, restaurants, and domestic services in the western and southwestern United States. The wages and working conditions of these jobs do not attract U.S.workers: state policy will not legislate the improvement of labor conditions, but neither does it declare officially that the U.S.economy systematically produces jobs that only third world workers find attractive. The result is an officially disavowed and yet unofficially mandated, clandestine movement of illegal immigration, which addresses the economy’s need for low-wage but whose dehumanization of migrant workers is politically contradictory”(Lowe 21).
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an effort to inscribe oneself into a text is always “incomplete,” making the text “a portrait
or ‘gesture’,” not a history” (Davis 50).
The fictional strategy of having Henry work as a spy who digs into the secrets of
the ethnic politician and other ethnic leaders, has been lauded as a clever one because it
effectively shows his alienated and doubled existence as an ethnic minority in American
society. Besides, more interestingly, Chang-rae Lee emphasizes the writer-like character
of a spy. According to Henry, “A good spy is but the secret writer of all moments
imminent” (198). Every day, or every other day, Henry is required to write a daily register
on the subject and send it to Dennis Hoagland, the boss of the company. The register is
supposed to be written in matter-of-fact style, not necessarily with analysis. Henry has been praised by Dennis for being especially good at writing these short registers, and, he confesses he secretly felt proud of his skill and strength. Then, by the way, in John
Kwang’s case, Henry finds that he cannot write from a fly-on-the-wall perspective as he did before. Even when Henry, the observer, finds his subject, Kwang, is “in a vulnerable position” to spew two or three secrets to make his reportage juicy, he does/cannot “propel him toward the finish” (198). Henry finds that he cannot maintain the status of an observer in meetings with Kwang. He feels enchanted with this new being, an Asian-
American politician who cares about other minorities, and falls into the danger of identifying himself with the subject.
Making a living out of spying, to be specific writing daily registers on the subjects, Henry has not thought (or rather has avoided thinking) about what results his registers would bring to the people he spies on, while he vaguely anticipates they would be regarded adversely by the people. In a rebuttal to a critical remark made by Lelia
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about his job, he thinks to himself:
Dennis Hoagland and his private firm had conveniently appeared at the
right time, offering the perfect vocation for the person I was, someone
who could reside in his one place and take half-steps out whenever he
wished. For that I felt indebted to him for life. I found a sanction from our
work, for I thought I had finally found my truest place in the culture. (127)
Henry accepted the job that Dennis Hoagland and his private firm offered because it
afforded him a position that allows him a justifiable existence in American society, a
motivation desperately needed for him while unneeded and, even, unexplainable to others.
He could not explain why he chose the line of employment, and he does not quit the job
when other options are available to him given his ability and his education. Now Henry
recognizes that he has played a role of a “native informant” behind a mask of a “native
speaker.” Growing in a society which seems to be “just barely tolerating [his] presence,”
Henry thinks that “[he] could be anyone, perhaps several anyones at once” (127). This
paradoxical confidence in his own metamorphic ability is possible because he is basically
an “invisible” existence in the society.7 With that Asian face, if he turns out to speak
Korean instead of English, he is perfectly and conveniently invisible to other “native
speakers” of English. Henry recalls one such experience he had while working in his
father’s grocery store: “They didn’t look at me. I was a comely shadow who didn’t
threaten them. I could even catch a rich old woman whose tight strand of pearls pinched
7 Because of this “invisibility” motif, Native Speaker has been frequently compared to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man by many critics. For example, Catherine Hong, in a review for Vogue, commented, “With echoes of Ralph Ellison, Chang-rae Lee’s extraordinary debut speaks for another kind of invisible man: the Asian immigrant in America” (236) Tina Chen compares Henry’s double performance as an ethnic spy with the one the protagonist’s grandfather, an ex-slave “the meekest of mean,” performs as “a spy in the enemy’s country”(qtd. in Chen, 2002; 655).
