Book Review – East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee

By Solti

During the last boring and unusually hot summer, I got a precious chance to read the book “East Goes West.”  The title of the book attracted me.  By surfing the Internet, I found that that the book’s title was translated as “동양선비 서양에 가시다.”  (Originally published in 1937.)  

As a Korean American living in America for several decades, my curiosity was growing.  By reading the novels and essays of America’s popular novelist John Steinbeck, I have been striving to find some good books to satisfy my desire to know about ‘America and Americans more.   By chance, I recognized that there was a not very well known pioneering Korean American novelist named Younghill Kang (강용흘 (姜鏞訖): 1898-1972).  

He was born in Hongwon, Hamgyongnam-Do in 1898. He escaped Korea and then went to Canada and studied at Dalhousie University.  Later he studied at Boston University and Harvard University and received his B.S. and Ed.M. in 1925 and 1927 respectively.  His Confucian studies and missionary school education in Korea under Japanese colonial ruling made him think about a freer educational environment. For a brighter future in his life, he finally left Korea in 1921. 

Writing in Korean and Japanese first, he switched to English only in 1928 and married his American wife, Frances Keeley. She helped him with his writings in many ways. He worked as an editor for the Encyclopedia Britannica for the first time as a Korean and taught at New York University, where his colleague Thomas Wolfe read the opening chapters of his famous novel The Grass Roof and enthusiastically recommended it to publish and it was well-received. 

East Goes West, however, criticized the United States and therefore was less popular until very recently compared with his signature novel The Grass Roof.  His novel “East Goes West” is his autobiographic style novel describing his strenuous life journey outside Korea in exile without no homeland.      

In his novel, East Goes West, a young man called Chungpa Han starts his immigrant life by landing at New York City with few dollars in his hands and a suitcase filled with several Shakespeare literature books.  As a poor foreign student, he needed to support himself.  First of all, he was always hungry.   During vacations or holidays, he went around numerous different jobs such as a Chinese restaurant waiter, hotel cooking staff, housekeeper, traveling salesman selling cheap fountain pens and books, box manufacturing worker, and farmer, etc. to earn living expenses and prepare for the tuition and fees to register the upcoming semesters.       

He is also interacted with Americans mainly in working, studying, and social gathering environments. He saw Koreans, Japanese, and Indians in socializing events, and Chinese when he was mainly working.  He experienced multiculturism with subtle culture shocks in communicating and mingling with them through various episodes as a young Asian who crossed the wild Pacific Ocean from his fatherland Korea. 

By also serving as an invited speaker or lecturer to various organizations including the universities and colleges, community social clubs, and churches, he barely sustained his life.  As a far Eastern scholar and poet reciting both Shakespeare’s and famous Chinese poems seamlessly, his dream was not always aligned with his harsh reality hand in hand.   His dream was always high, but his real life was always filled with hunger and thirstiness. He was a literature-loving young Asian student that was wandering around the complex, dirty, and maze-like streets and avenues connected by gigantic and gloomy skyscrapers of New York City.     

In the real world, the author Kang had a really hard time getting his American citizenship even if he married a native American.  Many famous dignitaries including renowned novelist Pearl Buck petitioned the US Congress to accept him as an American citizen.  At that time Asians were not allowed to be accepted as friendly as formal immigrants to America.  The history of unfair immigration policy toward Asians was unreasonably too deep in America at that time.      

Chungpa visited several Korean churches and tried to feel the warmheartedness of the Korean community in exile.  He was always recognizing agony as a very vulnerable immigrant in various aspects.   By socializing with them, Chungpa is placed in the midst of coexisting traditional Korean Confucian and western-style Christian ways of thought. One day, he got a very rare chance of serving for one church as an invited preacher.  Through this unusual experience at that church, he was shocked by finding religious fraud and cult in America.   

He visited various homes of Americans and Canadians during breaks and vacations by their invitations or his requests and also at the same time he was working with them.   Through these kinds of unique experiences, he tasted the diverse hardships of farmers, factory workers, restaurant waiters, and office workers through various unimaginable and unexpected episodes by himself.  Through these work experiences, he was intimidated and also overwhelmed by the power and characteristics of the emerging industrialized society of the Western world.   

As a “forced” young immigrant in America, Chungpa was gradually getting acquainted with several good friends including Americans, Chinese, and needless to say fellow Koreans.  He experienced diverse generation gaps, cultural gaps, and ideology gaps in love and marriage issues while interacting with them in diverse environments. 

It was fortunate for me to read Kang’s beautifully and finely described novel through an “Oriental” scholar’s view. He is a brilliant Korean (Eastern) writer with a pure poetic heart. It is clearly contrasted with American’s view such as a popular American (Western) novelist John Steinbeck who wrote ‘Travels with Charlie in Search of America.’        

East Goes West describes a personal life story of Han and his hard immigrant life in America.  He recognizes his fellow immigrants’ independence movements to liberate his homeland Korea from the iron shackles of Japan in America and their hopes to return to their fatherland. His substantial emotional distance from his fellow immigrants naturally increases his sense of loneliness and his hopes for a new and successful life in the West are never realized. 

His two best Korean friends Jum and Kim are also interested in becoming truly American, but it was not possible for them to get into American society. Han hopes his diligent schooling will solve his never-ending struggling situation and make him be assimilated into American society successful, but unfortunately in vain.

The novel East Goes West is composed of three parts (Parts One (four books), Two (nine books), and Three (four books)).  In the last Book Four of Part Three, Kang is summarizing his turbulent life in America as an exile symbolically using a dream with the following few sentences.    

My exile seems as if ended. But I have never gone back.  . . .

One here in America, I had a dream . . . a dream that I had climbed to the top of a lofty tree.  . . . 

. . .

And now, as is the inconsequential way of dreams, I was running down the steps into a dark and cryptlike cellar, still looking for my money and my keys.   The cellar seemed to be under the pavements of a vast city.  . . .

. . .

I awoke like the phoenix out of a burst of flames.

I  have remembered this dream, because, according to Oriental interpretation, it is a dream of good omen.  To be killed in a dream means success, and in particular death by fire augurs good fortune.  This is supposed to be so, because death symbolizes in Buddhistic philosophy growth and rebirth and a happier reincarnation.  

I recommend Kang’s Esat Goes West without hesitation to you.  Through the fine detailed sensitive and thoughtful eyes of a pioneering Korean American writer who lived a long time ago, you can get a chance of recognizing, thinking, reflecting, and learning recently emerging heavy and critical topics in American society these days.  I think it is worthwhile to read which can expand your own view about the West especially if you are an Easterner although you don’t understand the East fully either ironically.   Because of globalization, nowadays we feel that we are at the boundary between the East and the West as time goes by.   Nowadays, everything around the world is interacting with each other more closely with the advancement of the Internet and telecommunication technologies.  

I hope his unique literary works traversing East and West worlds should be researched by Korean Studies scholars further and translated into beautiful Korean to accommodate more enthusiastic readers interested in the close interactions and development directions of two cultures in Korea and abroad.  ***

East Goes West (Book):

URL=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1049322.East_Goes_West

Korean Book Review:

https://www.ktown1st.com/blog/VALover/18037