Su Cool for School

I already did a blog post a few months ago about how much I enjoyed Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Makings of an Oriental Yankee, but I thought I would share information about its book history. I wrote this as an assignment last semester and since all the grading is finished for that class I feel at liberty to share in case anyone is doing research on the novel or is simply interested in the complexities of how a book is produced, published, and received (even misinterpreted) throughout time. Also, I’m too lazy to write an original blog post (spring break just started, but I’m already worrying about all the work I need to get done during the break!)

East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee Production, Publication, and Reception History

1. Production

Younghill Kang, deemed the father of Korean American literature, had already tasted success from his first book that was published in 1931, The Grass Roof, which depicted life in Korea. Trained in Korean and Chinese classics, he had shown an extraordinary dedication to his scholarly pursuits early on, leaving his provincial town at the age of ten and traveling to Seoul on foot for 16 days against his father’s will to further his education. While studying and working in Japan, he was imprisoned for protests against the Japanese regime in annexed Korea, eventually escaping to America with just 4 dollars in his pocket (New York Times). (In this he is resembled by the protagonist of both The Grass Roof and East Goes West, Chungpa Han, who arrives in New York with the same meager fortune of 4 dollars and lofty dreams of a college education in the US). After receiving graduate degrees from both Harvard University and Boston University and participating in various translation projects, Kang taught comparative literature at New York University and began writing in English for the first time. The Grass Roof was published with the help of his friend and NYU colleague Thomas Wolfe, who connected Kang with Maxwell Perkins, his own editor at Scribner’s and discoverer of other great writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Kang’s first book was extremely well received, highly praised by other writers like H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, with the latter exclaiming “After Mr. Kang, most books seem a bit flat… What a man! What a writer!” (qtd. in Lee, 375). The Grass Roof was adapted into a children’s book called the The Happy Grove in 1933, and was even considered for a Hollywood motion picture with the agent, rather ironically, writing to Scribner’s about the “considerable interest being shown at present in Chinese stories” (qtd. in Lee, 406). All this success with his first book paved the path to his second book East Goes West.

In light of all this recognition, Kang pitched the idea for a sequel he initially titled “Death of an Exile” in 1931, the same year The Grass Roof was published. His proposal in application for a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship was rejected, resubmitted, and finally accepted in 1933, making him the first Asian individual ever to receive this fellowship. In the nationality section of his first application in 1931, he wrote: “In practice an American and permanently located here, but debarred by the United States Government from naturalization as an Oriental. I am not a citizen elsewhere, since the Korean Government was dissolved [by Japan] in 1910” (qtd. in 376). Kang’s reflections on citizenship—or his lack of citizenship status—is a theme that reoccurs in East Goes West, which is set in the 1920s just as the Immigration Act of 1924 and the subsequent Asian Exclusion Act was passed. This meant that while the character of Chungpa Han grappled with how to become a “Yankee,” becoming a legal American citizen was not a possibility for him or for his creator. Kang renewed his Guggenheim fellowship in 1934 and spent those two years first in Rome, and then Munich to write what would become East Goes West, interestingly undertaking the project writing about an immigrant’s conception of America while he himself was oceans away. Of his time in Munich, Kang humorously noted “In Germany I was more popular than the high-nosed American in the Hitler thirties, because I could be mistaken for a Japanese, the only race descended from the gods outside of the Aryans” (qtd. in Lee, 406). Being mistaken as Chinese and Japanese throughout his life, and without Korean or American citizenship, Kang had the complexity of his own identity to think about as he brought his fictional alter ego Chungpa Han to life.

When Kang returned to America and presented his manuscript of “Death of an Exile” to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, he received several editorial suggestions. Perkins suggested the work be “more palatable for Euro-American audiences” and wanted a story of “successful assimilation,” to be signaled more overtly by a suggested romance between the protagonist and an American girl. This demand for confirmation of “successful assimilation” was also targeted at the book’s ending, which is ambiguous and hard to read as hopeful when it concludes with a nightmare about entrapment and chaos (qtd. in Lew, 174). Kang revised the manuscript by cutting about 150 pages, but kept the ambiguous ending. In line with the editor’s note about “successful assimilation,” the manuscript’s initially somber title underwent several changes. Perkins suggested “The Americanization of Younghill Kang” and “Rebirth in America,” both indicative of his agenda for the book as a narrative championing Americanization. Thomas Wolfe offered “Yankee out of Korea” and “Oriental Yankee” as other possible titles (qtd. in Lee, 397). Perkins’ editorial suggestions were largely credited to his concern about marketability rather than necessarily censorship, as he himself claimed it was in “order to sell [the novel] at a suitable price” (qtd. in Lew, 174), which Kang actually critiques in his book through Chungpa Han’s employment as a salesman of cheap encyclopedias, a job that fills him with disgust. Chungpa Han unexpectedly finds himself with this job because the owner is excited about the narrative he can project onto the Korean man, enticed by possibility of sympathy and fascination from potential customers when faced with an Oriental trying to fund his Western education—something many readers have seen as a commentary on capitalism and materialism that was increasingly studied in this historical moment (Roh, 96). Indeed, in Kang’s Guggenheim Foundation fellowship application of 1931, he clearly stated his purpose of writing the book not as an endearing autobiography of one man, but as “being the reflection through the hero’s eyes of this mechanical age, of American civilization . . . also a history of his spiritual evolutions and revolutions while love-sick, bread-sick, butter-sick, education-sick, [of someone] lost and obliterated in the stone-and-steel jungles of New York City” (qtd, in Lee, 380). Kang’s own words suggest that while writing this book, his aim was not to please or entertain, but sketch and even critique a moment in history with a degree of cynicism.