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in the sags of her neck whispering to her friend right behind me, ‘Oriental Jews’” (53).8
The phrase “Oriental Jews” reveals, as I commented in the introduction, a racial stereotype of Korean immigrants as successors to the “racially stereotyped” Jews. Spike
Lee smartly shows in the film, Do the Right Thing (1989), the inter-ethnic quality of this kind of racial slur; in a scene, every race on the Bed-Stuy street, Brooklyn, New York, makes a racial slur toward one another, revealing how these “floating signifiers” are without historical foundation and substance, but still powerfully produced, reproduced, and circulated.
Describing the first case he worked as an assistant to Pete, a Japanese-American colleague in the company, as part of his initial training, he specifies “a bizarre sanction” and the shared sense of belonging he felt: “I felt explicitly that secret living I’d known throughout my life, but now for the first time it took the form of a bizarre sanction being with Pete and even Wen [the subject]. We laughed heartily together. We three thieves
American” (175). This scene reads as an American ethnic version of The Three
Musketeers, in which three inseparable friends pledge to live as “one for all, and all for one.” The romantic friendship shared among the adventurous white men of 17th century
Paris deteriorates into the self-deceptive pleasure of an ethnic undercover in 20th century
New York. Moved by the heartiness and peculiar camaraderie they share, Wen, the
subject, reveals secrets to Pete and Henry, which will boomerang back to harm himself.
As soon as Wen tells the name of the girl he loved, Henry confesses that he knew that
8 As if revenge to this racial slur, Lee’s description of the “rich old woman” is not favorable as is obvious in the “tight strand of pearls pinched in the sags of her neck.” She is even described as able to “take as a small bite of an apple and then put it back with its copper-mouthed wound facing down” (54). Interestingly, throughout the work, Lee repeatedly gives unfavorable descriptions of the white people from the upper-middle class, including the area Henry’s father lived in his later life and his son died during a game with neighborhood kids: “Everywhere else was gray. This will always be the color of Westchester for me, that wan gray, the kind of gray that speaks of an impenetrable wealth, never too fancy” (212).
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“she was doomed”; however, conveniently, Henry says he forgot the name the moment
Wen spoke it aloud. Ironically, what he clearly remembers is Pete’s face, which shines out with “the day’s first piece of truly useful information,” holding the joy professionally.
Henry designates the whole process of Pete’s job as “the simplest finesse” (176), with which he is expected to catch up. He even says that it was not Wen’s fault that he broke because it was impossible for a virgin like Wen to “imagine anything beyond a simple polarity to the world. Positive and negative” (176). Through this comment, Henry skillfully transfers the responsibility of Wen’s breakdown from their manipulation to the subject’s naiveté; he attempts to be relieved of an ethical burden for which he should feel
(and ultimately is) responsible. Since the Wen case, Henry has been a technically clean writer, but not an ethical writer who takes account of the result his story brings.
The fissure in the technical writer’s otherwise smooth surface is ultimately detected by Emile Luzan, a politically active Filipino psychiatrist, in the novel. To spy on Dr. Luzan, Henry disguises himself as a patient, which puts him in a position to tell his own story. Now he should perform a double job: writing a story on Luzan and making up his own legend. While Henry sits in a chair across Dr. Luzan, he finds that he makes inexplicable mistakes of telling inconsistent details about crucial parts of his life session by session, telling separate “set of near-truths”(181). While Henry excuses “it was simply loose, terrible business,” the inexplicable confusions reveal his embarrassment about telling his own life story and his recognition that he has irresponsibly dealt with other people’s lives as alienable stories. Telling “whatever lay immediately within [his] grasp,” in the meetings with Dr. Luzan, though, he gets an opportunity to see into himself, his life, and “who [he] has been all [his] life” (204), a question Dr. Luzan asked Henry in
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one of the sessions. In the paradoxical spy-subject/ doctor-patient relationship, Henry recognizes that the “good” doctor “knew a hundredfold of me compared to what [he] had filched from him” (207) and that, with the knowledge or through the sessions themselves, the doctor “saved [his] life in ways he never imagined, or ever could” (207). For the first time in his career as a spy, Henry becomes truly worried about what his reports could bring to the subject. The fictional confessions that Henry writes and narrates, performing in the role of a patient but only as an undercover agent, dangerously encroach upon his real self and his real life. This emotional connection is certainly an ominous sign for a spy, but an auspicious one for an ethical writer. While his attempt to warn the doctor of possible dangers is frustrated by the company, it signals a transfer from being “some sentient machine of transcription” to an explorer into “the arcana of human interpretation” (203).
John Kwang is the new subject that Henry is assigned after he fails in the Luzan case. Henry is expected to make up for the last mistake, which can happen once in anyone’s career, and, according to Dennis Hoagland, Kwang is “a piece of cake,” because it follows a typical pattern in which a story unfolds. Then, Henry’s renewed consciousness as a writer does not allow the usual, “automatic, half-conscious” way of reporting (204). Henry’s now ethical consciousness as a writer is strengthened by the ethnic link or bond that he shares with Kwang; it makes the job of daily reports even more difficult. Beyond “a moment’s pang of remorse” that Henry has felt (up until this point) in exposing information about the other subjects, he now feels as if “[he] were offering a private fact about [his] father or mother to a complete stranger in one of [his family’s] stores” (147). This keen sense of betrayal that Henry feels in exposing
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information about Kwang is not just owing to the fact that he shares Korean ethnicity
with him; moreover, it is because of “the greater lore,” “one more version” of the Kwang
story he wants to write “for Hoagland, for the client, for the entire business of [the
company’s] research” (210), other than the myriad versions they already have. The
version that Henry tells seems to be another typical immigrant assimilation story. What
impresses him is the part where Kwang began to consider “America as a part of him,
maybe even his” after he attended school, learned to read, write, and speak his new home
language at a Catholic orphanage. While this is useless information to others at the
company, as he acknowledges, that confident ownership of English and “claim America”
is “the crucial leap of his character,” “the leap of his identity” Henry alone finds valuable
(211). Because uneasiness with language and skepticism in “claiming America” is an
inveterate disease Henry has been suffering all of his life, it is a wonder to witness a
Korean immigrant who speaks formally fluent English and claims America as his own,
even though he is not ignorant of the danger, as Lim warns against, that the claim
becomes another myth which “feeds American national pride and prejudice” (qtd. in
Cheung 9); even his parents, who felt grateful and indebted for what their new adopted
land offered to them, did not consider America their own. Even with rightfully achieved legal citizenship, the parents always remained, psychologically and socially, as resident alien. Invoking metafictional components, Lee has the narrator invite the readers into the dilemma in which Henry finds himself :
So I followed him, I wrote what I could. He knew I was near. I believed
he wished me so. For how do you trail some one who keeps you so close?
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How do you write of one who tells you more stories that you need to
know? Where do you begin, and where are you able to end? (211)
Asked these questions by the novels’ protagonist and narrator, the readers are invited to
put themselves into the dilemma in which Henry currently finds himself: how will you
“trail,” which assumes some distance and lost marks, someone with whom you feel “so
close”? From now on the readers are co-writers, co-conspirators, and even accomplices to the story that Henry writes and performs. Henry can no more “simply flash a light inside a character,” catching a figure “with a momentary language” because, through the
communications he shared with Luzan, now he knows a human being cannot be understood “from a singular mode” but “through the crucible of a larger narrative”: “I know that the greater truths reside in our necessary fictions spanning human event and
time” (206). As Kwang’s downfall reveals, Henry does not seem to believe that
(political) representation is a way to secure his vantage point in society, while he
poignantly indicts the paucity of American political imagination which does not allow
representation of undocumented workers, whose existence the U.S. economy structurally
necessitates. The strategy Henry, as an ethical writer, or an edifying philosopher, takes is
what Spivak performed in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; Spivak paradoxically performs a
representation of the Subaltern by emphasizing their unspeakability or unrepresentability.
Likewise, Henry represents the invisible existences by observing and recording how an
effort to (politically) represent the invisible is successfully and exhaustively obstructed
and hampered; the record becomes a more complicated and dismal one given that Henry
played an essential role in the conspiracy.
