30 The New York Review
tome called Universal Education; and
Senator Kirby, who picks up a hitch-
hiking Chungpa and heartily tells him
to call himself an American—and also
that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
But there’s another strain of humor
here, a sort of deadpan ramble, antici-
pating the later comic novels of Charles
Portis, which draw laughs by cutting off
a seemingly limitless series of observa-
tions at an unexpected point. In this
vein, Kang produces witty portraits of
Chungpa’s fellow foreign college stu-
dents, such as an Italian roommate who
somehow removes and dons his neck-
tie only when no one’s looking, and the
homesick Peking University graduate
Eugene Chung, whose sober hobby is
his new typewriter:
When he was not writing long let-
ters to his wife in Chinese, he was
practising [sic] with his typewriter
the touch method, spending hours
and hours on just his name.... His
only regret was, he could not com-
bine his two interests, write his
wife and at the same time use that
machine. This he could not do be-
cause she knew no English.Kang is even funnier when observing
whites. During his Canadian sojourn,
Chungpa is unaccountably fascinated
by a mildly unusual ménage:
I remember the Stratford [On-
tario] barber who boarded at Mrs.
Moody’s all the time.... This bar-
ber looked like a farmer and not a
barber, and in fact I think he had
newly become a barber, not liking
the dirt of farm life. It was his am-
bition to get down to Boston. He
was engaged to a girl who ran the
only beauty shop in Stratford and
who was always unusually dressed.
Her clothes, though they were
made at home by her dressmaker
sister, seemed copies of Parisian
styles. One time she would appear
in a dress with long sleeves—ex-
traordinarily long, I mean, down
to the knees. Or she would wear
an enormously wide flopping straw
hat with streamers. Besides, she
was always exceptionally deco-
rated underneath, whether as an
advertisement of her shop or just to
take advantage of it, I can’t say....
She, too, no doubt, was eager to
get down to Boston. They never
managed it. Several years later, as
I drifted north once more, I saw
them both in Stratford, married
and settled down.... They had a
fat boy-baby now, whose ambition
ultimately perhaps will be to go to
Boston.The thwarted, multigenerational ambi-
tion to make it to Boston is the chief
joke here, but it’s kept alive by little
virtuosic touches: the barber’s farming
past, the shopkeeper’s outré clothes, the
interjections (“I mean,” “I can’t say”)
that remind you that the man watching
the comedy play out—Chungpa Han—
must look like no one else they’d ever
seen. “I was inexorably unfamiliar,” he
reflects.
The novelist and memoirist Alexan-
der Chee’s rousing introduction to the
new Penguin Classics edition of East
Goes West argues strongly for its rel-
evance today. Chee says that “Kang
wrote East Goes West as a call to ac-
tion, a call for [America] to live up to
the dream it has of itself,” and he rightly
touches on how Kang illuminates a
whole shadow community of mar-
ginalized immigrants—most of them
Asian, all in a sort of historical limbo.
Some thrive, most stagnate, a few go
mad with homesickness. “Perkins tried
to get Kang to write a happier book,”
Chee points out, “but Kang had delib-
erately imagined a less successful and
happy life for Han than the one he him-
self had lived, in part to dramatize the
plight of those less fortunate than he
was.”
But I’m more cynical than Chee
about the book’s utility as a rallying
cry. Its value is in the heady mix of high
and low, the antic yet clear-eyed take
on race relations, the parade of tragic
and comic bit players, and above all,
the unleashed chattering of Chungpa’s
distinctive voice. Underlying the rich-
ness and humor, there’s a deep pessi-
mism about making it in America, for
anyone not white and male. In Boston,
a college-educated black friend, Wag-
staff, works as an elevator man, and
“expected all his life to be an elevator
man.” Chungpa’s white male cowork-
ers at the Boshnack Brothers depart-
ment store in Philadelphia spread
rumors that their female counterparts,
who earned $12 a week, “made a
side-living by prostitution, since it was
impossible to live on that in a big city.”
