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University of Cincinnati 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.
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