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*
Jack Kalantzakos,9 Henry’s mentor and colleague at the company, who is himself
an immigrant from Greece, observes the changes Henry goes through and offers some
practical advice, which Henry appreciates but finally declines to accept. As an action
figure—rumor says that he was an arsonist and murderer—, Jack completely accepts his
status as a technician, “happier with limited knowledge” (290). Jack considers it inescapable for the “good immigrant boys” like himself and Henry to “see just a small
part of things” (288). According to him, it is “bad hubris” for immigrants to want more
than “a little bit of the good life,” which is possible “if [they] work hard, and do not
question the rules too much” (288). According to Jack, then, it is the privilege or talent of
the whites, like Hoagland, the boss of the company, to see a big picture, establish or
question the rules, and “always [win] the game” (288). While his recognition of
immigrant America is truly realistic, removed from a fantasy of the American dream, his solution does not contribute to a reform of that problematic reality; it confirms and strengthens the negative or regressive reality of society.
Recalling a visit to Jack’s house, which is located in the neighborhood where retired New York City cops live, Henry describes observing the neighbors gardening:
The men below would keep at their work, steadily clipping away until
dusk at the overgrowth—“man-a-curing” was Lelia’s reprise—showing no
9 As Henry Park is often compared to the nameless protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for their shared marginality as an ethnic minority, Jack Kalantzakos reminds readers of Brother Jack in the novel, a leader of the communist organization, the Brotherhood. While Brother Jack is more intent on realizing the organization’s cause than tending to the oppressed people in spite of his apparent kindness and sympathy, Jack Kalantzakos is described as a petit bourgeoisie figure who is complacent with his “little bit of the good life” (288). Both of the characters play a mentorial role toward the protagonists at first, but the protagonists remain disillusioned with what they symbolize.
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mercy to the thorny shrubs, the crapweeds and wild grasses, the tiny
shoots of anything that rose up between the cracks of their meticulously
land-scaped stones. (35)
This vignette is obviously a comment on mainstream America—meaningfully
emphasized by retired New York cops with pruning knife and shears— as Jack suggests,
which is finally “not so open” (292) to “anything outside mainstream experience and
culture” (274). Their policing hands mercilessly weed out everything considered extra,
surplus, or other to their carefully tended garden of American Eden with the
meticulousness of a manicurist, or “man-a-cur[e]” who “clip[s] away…the overgrowth”;
or with the punctiliousness of a surgeon, who “cure[s]” a patient of a disease.10
In spite of all the infidelities and crimes of Kwang and despite all the final
betrayals on Henry’s side, including his turning over the donor lists to Hoagland, the
protection he voluntarily provides for Kwang at the end of his political career, against the
angry American mass, is meaningful because it is a gesture of an Asian-American who
decides to “claim America” while acknowledging he is an immigrant’s son who has a
“wide immigrant face” (343). It is the first step he publicly makes toward self-
affirmation and national-reclamation:
Everyone is shouting. A hundred mouths shouting for him [Kwang]. And
when I reach him I strike at them. I strike at everything that shouts and
10 Chinese or Korean concept of garden, which embraces nature as it is, is contrasted with the Western concept of garden, which finds beauty from a controlled state of nature. In a similar context, Western medicine tends to focus on the treatment of the symptom or affected parts, while Eastern medicine emphasizes general harmony between the whole body and spirit.
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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 hand. I half
welcome them. (343)
It is more meaningful that Henry tries to protect John physically in the tumultuous hand-
to-hand commotion, shielding a figure exposed to legal, social, and ethical criticism.
Always an oral or verbal person and an unconventional spy throughout the novel who is
neither a patriot nor a hero, Henry chooses to fight and be defeated as a champion of an
underdog ethnic politician. Henry, unexpectedly, comes to know that Kwang is the one
who instigated Eduardo’s murder because of his assumed betrayal. Actually, Kwang
confides the secret to Henry, like he is “the world” so that “the world can know,” because
he feels so guilty about the murderous act and its consequences. As a “final honoring to
Kwang,” Henry decides not to report the crime to Hoagland even though he hands over
what he requests, the money club list. Because he checked, as he said to Jack, that
Kwang just had redistributed the money without taking any profit himself, Henry naively thinks it would do little harm to hand over the list. As Mary Jane Hurst points out in the
article “Language, Gender, and Community in American Fiction at the End of the
Century,” Henry does not realize that the Immigration and Natural Service will use the
information to detect and deport illegal immigrants, in spite of Jack’s strong intimation
that Government people are the clients who requested the assignment. In spite of Henry’s attempt to protect Kwang, his political career is ruined and his people are deported. The plot line seems to confirm Jack’s vision of the world that there exists someone who
“knows how large and wide it truly is” (288).
