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East Goes West: The Making of an
Oriental Yankee Younghill Kang (1937)
Six years after The GRASS ROOF (1931), YOUNGHILL
KANG believed he was now prepared to write a se-
quel to that autobiographical novel. East Goes West
is largely based on the author’s own experiences
as a struggling student during his first years in the
United States.
After the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910,
the male protagonist Chungpa Han moves to New
York in the 1920s to find freedom and universal
truths. In his eyes, Korea, and the East in general,
represents an old and dying culture, whereas the
West stands for the future. Chungpa therefore
adores the West and is critical of his home coun-
try and its culture. He soon realizes, however, that
there is a discrepancy between the West he knows
from literature and the West he experiences. His
images of the United States become shattered after
he faces discrimination and poverty while working
as a servant, waiter, sales representative, and de-
partment store clerk.
In the end, Han remains an outsider. His un-
happy love for Trip, a white American girl, can be
seen as an illustration of his status as an alien. Trip
is superficially interested in him and his “exotic-
ness” but does not really care for him as a person
and thus politely rejects his advances. Chungpa
misinterprets her initial interest as being genuine
and only later realizes that he is wrong when he

finds himself in front of her door, which remains

forever closed to him because she has moved with-

out leaving her new address for him. It seems as

if Chungpa unsuccessfully searches for love and a

home, and as if he is trying to become an Ameri-

can but is not accepted as such.

More than an immigrant history, East Goes West

is one of the rarest of literary species: a novel of

ideas. Kang’s great-hearted hero is a sensitive young

classical scholar who arrives in America via Japan

with only four dollars and a suitcase full of books,

many of them on Western literature. As the title

denotes, Kang regards himself as representing the

East. Born into a culture in which one’s obligation

to others is valued more than that to oneself, Kang

affirms that his sense of self is stirred by his expo-

sure to Western knowledge. Against the stereotype

of any Asian as “either a cruel and brutish heathen

with horrid outlandish customs, or a subtle and

crafty gentleman of inscrutable sophistication,”

Kang asserts that the Asian is in reality a “troubled

child” who comes to the West “straight from his

own antique and outmoded culture” (195).

East Goes West projects the “making of an Ori-

ental Yankee,” just as it projects his unmaking. It

is a journey that ultimately leads to rebirth—or

rather, what Han calls the “death of the state of

exile”—and an acceptance of belonging every-

where and nowhere. As Kang’s friend and mentor

Thomas Wolfe wrote, Kang was “a born writer,