Koreans in Exile: Younghill Kang and Richard E. Kim
Joseph Jonghyun Jeon 2017
16 pages
===============
Abstract
Born roughly three decades apart, Younghill Kang (c. 1903–72) and Richard Eun-kook Kim (1932–2009) were the two most prominent early Korean/American writers, if by “early” we mean before the Asian American movement in the late 1960s and the emergence of Asian American literature as an explicit category. Both lived as children through Japanese colonization in what today is known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or North Korea (not to be confused with the Republic of Korea or South Korea). Both immigrated as young men to the United States where they pursued university educations and advanced degrees. As writers and professors in U.S. academic institutions, both also achieved a fair amount of success. Their works, mostly autobiographical fiction, gained a good deal of initial recognition in the United States in part because they offered an insider's view of a Korean culture in tumultuous times to an audience that could only view it from afar. In addition, they share similar career trajectories: both made an immediate splash in American public culture but soon vanished from public life after a decade or so of high visibility (Kang in the 1930s and Kim in the 1960s) with their books going out of print. Both also gained new audiences for their earlier work either posthumously or late in life: Kaya Press, a publisher specializing in Asian/American diasporic writing, republished Kang's East Goes West in 1997 and Penguin republished Kim's The Martyred in 2011 as part of their Penguin Classics series.
Although Kang wrote his most visible work before the Korean War and Kim produced his afterward, their commonalities might encourage us to read these writers as witnesses to a larger historical continuum that encompasses Korea's cultural, political, and economic emergence into global modernity, initially under the protection of and later in partnership with the United States, and also one that overlaps an even broader geopolitical recalibration, as the growth of Asian economies in the second half of the twentieth century increasingly!demands a revision of earlier models of east-west relations. As diasporic writers, Kang and Kim do not simply represent exilic Asian figures grappling with new Western environs. They also figure early transnational engagements across national, aesthetic, political, and racial lines, within the context of the gradual transformation of Korea from the so-called Hermit Kingdom, as it was known during the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897), into the international power that it is today.
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Koreans in Exile: Younghill Kang and Richard E. Kim
Joseph Jonghyun Jeon
Born roughly three decades apart, Younghill Kang (c. 1903–72) and Richard
Eun-kook Kim (1932–2009) were the two most prominent early Korean/
American writers, if by “early” we mean before the Asian American move-
ment in the late 1960s and the emergence of Asian American literature as
an explicit category. Both lived as children through Japanese colonization in
what today is known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or North
Korea (not to be confused with the Republic of Korea or South Korea). Both
immigrated as young men to the United States where they pursued univer-
sity educations and advanced degrees. As writers and professors in U.S. aca-
demic institutions, both also achieved a fair amount of success. Their works,
mostly autobiographical iction, gained a good deal of initial recognition in
the United States in part because they ofered an insider’s view of a Korean
culture in tumultuous times to an audience that could only view it from afar.
In addition, they share similar career trajectories: both made an immediate
splash in American public culture but soon vanished from public life after a
decade or so of high visibility (Kang in the 1930s and Kim in the 1960s) with
their books going out of print. Both also gained new audiences for their earlier
work either posthumously or late in life: Kaya Press, a publisher specializing in
Asian/American diasporic writing, republished Kang’s East Goes West in 1997
and Penguin republished Kim’s The Martyred in 2011 as part of their Penguin
Classics series.
Although Kang wrote his most visible work before the Korean War and
Kim produced his afterward, their commonalities might encourage us to read
these writers as witnesses to a larger historical continuum that encompasses
Korea’s cultural, political, and economic emergence into global modernity,
initially under the protection of and later in partnership with the United
States, and also one that overlaps an even broader geopolitical recalibration,
as the growth of Asian economies in the second half of the twentieth century
increasingly demands a revision of earlier models of east-west relations. As
diasporic writers, Kang and Kim do not simply represent exilic Asian igures
grappling with new Western environs. They also igure early transnational
engagements across national, aesthetic, political, and racial lines, within the
context of the gradual transformation of Korea from the so-called Hermit
Kingdom, as it was known during the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897), into the
international power that it is today.