Several critics—Joan Huang, Tina Chen, and Tim Engles, for example—have
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pointed out that Henry’s effort to search his justified place in the U.S. finally seems to fail
in that context. The list he naively submits to Hoagland causes arrest and deportation of
the people with whom he has sympathized and identified. The job he settles for,
temporarily as it seems, after he left the spying job is finally as an assistant to Lelia; as a
tool for her speech therapy class, he acts not that fabulous role of the Speech Monster,
who “gobbles up kids but [cowers] when anyone repeats the day’s secret phrase” (348).
Even in the final scene in which multiethnic diversity is beautifully presented, it is Lelia
who “call[s] all the difficult names of who we are,” “taking care of every last pitch and
accent” (349). This scene calls to mind the first naming of Creation by Adam described
in Genesis 2:19-20: “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the
name thereof. / And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field” (King James Version). Reversing gender roles, Lelia is an Adam of this class, in which the students are mostly foreign language speakers. Is it because
Henry, an Asian American man, is too feminine to be an American Adam, even compared to a white woman who exerts power of naming and defining in this ESL Garden of Eden?
Subtle as it is, I insist that Henry shows meaningful changes throughout the work, and it is connected to his self-consciousness and identity. Above all, unlike Dennis
Hoagland’s expectation (said never to have been wrong), Henry quits the spying job. As much as the spying job is a purposeful metaphor, Henry’s quitting the job is also a metaphor of some analytical significance or critical import. Through the retirement,
Henry secures a vantage point from which to observe and challenge the “order of things,”
to borrow Foucault’s vocabulary once more, that allows “some things and activities [to
be] possible and explicable, and other things unthinkable” (Danaher et al. xiv). While he
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paid a dear price for the freedom, Henry is now ready to be on his own, ready to
undertake the risk of being emotionally vulnerable, even if it causes him pain. Unlike
Joan Huang’s interpretation, presented in “Oral Fixations: An Exploration of Native
Speaker,” that the classroom is a refuge in which Henry finds only temporary comfort,
avoiding challenges from an adult world, I insist the final scene is truly encouraging
because it is a courageous revisitation to the very source of his innermost fears.
In the final scene, the classroom seems to be a meeting place where the sources of
his fears come together in a form that he can handle: language and relationship, including
Lelia and Mitt, his dead son, of whom the students in the class remind him. Playing the
role of the Speech Monster in his wife’s speech therapy class, it is Henry, rather than the
kids, who truly learns that “it’s fine to mess it all up” (349). Though he senses some kids’
doubtful gazes about whether “[his] voice moves in time with [his] mouth, truly belongs
to [his] face,” their gazes do not seem to eat at his consciousness anymore. Instead of
reflecting himself in a mirror as a response to those gazes, as he had before, he embraces
them, with his mask off, appreciating that “they are just the size I will forever know, that
very weight so wondrous to me, and awful”(349). This seems to be his true remedial moment. While it is Lelia who calls each one’s name, Henry is not an auxiliary existence which plays an insignificant role in this naming. Henry hears, as God did behind Adam,
when she speaks “a dozen lovely and native languages”: as much as it was pleasing to
God, I argue, Henry now appreciates “all the difficult names of who we are” (349).
