Asian Voices in English

Plenary Lecture

Richard E. Kim I am an American and have been one for more than a quarter of a century - but, as you all know, appearance can be deceiving ... I live, and I have lived for more than twenty years, in a very liberal, small academic town in what must be the most liberal state in America - Massachusetts . Now - my barber in that very liberal academic town in that most liberal state in the Union still greets me at each of my tonsorial visits to his shop by saying, 'Well, you're still here, eh?' 'Well, yes, I am still here as you can see.' 'So, what are you studying these days?' That - after all those years of my academic life as professor of English at the University in his town. I would merely mumble something to the effect that I am, well, studying life, sort of. Then there is this blue-eyed, blond,lady bank-teller who asks me where I am from, the sort of question no one ever asks my blue-eyed, brunette wife of DanishGerman ancestry. Again, I would mumble, 'Oh, from here and there.' The lady and I are trying to untangle a bureaucratic mishap involving a quarter of a million dollars of our business account, and, speaking on the phone to someone at the main office of the bank, she says - oh, so sweetly - 'Look, Jane, I have here with me a very nice foreign student who ... blah, blah, blah ...' Well, it has been also like that for me in the States in my relation with the socalled American literary establishment. I remember that, when my first novel, The Martyred, was published in NewYork, I was simply presumed to be and presented as a Korean writer, and,. no one, including myself, minded that - except the Koreans in Korea, especially Korean writers and critics who felt that since I wrote in English I lacked proper credentials and legitimate claims to be a Korean writer. In fact, a professor-critic there who made his living mainly by putting out anthologies told me in all seriousness that when I finally wrote something - By RICHARD E. KIM God, said he, anything - in Korean, he would certainly include me in one of his literary anthologies. To this day, I am not considered, so I am told, by Korean writers and critics, to be qualified as a proper Korean writer. So it went till my third book was published in the States, when Professor Edward Sidensticker, an eminent authority on Japanese literature, reviewing the book most favorably, referred to me as Richard Kim of Korea, whereupon the progressive, liberal staff of the New York Times Book Review listed the book in the Review's list of Editor's Choice and defined me categorically as a Korean-American writer. The dawn of hyphenated Americans (not all of them, mind you) has arrived. But, that, of course, made the Korean writers and critics more adamant than ever about my literary status (or non-status). Now, really, all this is quite silly, but what it all seemed to signify was that, from a literary point of view of categorizing writers, I was a very inconvenient writer indeed - both to the Koreans and the Americans. Well, I really was too busy doing this and that non-literary things to care much about all that, but I did want to look into this business of my Koreanness, so to speak, just to see,if for nothing else, if I could also write in Korean. To make a long story short, it did turn out that I could indeed write in Korean, and thank God for that, and that was that. That is, as Dr Han Suyin has remarked the other day, I could just think of myself as a writer at peace with the world, the whole world, in diverse cultures and languages, and let the literary intelligentsia and academicians worry about the rest. And yet, the very theme of this conference, not so much about 'in English,' I confess, as about 'Asian Voices,' has made me realize that, at last, I have now found one unequivocal, unchallengeable claim that I can make about myself, about my literary status and identity - an Asian writer. How nice! Now, to this matter of 'in English.' I do write in English, more so than in Korean, and I think I can say that I am one writer who is madly in love with the first person 'I' of the...