(In the company’s men’s club, they
throw around the n-word with sicken-
ing impunity.)
As for Chungpa, his jobs have all
been menial; how is his American ex-
istence any better than life under the
Japanese back home, who “wanted all
honored men in Korea to become coo-
lies”? “I couldn’t make him understand
about Korea,” Chungpa says of a bum;
by the end of the book, white America
by and large still doesn’t know what to
make of him.^5
Catching the flu in Boston, Chungpa
has a vision of despair. “Nobody would
know the moment when I died and no-
body would care,” he moans. “Many
Oriental students had died like this on
foreign soil.” A fellow expat’s death
merits a brief mention in the paper on
“the suicide of a friendless ‘Japanese’
on Bleecker Street.” Even in death, Ko -
reans remain indistinct.
Chee and I could both be right. East
Goes West is bookended by dreams,
the first an enthralling fantasy of New
York, the last a soul-killing night-
mare: a final verdict might depend on
how you interpret the latter. At some
point in his American life, a slumber-
ing Chungpa is vouchsafed a glimpse
of long-lost boyhood friends (previ-
ously unmentioned in East Goes West,
but present in The Grass Roof) before
plunging into “a dark and cryptlike cel-
lar” somewhere “under the pavements
of a vast city”—flashing back to his
destitute second night in New York.
A “red-faced” mob shoves its torches
“crackling, through the gratings” of
the cell that he shares with “some
frightened- looking Negroes.”
Chungpa’s own interpretation of thisincendiary scene feels tacked on, hom-
iletic. To be killed by fire in a dream
“augurs good fortune,” according to
“Oriental interpretation.” He gives
it a Buddhist spin (death symbolizes
“growth and rebirth and a happier re-
incarnation”) that feels peculiarly un-
convincing—the only line in the book
I don’t believe he means. The book
ends abruptly, as though the chatty
Chungpa is still too rattled by what
he’s conjured.
After World War II, in that heart-
breakingly brief span of time between
the liberation of Korea from Japan
and the outbreak of the Korean War,
Kang returned to his homeland for two
years, at the invitation of the US Army
Military Government in Korea (going
by the mystical acronym USAMGIK).
He had been away too long; his pres-
ence didn’t make sense to Koreans or
to himself. “Thirty million frustrated,
confused, and humiliated Koreans are
trying to become a nation,” he com-
plained to Perkins. “We are getting
nowhere.” In Robert T. Oliver’s ha-
giographic Syngman Rhee: The Man
Behind the Myth (1954), Kang is de-
picted as ineffective and apolitical,
telling reporters: “I don’t like or trust
Dr. Rhee... I’m a writer, an artist.” Ac-
cording to Oliver (who was, in essence,
Rhee’s stateside publicist during this
time), Kang’s irrelevance to Koreans
led US officials to shunt him to a back
room.
In 1948 Younghill Kang returned to
the US, and during the Korean War,
according to Sunyoung Lee’s chronol-
ogy, “Kang’s restless anxiety [over the
war] makes it difficult for him to reac-
culturate to American life.” In his 1954
application for a Guggenheim fellow-
ship, he writes in anguish:It is natural for me to love Amer-
ica and fight for her, it is natural
for me to love Korea.... I know
why the UN or [President] Truman
has done what has been done [i.e.,
entered the war upon Commu-
nist North Korea’s invasion of the
South]. But I also know we have
spent millions and lives and cre-
ated enemies in Korea.... What is
it they fight? Communism? democ-
racy?... To the average Korean
what do they mean? The typical
Korean is a hunted uneducated
farmer. One thing makes him go
mad, that 38th Parallel, separating
parent from child, husband from
wife.... Whichever force won this
war from without shall lose it polit-
ically. The operation was a success,
but the patient died—it’s that kind
of success.The great powers—the US on one side,
China and the Soviet Union on the
other—were spelling out the terms of
Korea’s doom, just as surely as Japan
had earlier in the century.