In this analysis, I have explored how an alienated Asian American subject is transformed from a technical writer to an ethical writer; the transformation, to state differently, is also a process in which a subject negotiates an exit in an ideologically
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contained society which shapes a way of knowing, thinking, and existing. Against Jack’s imploration that the spying company, which represents immigrant America, is a family for those who do not have anything else whether Henry “like(s) it or not “(291), Henry responds that it is an “orphanage” run by a “Fagin,” who takes profit by exploiting the orphans (292). Now, as an orphan out of an “orphanage,” he painfully recognizes the
“ugly immigrant truth” that he has “exploited [his] own, and those others who can be exploited” (319). This self-recognition of his double position as an exploiter and exploited provides Henry with a dynamic strength as a writer. Now, as a fledgling ethical writer, he will write “a new book of the land,” half-trusting and half-suspecting the power of language (279) in this “city of words”: “They are all here, the shades of skin I know, all the mouths of bad teeth, the speaking that is too loud, the cooking smells, body smells, the English, and then the phrases of English, their grunts of it to get by” (344).
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CONCLUSION
Throughout this dissertation, I have tried to explore how Korean-American
writers have attempted to construct or negotiate their writer identities, struggling with common or unique issues of their own. While border existence as an Asian American is a common issue to struggle with, as I have observed, each writer’s main issues were different according to the historical, social, economical, and cultural conditions in which he or she was situated; accordingly, the strategy and tactics each of the writers developed were different. In East Goes West, Han employs “appropriate distance” and the art of
“role playing” to survive in the West as an Eastern scholar, which I interpreted as the author Kang failing to apply for his own survival in the U.S. in the 1930s. In Dictee, the narrator makes an imaginary “inventory of traces” to understand her hybridity and negotiates her place as a diseuse, a woman speaker for the ones who have been forgotten, alienated, and silenced. In Native Speaker, the protagonist begins a process of becoming an ethical writer, quitting the complacent status of a technical writer. Along this thread, I have tried to focus on subversive moments, ruptures between an authorial self and a narratorial self in the text. Through the awkward or strained encounter between authorial and narratorial self, I wanted to suggest how Asian American life writing could be read against the readers’ typical expectation about immigrant narratives.
The basic question I have tried to explore throughout the dissertation is the one, as
I have commented in the introduction, which almost every student of resistance discourse has asked, to borrow Audre Lorde’s expression, “Is it possible to dismantle the master’s house with his own tools?”(110) In the article, ““Nationalism and Korean American
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Women’s Writing: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee,” Shu Mei Shih asks a similar question: “How can this nationalism, a ‘derivative discourse,’ liberate the nation from the grip of colonial and neocolonial powers, when discourse itself was borrowed from those very same powers?” (158) James Kyung-Jin Lee also asks the question, in his article
“Where the Talented Tenth Meets the Model Minority”: “to what extent must they
[writers] borrow from and deploy the languages of power, those the primary definers have used to facilitate the very conditions in urban space that the writers work against?”
(235) This question stands out to me more strongly because I plan to go back to Korea and settle there. I awakened to my colonized and racialized subjectivity during a stay as an international student in the U.S. and have begun to unlearn the colonial and racial sense and sensibility. Back to Korea, how can I keep the process of unlearning without falling into the pitfalls of just parroting what I have learned here without considering a specific context? Away from “the place where most theorizing about women [or anything] is taking place” (Lugones and Spelman 498), how can I avoid becoming a blind and naive trend follower in the periphery, even if the trend is a liberating one?
Many of the Korean scholars who achieved their doctoral degree in literature from
U.S. universities majored in the areas of ethnic literatures and postcolonialism. The graduate swarming around the area can be interpreted in two ways. First, it is natural for a student to be inclined toward a subject that is directly related to himself or herself and helps explain his or her place in a society. Second, it is a tactic to survive in a competitive academic market; they can, or at least it appears that they can, speak more “authentically” about Korean-American literature than any other—for example, white Americans—
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except Korean-Americans.1 Because the scholars came from the country with an
experience of colonization and have experienced racial discrimination themselves during
their stay in the U.S., they feel that they are entitled to speak about oppression, exploitation, discrimination, and liberation; instead, they often choose or are tacitly enforced to remain an outsider to other issues. As is critically pointed out about the scholars of postcolonialism, it is an academic ghetto where minority scholars are allowed a modicum of power and stay complacent about what they have achieved, diverted from the very effort to deconstruct the structure which the area of their study criticizes; they often end up in strengthening the very structure which they aim to deconstruct. How could the scholars influence the core structure to change without getting stuck in the complacent ghetto the mainstream academy condescendingly sanctions? With these questions in mind, I intend to briefly discuss how Korean-American literary texts have been received in Korea, opening a space for my further study.
