The American Century: Literature since 1945 775American missionary, Beccah. And it tells the story of a search for stability, and a
secure identity, framed by the mother’s secret past as a “comfort woman,” a prostitute
in a “recreation camp” forced to service the Japanese military. “For years, we traveled
from the east coast to the west coast, from north to south,” Beccah recalls, “to every
state in the Union.” Eventually, they stay in Hawaii. There it becomes Beccah’s task to
piece together the traumatic story of her mother, to “claw” through memories to
understand the atrocities she has suffered. As Akiko struggles to come to terms with
her past, she tries to find a place for herself in America. That place is never really
found, not least because she sees the United States only as a “country of excess and
extravaganza.” Her daughter, too, experiences dislocation and disorientation.
“When you see it for the first time, it glitters, beautiful, like a dream,” she says of
America, “but then, the longer you walk through it, the more you realize that dream
is empty, false, sterile. You realize that you have no face and no place in this country.”
Still, by the end of the narrative, she is beginning to break out of “death thoughts” in
a way that, understandably, her mother could never manage. With her mother dead,
but the truth of her life and the love between them now acknowledged, Akiko seems
to have achieved a kind of wholeness. Like the protagonists of so many stories of
immigrant experience – The No-No Boy and The Joy Luck Club, for instance – Akiko
ends with a beginning, by starting to understand and even cope with the diasporic
currents of her life.
Notable writing by Korean-Americans includes the fiction of Susan Choi
(1969–), which subtly negotiates the politics of cultural division (The Foreign
Student (1995), American Woman (2003), A Person of Interest (2008)). It also
includes autobiography. In The Dreams of Two Yi-min (1989), for example, Margaret
K. Pai (1914–) describes the life of her family in Hawaii, while Mary Paik Lee
(1900–1995) tells the story of her own immigration in Quiet Odyssey (1990).
Although these two books were only written toward the end of the twentieth
century, both in fact deal with immigration experience toward the beginning. Like
them, the novel Clay Walls (1987) by Kim Ronyoung (1926–1987) looks back to an
earlier part of the century, telling the story of Koreans arriving in California in the
1920s. Unlike them, however, it concentrates on the lives Korean immigrant women
led once they arrived in America. A panoramic novel, Clay Walls pushes its story
through to the 1940s. And, by emphasizing in particular the stories of a mother and
daughter, it contrasts the experiences of first and second generation immigrants as
they fight for job opportunities and encounter racism in their new home. Dictee
(1982) by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) also documents both Korean life
under Japanese control and Korean immigrant experience in America. Whereas
Ronyoung is naturalistic in her approach, though, Cha is radically experimental
and innovative. Weaving together a number of different narrative forms, including
letters, journal entries, poetry, and excerpts from histories, she also punctuates her
text with photographs, maps, and other visual material. The result is a cross between
postmodern fiction, memoir, and protest literature. A generic hybrid, Dictee
dramatizes in its structure as well as in its story the complex, conflicted fate that is,
very often, the lot of the immigrant.GGray_c05.indd 775ray_c 05 .indd 775 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM