28 The New York Review
Like No One They’d Ever Seen
Ed Park
East Goes West
by Younghill Kang, with a
foreword by Alexander Chee
and afterword by Sunyoung Lee.
Penguin, 389 pp., $18.00 (paper)
What if the finest, funniest, crazi-
est, sanest, most cheerfully depress-
ing Korean- American novel was also
one of the first? To a modern reader,
the most dated thing about Younghill
Kang’s East Goes West, published by
Scribner’s in 1937, is its tired title. (Ei-
ther that or its subtitle, “The Making
of an Oriental Yankee.”) Practically
everything else about this brash mod-
ernist comic novel still feels electric.
East Goes West has a ghostly history:
at times vaguely canonical, yet without
discernible influence, it has been out of
print for decades at a stretch, and sur-
faces every quarter-century or so as a
sort of literary Brigadoon. (Last year’s
Penguin Classics edition is its third
major republication.) Kang’s debut,
The Grass Roof (1931), captures the
twilight of the Korean kingdom in the
first two decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, as Japan colonizes the peninsula.
Its narrator, Chungpa Han, is a preco-
cious child whose thirst for education
takes him from his secluded home
village to Seoul, three hundred miles
away; into the heart of Japan; and fi-
nally to America, where East Goes
West picks up on the pilgrim’s progress.
Though both novels were first pub-
lished to great acclaim by Maxwell
Perkins—the legendary editor of
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas
Wolfe—they stand as the alpha and
omega of Kang’s fiction career: an ex-
plosion of talent, followed by thirty- five
years of silence. His sensual, impudent
voice and bold escape from his home-
land (“I had seen the disintegration
of one of the first nations of Earth”)
provoked Rebecca West to exclaim, in
a review of The Grass Roof, “What a
man! What a writer!” Yet by the time
of his death in 1972, Kang had faded
from public recognition.
The fictional Chungpa Han’s itin-
erary and timeline generally tracks
Kang’s. Born around 1903, he grew up
in rural North Korea, stuffing himself
with Korean and Chinese poetry. At
age eleven, he trekked alone to Seoul,
a journey of sixteen days, to further his
education, then went to Japan the next
year. Back in Korea by 1919, he par-
ticipated in the March 1 Movement, a
nationwide uprising against Japanese
rule, for which he and thousands of
others were jailed. (Among The Grass
Roof’s virtues is a ground-level ac-
count of the event and its aftermath.)
Following a thwarted attempt to leave
Japanese- occupied Korea via Siberia,
and a second spell in jail, he finally
made it to the US three years before
the Immigration Act of 1924 effec-
tively outlawed most immigration from
Korea and other East Asian countries
until it was replaced in 1965.
His audience in the 1930s, then, was
not the Korean diaspora, for the sim-
ple reason that there hardly was any.
(Between 1903 and 1924, fewer than
10,000 Koreans had come to the US,
most of them as laborers in Hawaii
and California.) He wrote instead as
the last of his breed, addressing those
Americans with little sense of Korea’s
existence, let alone its vexed status as a
colony of Japan (1910 –1945). He was a
man without a country: an alien unable
to obtain US citizenship due to immi-
gration restrictions, and unwilling to
return to a land that no longer existed.^1
He assimilated with a passion. He
studied at various schools (obtaining
a master’s in English education from
Harvard) and married a Caucasian
woman, a Wellesley grad-
uate named Frances Keely
(she was also an alien for a
time: her US citizenship was
revoked for marrying an Ori-
ental). His deep knowledge of
East Asian culture equipped
him to be a writer for the En-
cyclopaedia Britannica and a
curator for the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. In 1929 he
taught literature at New York
University, living in Green-
wich Village. At NYU, Kang
befriended fellow instructor
Thomas Wolfe, on the verge of
publishing Look Homeward,
Angel. Wolfe changed Kang’s
life by recommending him to
Perkins, who brought out The
Grass Roof—the only book
that Wolfe ever reviewed.
By the time immigration
restrictions loosened in the
1960s, Kang’s writing from
the 1930s must have seemed
remote to newer arrivals.
