East is West and West is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America

2. Masculine Racial Formations in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee

2 / Masculine Racial Formations in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee When Younghill Kang published his second novel, East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee, in 1937, literary reviewers equated Kang with his fictional character and narrator, Chungpa Han, seeing both as successfully integrated Asians who became Americans. A New York Times reviewer wrote that Kang’s story attracts and holds the attention as if it were a novel. . . . But of course, East Goes West is not a mere novel. It is the candid record of “the making of an Oriental Yankee” as its subtitle states, and its author has been so successfully Americanized as to become Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in New York University and a member of the Department of Far Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum.1 Another reviewer expressed a similar sentiment, triumphantly declaring that Kang succeeded by finally obtaining “an American wife and achieving the first rung of an intellectual career.”2 These reviews are fascinating precisely because they portray the Korean man’s becoming “American” through both class ascension and the attainment of normative gendered sexual identity, 64 / masculine racial formations the latter even reliant on an act of Asian-white miscegenation, and because they implicitly suggest that race was not a barrier.3 However, Kang’s life was not a simple manifestation of the American immigrant dream, as these reviewers believed. Kang’s class privilege did not render him immune to immigration exclusion laws or allow him to benefit from the naturalization laws reserved only for whites. Kang was able to enter the United States only because he arrived right before the passage of the 1924 National Origins Act, which essentially cut off Asian immigration; yet even as the first Asian American to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, Kang was prevented from becoming a citizen.4 Kang’s bill for citizenship in 1937 argued for his exception as an Asian intellectual, but it was never heard in the US House of Representatives (HR 7127), even though Congressman Kent E. Keller argued on Kang’s behalf that “[the exclusion law] was [passed] for the purpose of preventing the competition with American labor and not with American scholarship.”5 The campaign also included statements of support from prominent American intellectuals, writers, and politicians such as John Chamberlain, Pearl S. Buck, Lewis Mumford, Malcolm Cowley , and Charles Scribner.6 None of these appeals worked. Thus, while Kang lived in the United States with his family for the rest of his life, he was never quite at home because of his “alien” status . This contradiction was familiar to many Asians who came to the United States in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, Kang’s education and his class background present an Asian American experience different from that of the mostly working-class Asian immigrants entering the country at this time. Few could have had a citizenship bill introduced by a US congressman and signed by illustrious American authors. In addition, Kang’s marriage to an upper-middle-class white woman, Frances Keely, described as “the pampered daughter of a Virginia industrialist turned professor,” was unusual given the social disapproval of Asian-white marriages at this time.7 These exceptions underwrote the literary critics’ belief that Kang had indeed “made it.” I have drawn from their reviews to underscore masculine racial formations / 65 the contradictions between Kang’s exceptional status as an Asian American man at this time and the fact that he could not fully take advantage of that status. This contradiction is explored in the novel through various Korean male characters. However, any interpretation of Kang’s novel as simply biographical discounts Kang as a serious creative writer and, more important, prevents us from seeing how his imaginative fiction probes the nature and degree of the marginalization of Korean and Asian men at that historical moment, even of highly educated men such as Kang himself. No straightforward autobiography would do what I demonstrate that Kang’s novel is able to do. Most important for this study, Kang’s novel illustrates the variegated images of Asian American masculinity at this time, images that did not always fit into the prevailing narrative of the Asian immigrant male laborer. Kang paints a picture of Korean and Asian men who, far from having “made it” in America, continually negotiate their marginalized positions not only through race but also through class...