East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (review)

East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee is one of the best novels of the immigrant experience to come along in years, despite the fact that it was originally written in 1937. Sixty years later, Younghill Kang’s novel of a Korean immigrant’s arrival in America and his struggle to find a place in society despite discrimination is as relevant as ever.

More than an immigrant tale, this is one of the rarest of literary species: a novel of ideas. Lyrical and moving, it has as its backbone a subtle social critique, and as its backdrop a marvelous portrait of New York City in the 1920s. Kang’s big-hearted hero, Chungpa Han, is a sensitive young classical scholar who lands in America via Japan with four dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare. He approaches the New World with bravery, generosity, and a kind of stubborn ambition, yet all the roads he takes lead to marginalization. Like many other immigrants, he works at menial jobs and lives in squalor but continues to try to carve out a place for himself.

My bread was almost gone. I had known the famines of poor rice years in Korea. Now, in utter solitude with a chilling heart, I feared pavement famine, with plenty all around but in the end not even grass to chew. While in the shadow of New York’s skyline, sunny hours were few, evenings seemed to be cold, dreary, long. In my unheated room during the cold hours, I spent some monstrous intervals in studying Shakespeare. But it was hard to concentrate, even in the midst of Hamlet’s subtlest soliloquies, I could think of nothing but food. I often passed that charitable soup kitchen, but it, too, wore a closed and alien look and I shrank from passing myself off in there.

After seeing lavish banquets, Han covets the wasted food. The disparity between lack and plenty begins to eat away at his blind faith in the American dream. Han’s one hope, aside from literature and the refuge it offers, is a bond forged with other immigrants—Siamese, Italian, Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—from whom he seeks guidance in things American. A series of jobs as a waiter, door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, department-store clerk, and lowly assistant to an evangelical minister leads him to construct a persona that is neither Korean nor American. He becomes a kind of chameleon, changing in response to the occasion—the first step in the making of a Yankee:

Soon I became convinced that everyone in New York felt...the need of sustaining a role, a sort of gaminlike sophistication, harder and more polished than a diamond in the more prosperous classes, but equally present in the low, a hard shell over the soul of New World children, essential for the pebbles rattling through subway tunnels and their sun-hid city streets.

Ultimately, the gross excesses of materialism and the lack of opportunity lead to Han’s spiritual disenfranchisement. Meanwhile Korea, for all intents and purposes, is no longer the country he remembers. However, Han holds on to the classical traditions of his besieged homeland, just as he tries to understand the modernity of New York City, and though his idealism eventually gives way to realism, he is never bitter:

We floated insecurely, in the rootless groping fashion of men hung between two worlds. With Korean culture at a dying gasp, being throttled wherever possible by the Japanese, with conditions at home ever tragic and uncertain, life for us was tied by a slenderer thread to the homeland than for the Chinese. Still it was tied. Koreans thought of themselves as exiles, not as immigrants.

East Goes West charts the “making of an Oriental Yankee” just as it charts 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...