The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896-1910 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS199 alists were primarily elitist reformers. Their approach was to stress national capitalist development, education based on reason and science, and in general a moral or ethical transformation of the people at large led by a humanistic, cosmopolitan -minded body of intellectuals. They borrowed much from English liberalism , the Gandhian principle of self-reliance, and indigenous cultural symbols to weave their eclectic fabric of national strength as a prerequisite for regaining national independence—eventually. The radicals, inspired by Marxism and populist ideas and putting peasants and laborers at the center of their platform, denounced all cultural nationalists as deceitful and self-serving or vacuous slogan -mongers. The radicals saw no distinction between them and Korea's foreign exploiters. Independence must come first, the radicals argued, and a relentless class struggle must be waged by the have-nots of Korea both toward this end and for reconstructing the nation along fully egalitarian lines. Yet, as Robinson points out, this rhetoric was not without its own conundrum of elitism, for it too had to reckon with the Marxist concept of a vanguard of committed intellectuals leading the masses on the revolutionary path. Here Robinson makes good, though only passing, comparisons with Li TaChiao of the Chinese Communist movement (later Mao Zedong was to pick up where his mentor Li had left off). At any rate, clearly the early 1920s produced much new nationalist thinking and in Korea, as in China and Japan, it was marked by variety, conflict, and irresolution. Need one point out that the reverberations of that era are still being heard in both North and South Korea? By his rigorously focused inquiry into a critical phase of modern Korean nationalism, Robinson has made a solid contribution to the study of twentieth century Korean history. The author deserves hearty congratulations, and so does his jacket designer for producing what strikes me as an aesthetically stunning cover! Vipan Chandra Wheaton College The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 18961910 , by Wayne Patterson. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988. xii + 274 pp. Maps, appendix, bibliography, glossary, index. $30. Any sustained migration is the sum of hundreds of individual decisions made at many levels. The great migrations of Europeans to the Americas have kept historians busy for generations, and will continue to do so. Only in recent decades has the movement of Asians to North America and its political outliers been the subject of scholarly attention. The migration of Koreans to Hawaii, having involved about seven thousand persons and having lasted for only a few years—it might seem that it would be simple to write up the story. Anyone thinking this would be far wrong. Wayne Patterson wrote his dissertation in history in 1977 on Korean immigration to 200BOOK REVIEWS Hawaii, and spent a decade updating it and doing a vast amount of further research and travel. It is Patterson's genius that he is able to tell this complicated tale with accuracy and with a style that keeps the reader's interests. In many parts of this book the tracing of illicit actions, bribery, and corruption makes the history of Korean immigration to Hawaii read like a detective story. The central motivation of the Planters Labor and Supply Company, which became the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association, was to import workers who would be cheaper than the Japanese labor in the canefields, and would act as strikebreakers whenever the canefield workers—predominantly from Japan— called a strike (for what we later would consider thoroughly acceptable reasons). The central figure in getting the emigration from Korea started was Horace N. Allen, U.S. minister to the Korean court, a complex man, often likeable even when he was conniving, paying off political debts, and lying to all and sundry. Patterson deals nicely with the larger picture in which Korean immigration to Hawaii operated. From the American viewpoint, there was the national schizophrenia of wanting cheap labor, but not wanting the cheapest possible laborers, Asians. From the Japanese viewpoint, there was the desire to become peers with the West, but not wanting to be considered as Oriental as the Chinese. Upon this backcloth of motivations of the institutional players we see the slowly...