The next significant novel in
English by a Korean immi-
grant, Richard E. Kim’s The
Martyred (1964), was its sty-
listic antithesis: a brooding,
Camusian work set during the
Korean War (1950 –1953), in
which Kim served as an infan-
try lieutenant.^2 Kang’s DNA
is hard to locate in the varied
work of the Korean-American
novelists since. As a result, East Goes
West’s tumbling prose and loose, pica-
resque structure feel amazingly “free
and vigorous” (per Wolfe) today.Early on, East Goes West appears to
be a comedy of errors, perhaps laying
the groundwork for a Horatio Alger
story: youthful Chungpa Han arrives
alone in New York City from Korea, via
Japan and Canada, with two letters of
introduction, four dollars, and the keen
sense of life starting anew. (Chungpa
notes that the Korean word for “boat”
is the same as that for “womb.”) He ex-
tols Manhattan as “that magic city on
rock yet ungrounded, nervous, flowing,million-hued,” crammed with “young,
slim, stately things a thousand houses
high,” a “great nature severed city [fes-
tooned] with diamonds of frozen elec-
trical phenomena” that is destined to
be “the vast mechanical incubator of
me.” The description practically bursts
into flames; here and elsewhere, Kang
calls to mind no one so much as that
later Wolfean disciple, Jack Kerouac.^3
The very sight of New York stirs his
soul because—more than Paris, Lon-don, or “age-buried Rome”—it’s the
apotheosis of the Machine Age, and
thus the opposite of his homeland,
whose resistance to change spelled its
doom. Whereas in The Grass Roof
Chungpa depicts his native country as
a wonderland of faithful canines and
revered crazy poets, easily crushed by a
more modernized Japan, on the second
page of East Goes West, he describes
Korea in darkly apocalyptic terms, a
catastrophe out of science fiction:It was my destiny to see the dis-
jointing of a world. Upon my
planet in lost time, the heyday of
life passed by. Gently at first. Its
attraction of gravity, the grip on its
creatures maintained through its
fervid bowels, its harmonious mo-
tion weakened. Then the air grew
thin, cooler and cooler. At last,
what had been good breathing tothe old was only strangling pande-
monium to the newer generations.Fleeing “the death of an ancient
planet,” our hero lands in an America
so strange it might as well be Mars. He
announces that the book which fol-
lows—East Goes West—will be “the
record of my early search” for roots in
this foreign place.
Reaching New York, Chungpa Han
is in high spirits. For his first night,
he splurges on a mid-tier
hotel. The elevator gives him
a “funny cool ziffy feeling,”
and the bathroom is a mar-
vel, unlike anything in Korea.
The hotel mirror is also a nov-
elty; in his old life, a mirror
was generally a covered thing
“about the size of a watch.”
Seeing his old-world face in a
brand-new country brings on
something close to hypnosis:I have read that Koreans
are a mysterious race, from
the anthropologist’s view-
point. Mixtures of several
blood streams must have
taken place prehistori-
cally. Many Koreans have
brown hair, not black—
mine was black, so black
as to have a blackberry’s
shine. Many have natu-
rally wavy hair. Mine was
quite straight, as straight
as pine-needles. Koreans,
especially women and
young men, are often ivory
and rose. My face, after
the sun of the long Pacific
voyage, suggested copper
and brass. My undertones
of the skin, too, mouth and
cheek, were not at all rosy,
but more plum. I was a
brunette Korean. Koreans
are more animated and
hot-tempered than the Chinese,
more robust and solid than the Jap-
anese, and I showed these racial
traits as well.... My limbs retained
a look of extreme plasticity, as in
a growing boy, or in a Gauguin
painting, but with many Koreans,
even grown up, they still do.For Chungpa to establish his alien
self at the outset of this story, describ-
ing it as a specifically Korean body, dis-
tinct from the somewhat better-known
Chinese or Japanese ones (and even
from those of other Koreans), is a rad-
ical move. It suggests that American
readers need to know exactly how he
looks, or they’ll fail to understand his
story. There’s also a quality of self-
revelation, as though he needed to go
halfway around the world to see him-
self fully, in the privacy of a New York
hotel room. Rather than dwelling on
the melancholy of anatomy, he notes his
“extreme plasticity,” to show that he’s
ready for America to transform him.
On his second day in New York,
Chungpa Han gets a haircut, not grasp-
ing that shampoo, shave, and other
services cost extra. He leaves the bar-
bershop with a dime to his name. He is
counting on imminent employment, but(^1) In 1939 the Committee on Citizenship
for Younghill Kang and Illinois rep-
resentative Kent E. Keller introduced
a bill (H.R. 7127) for his naturaliza-
tion, garnering support from Perkins,
Charles Scribner, Pearl S. Buck, Mal-
colm Cowley, and others. The bill was
rejected.
(^2) Kim came to the US after the war in
1955, eventually studying at the Uni-
versity of Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
where his teachers and admirers in-
cluded Philip Roth.
(^3) Even in a more restrained register,
New York brings out Kang’s lyricism:
“Outside the restaurant a heavy rain
like black ink was pouring. Like bee-
tles called up by the rain, the shiny
taxis twisted and turned cumbrously,
seemed bound to collide in their nar-
row quarters.”
Younghill Kang