By the early 1990s, Korean national readers and scholars had not paid attention to the existence of Korea-American literatures. While Korean publishers, scholars, and readers have been quickly catching up with the trend of the American publishing market, including some ethnic literary works, Korean-American texts did not reach their interest widely until a Korean translation of Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman was published in August 1997. Complicated reasons explain the tardiness in receiving the Korean-
American literary works. First, I attribute the reason to the scarcity of noteworthy
1 While the border between Koreans in America and Korean-Americans is fluid and vague in that one can become another under some conditions and many scholars of Asian studies, including me, tend to freely lump these two groups together, there certainly exist meaningful differences between these two groups in terms of acculturation and enculturation. To legally differentiate these two groups, as is rough, most Koreans in America are on non-immigrant visa—such as F1, J1, B1,and H1—while most Korean- Americans are on immigrant visa, resident aliens, or citizens. See Kim, Bryan S.K. “Acculturation and Enculturation” Handbook of Asian American Psychology. Ed. Frederick T.L. Leong, et al. 141-158.
123
Korean-American literary works. There have been some works which were critically acclaimed and popularly successful, like Younghill Kang’s East Goes West (1937) or
Richard E. Kim’ s The Martyred (1964) , but it was in the 1990s that Korean-American literature produced notable writers and works on a full scale. According to Sunmoh Yu, a
Korean scholar of Asian-American literature, the 1990s was a renaissance period of
Korean American literature (Yu 150). Second, the Korean academy and publishing market lacked capacity to pay attention to the small sector of an ethnic American literature even if it could be traced back to themselves. It needed some level of academic development and cultural diversity that the Korean academy and literature market could pay attention to Korean-American literature, deviating from their usual pursuit of canonical American literature. Rather, considering the enthusiasm of American publishing market for ethnic literature as a lucrative venue newly discovered, it can be said that the Korean scholars and readers are faithfully catching up with the trend of the
American literature market, not deviating from a trend at all. While the introduction and thriving, as is still meager, of ethnic literature is greatly attributed to the American publishing industry’s aggressive world-wide marketing, I expect and anticipate that more people will experience unlearning of the assimilating effect of Eurocentric education through contact with alternative and revisionist voices presented in this newly introduced sector of American literature.
The academic reception of Korean-American literature began a little earlier than its popular reception. According to Sumee Lee’s article which surveys Asian American literary studies in Korea 1994-2005, about 57 articles on Korean-American literature were published in the main academic journals since Sangran Lee’s article “Asian
124
American Women Writers; ‘Other’ narratives and their themes” appeared in YongoYong
MunHak (Journal of English Language and Literature) in 1994 (Lee 889). While there were some articles that explored Korean-American writers and works written by Korean-
American scholars before 1990s, it was in the 1990s when postcolonialism and multiculturalism achieved a rise in critical theory, which was influenced by the boom in the U.S. a decade earlier that Korean scholars began to research Korean-American literature at an academic level. Korean scholars of English literature seem to have recognized a new possibility in this emergent field—Asian-American literature— combined with theoretical areas, such as postcolonialism, postmodernism, feminism, cultural studies, and Marxism. Even though they were attracted to Korean-American literature because of the shared cultural and historical background at first, they began to explore what meaning the Korean-American literature could have in the U.S. and Korean context, and for what reasons and in what ways the Korean-American literature could be read.