With Frances, he translated Medita-
tions of the Lover, poems by the Korean
poet and Buddhist monk Han Yong-un
(1879–1944); it was rejected by Scrib-
ner’s. (Perhaps Han’s surname inspired
Chungpa’s.) Save for a 1954 translation
of the Japanese play Anatahan (Her-
mitage House), Kang never published
another book in America. Through the
1950s, he wrote for various encyclope-
dias, mostly entries about China. When
he wasn’t teaching or working on farms
on Long Island, he drove around the
country delivering lectures on topicslike “The Democratic Opportunity in
Asia.”By chance, two strange sheets of
paper fell out of my used copy of The
Grass Roof (a 1966 printing of the 1959
Follett reissue), and they afford a rare
peek at the nature of Kang’s later life,
long after the dissipation of his fame.
The book was inscribed by Kang to a
reader in 1970, two years before Kang’s
death. The sheets, a pair of advertise-
ments for himself, were almost cer-
tainly made by Kang; though undated,
they might be the last thing he wrote
for some imagined general reader.
Sheet one, which I take as being of
earlier origin, is the more professional
looking. It has a portrait of Kang in
coat and tie, seated at a desk, downcast
eyes studying an open book. Plaudits
include what appears to be a long blurb
from Pearl S. Buck. But only the first
few words (“one of the most brilliant
minds of the East”) are hers; the rest
is a Who’s Who–like list of accomplish-
ments. The reverse displays nine raves
for his novels. The layout is dense but
orderly, and the spotlight is firmly on
his rich literary legacy.
The second sheet appears to be
from a later date. Ostensibly it touts
his public- speaking bona fides. One
side bears typewritten extracts from
his speeches, plus his home address in
Huntington, Long Island. The other
side, though, looks like the snapshot
of a meltdown: a blizzard of text, in a
dozen conflicting typefaces and angles,
comprising shards of testimonials and
invitations (“LUNCHEON IN ALEX-
ANDER DINING HALL”). It’s hard to
know what’s being offered. The word
“Vietnam” ominously appears, unat-
tached; then the eye makes out the tiny
words “Or Negotiation?” A chunk of
Rebecca West’s age-old review drifts
through, as does a Grass Roof review,
but it’s clear he’s long since abandoned
his life as a novelist.
It’s a shocking composition. The en-
nobling lecture extracts on the obverse
(“Great books are still the greatest
weapons in fighting, and the only last-
ing psychological propaganda”) have
been replaced by noise and chaos. No
novelist’s permanence is assured, but
given Younghill Kang’s primacy as the
first Korean-American novelist, this
feels like a higher order of defeat, as
though the country that he so endeav-
ored to be part of had turned its back
on him. To gaze upon this frenzied
collage is to wonder if some part of his
soul had taken up residence in the cell
of his youthful alter-ego’s hair- raising
dream—a form of PTSD, from a war he
wasn’t actually in but that he felt in his
bones.
The Penguin edition of East Goes
West reminds us of how excellent he
really was. Written in the 1930s, set in
the 1920s, the book is thrillingly time-
less. Kang’s obscurity cannot negate his
heroic path to becoming a great Amer-
ican novelist—casting off one tongue
to master another. In a 2008 essay in
Guernica on Korean-American fiction,
Chee aptly calls East Goes West a “Na-
bakovian [sic] tour de force.” Though
Nabokov expressed no interest in “the
entire Orient,” he and Kang—poets in
their youth—have much in common.
Both lived from the turn of the century
to the 1970s, and in their late teens fled
homelands in upheaval. Both found
fame in the US, as stylistically daring(^5) When he tells the friendly Senator
K irby, “But an Or iental has a hard ti me
in America,” Kirby replies, “There
shouldn’t be any buts about it! Believe
in America with all your heart.... You
should be one of us.” Chungpa informs
him, “But legally I am denied.”