Raised as a child in Korea, Younghill Kang is generally regarded as the
irst Korean American novelist. Shortly after participating in the March
First Movement, a large-scale anticolonial demonstration of some two mil-
lion Koreans in 1919 protesting Japanese occupation, Kang left Korea for the
United States. As his ictional avatar, Chungpa Han, would later describe
in his 1937 novel East Goes West, his arrival in the United States was “just in
time, before the law against Oriental immigration was passed,” referring to the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which buttressed U.S. policies against Asian
immigration that had been state policy since 1882.
4
Kang attended, in succession, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia; Boston University, from which he received a bachelor of science degree in 1925; and Harvard University, from which he received a master’s degree in English education. Throughout the
1930s in particular, Kang gained a good deal of visibility in the New York art
and intellectual scene. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the irst Asian ever
to do so; curated Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; served as an
editor for the Encylopædia Britannica; and taught at New York University. His
most acclaimed work during his lifetime, The Grass Roof (1931), was published
by Scribner and reviewed favorably, most notably by Thomas Wolfe, Kang’s
colleague at New York University . Although the initial reception of his second
novel, East Goes West, was less enthusiastic, it became the text of greatest inter-
est to later Asian American literary scholars because it narrates his experiences
in the United States, his home for the rest of his life.
Kang made numerous attempts to become naturalized as a U.S. citizen,
including separate special bills introduced speciically on his behalf in the U.S.
House of Representative and Senate in 1939 . The irst was introduced by Illinois
Congressman Kent E. Keller and included a supporting document authored
by such luminaries as Malcolm Cowley, Pearl Buck, Lewis Mumford, Maxwell
Perkins, and Charles Scribner.
Second, West Virginia Senator Matthew M. Neely doubled Kent’s eforts in his chamber, but both bills failed to pass, and Kang was never granted citizenship. Like all Korean Americans until 1943 when the law was changed, he was classiied as an “enemy alien” during World War II, the same classiication given to Japanese Americans, since at the time Korea was considered part of the Japanese Empire. After the bombing of
Pearl Harbor, Kang gave up his teaching position at New York University and
his job at the Metropolitan Museum, and instead worked for the U.S. War
Department and published a number of anti-Japanese propaganda pieces in
various publications. After the war, he traveled to Korea and worked for the
U.S. Army Military Government as an attaché during the occupation in the
Oice of Public Information before returning to the United States again in
1948. Though he worked on translations of Korean and Japanese literature
and as a teacher at various colleges and universities before his death in 1972,
his career as a novelist never continued after the publication of East Goes West.
Born Kim Ǔn’guk in Hamhŭng, which is today North Korea’s second larg-
est city after Pyongyang, Richard E. Kim spent his early years living under
Japanese colonial rule and experienced liberation irst hand when it came
in 1945. Although the lives of the two writers and the thematic terrain they
explored overlapped, Kang’s major writing was written and published dur-
ing Japanese colonialism and before the Korean War while Kim’s came after
both had ended. Unlike Kang, then, Kim experienced the Korean War directly
as a soldier in the South Korean military while Kang was already ensconced
in New York City. After an honorable discharge from the army in 1954, Kim
left Korea for the United States in 1955, not long after the Korean Armistice
Agreement was signed in 1953. In the United States, he received his bachelor’s
degree from Middlebury College and master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins
University, the University of Iowa, and Harvard University.
His most successful work was his irst novel The Martyred (1964). Focusing on
events that took place during the Korean War, the novel was a New York Times
bestseller and was nominated for the National Book Award. Also awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, Kim taught at a number of U.S. academic
institutions, including the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Syracuse
University, and San Diego State University. Although he continued to publish
in a number of forms and venues until his death in 2009 , including children’s
iction, essays, and newspaper articles, his most visible major literary works
after his irst novel were The Innocent (1968), a novel based on the 1961 military
coup d’état in South Korea, and Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood (1970),
a ictional memoir that relects on Kim’s childhood under Japanese colonial-
ism, the end of which coincides with the end of the novel. Like Kang, Kim was
unable to match his early literary success; after his last academic appointment
as a Fulbright Professor at Seoul National University (1981–83), he spent his
later years working as a reporter/narrator on educational Korean television
projects, as a columnist for Korean newspapers, and as a translator before his
death in 2009 .
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