To psychologically analyze the reception of Korean-American literature in Korea, it is, above all, a surprise mingled with curiosity and pride. For example, about Comfort
Woman (the first Korean-American novel translated into Korean) Korean readers are surprised that such very Asian / Korean material could be presented in American literature, and American readers read and find it interesting. They feel proud, reflecting inverse desire toward the metropolitan center, to find that the work was critically acclaimed and received several literary awards, and are encouraged to have interest in, apart from appropriately critiquing, the text. Korean readers who have access to the original English text feel excited to find Korean words in the work, such as Chesa—
125
annual memorial service for the dead—and enjoy surreptitious feeling of superiority that
they best understand the context of the novel and the nuance of the Korean words.2
Since Comfort Woman was translated into Korean in 1997, most Korean-
American literatures, and specifically novels, have been translated into Korean. To briefly enumerate works introduced to Korea,3 : Foreign Student (Susan Choi 1998
/1999), East Goes West (Younghill Kang 1937 /2000), Dictee (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
1981 / 2004), “Yellow” (Don Lee 2001 /2002), Interpreter (Suki Kim 2003 / 2005).
While it took sixty-three years for Kang’s East Goes West to be translated into the author’s mother tongue, the works of the recent writers who appeared since the 1990s are being translated almost as soon as they are published in the U.S. Even though some of the works failed in the market, out of print by now—Comfort Woman, for example—, publishers see the continued interest in publishing Korean-American writers’ works in
Korea.
Nevertheless, Korean-American literature is not read widely in the classroom of
the Korean universities yet. While some pioneering scholars, most of whom witnessed
the boom in the U.S. themselves and found the area meaningful or promising, have
published articles and books in the area, university curricula, often wed to the traditional
canon, do not seem to be easily giving in to the demand to introduce newer voices and redefine the meaning of the “canon.” Due to the consistent challenges to the curricula, some African American and postcolonial literatures have been introduced at the graduate
2 It needs to be discussed more what role these un-translated native words in ethnic literature perform. The native words also need special care when they are translated into a native tongue. In the case of Comfort Woman, these words appeared without any differentiation, such as italicization, which informed that they appeared in the original text as such, nullifying the author’s intention for the words to stand out among English words. 3 In a parenthesis after each of the titles of the works, first refers to the year when it was published in the U.S., and second to the year when it was published as a translated version in Korea.
126
level; it may take more time, however, for Korean undergraduate and graduate classrooms to fully incorporate Asian-American literature into their curricula.
According to the survey by Sumee Lee, Korean-American literature
understandably but undesirably takes a biggest part in the study of Asian-American
literature in Korea. Among 123 articles published on Asian-American literature between
1994 and 2005 in Korea, 57 articles—about half—were written on Korean-American
literature while 33 articles were written on Chinese-American literature; 6 on Japanese-
American; 4 on Philippine-American; and 1 on Malay-American literature. Lee expresses
concern about the unbalanced concentration on Korean and Chinese-American literature
and insists that the interests of Korean scholars of Asian-American literature need to be
more diverse in terms of ethnicity, genre, and themes in their research. While I basically
agree with Lee’s suggestion, though, I think that in the case of Chinese-American
literature, 33 articles, a little more than a quarter, is an appropriate quantity considering
the weight Chinese-American literature takes in Asian-American literature scene. Even in
the case of Korean-American literature, I don’t think the problem lies in the concentration
itself; it is, rather, the result of some Korean scholars’ problematic thinking that Korean-
American literature can be actively subsumed within the category of Korean literature. It
is understandable that Korean scholars are attracted to Korean-American literature
because of the shared history, culture, and ethnicity, but it is problematic to think of
Korean-American literature as something derived from Korean literature in the same way
as it is far-fetched that some Koreans feel responsible and apologize to Americans for
Seunghee Cho’s killing at the Virginia Tech incident in 2007. Indeed, Korean-American literature is part of Asian-American and American literature created in a very special
127
American context, as is Seunghee Cho’s tragedy. Certainly, for some works, scholars feel more tempted to include the works in Korean literature because they deal with very
Korean-specific material—for example, Comfort Woman. Even in those cases, it should be remembered that the works were written by English-speaking authors toward
American readers, interpreted in a Korean-American way. When Korean scholars could see Korean-American literature in the wider spectrum of American literature and explore the relationship with other Asian-American literatures, the imbalance will be resolved.
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