2. Publication

            The book East goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee was thus published by Scribner’s in 1937, New York for the price of $2.75, as well as in London that same year (World Affairs, 263). There are only 3 separate editions of East Goes West to date, starting with Scribner’s 1937 edition, followed by one in 1965, and another in 1997. The 1965 edition was by Follett Publishing, which also reissued Kang’s first book The Grass Roof in 1966. The second edition of East Goes West did not see as much attention as the reissued The Grass Roof, which was noted in multiple Korean history journals like The Journal of Asian Studies and Pacific Affairs without mention of the sequel. While The Grass Roof was translated into multiple languages during the 20^th century ranging from French, German, Czech, Vietnamese, and of course Korean, East Goes West does not seem to have been translated until the year 2000 when the Korean edition was published. Reflecting this disparity of treatment between Kang’s first and second books—arguably a series but often read independently due to the six-year gap between their publications as well as their differences in subject matter and tone—only the 1997 edition of  East Goes West included an introduction in contrast to the early editions of The Grass Roof which included a flattering introduction by author Rebecca West.

The Kaya Press edition from 1997 comes with an “Afterword” by Sunyoung Lee, who did extensive research on Kang’s life and collected valuable secondary sources from unpublished archives, such as letters from Scribner’s archives and materials from the Guggenheim Foundation files. This Kaya edition is credited for the successful revival of East Goes West, which was mostly forgotten by the time of Kang’s death. This edition was also reprinted in 2006, and many subsequent works of criticism cite Lee’s “Afterword” for pieces of Kang’s biography and other insights. Walter K. Lew shows disapproval of this edition, claiming “The Kaya edition of EGW, printed in 1997 over the strenuous objections of the Kang estate and its agent, is error-ridden in both its main text and supplementary material” (Lew, 185). However, this view seems to be particular to Lew and isn’t seen much elsewhere. A1999 review of Kaya’s edition states “we owe a great debt to Kaya for reissuing this brilliant novel and for its addition of “The Unmaking of an Oriental Yankee,” an afterword by Sunyoung Lee… Every once in a while a book comes along that, even if not destined to be, deserves to be a classic. Younghill Kang’s East Goes West is such a book” (Lowitz, 203). This quote seems to be telling of several things—one, that despite its initial publication by the famous Maxwell Perkins through Scribner’s, East Goes West deserves yet is not quite treated as a classic at this point in time. The fact that the most recent available edition of East Goes West is also by Kaya Press is important to consider, as Kaya Press is respected but not a particularly big publisher, as an independent non-profit publisher founded in 1994 focusing specifically on Asian and Pacific Islander diasporic literature. Kaya Press is currently based in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and its edition of East Goes West might be considered for niche markets rather than reflective of a mainstream demand for the book.

Interestingly, another publication of East goes West is planned for May 2019, as announced by Penguin Classics. This publication is categorized by Penguin as “Fiction Classics,” and features a new foreword by Alexander Chee. Their online blurb for the upcoming book praises East Goes West as “a masterpiece not only of Asian American literature but also American literature.” Perhaps this is a sign of a change since Lowitz’ review of the 1997 Kaya edition, which tentatively claimed that East Goes West “deserves” to be a classic rather than simply recognizing it as one. More about the reception history of this book is to follow, but the original manuscript of the book can now be found in the Huntington Historical Society files, along with photographs and archived articles about Kang and his work (Lee, 424).

3. Reception and Legacy

            The initial reception of the East Goes West was positive, but not particularly fitting to Kang’s vision of the book as hinted at by his statement of intent in his Guggenheim Foundation fellowship application. A World Affairs review from 1937 states that the “engaging autobiography of a young Korean” has “so much of human interest and episode, so much of a delightful personality, it will be impossible to do less than read it all” (World Affairs, 263-4). Although expressing favor towards the book, the fact that the review calls the book an autobiography even though it clearly has a protagonist with a name different from Kang’s seems to dismiss the unique form of the novel. Moreover, it’s surprising to see that the book is described with such a light-hearted tone, suggesting the reader could expect “delightful” entertainment from the book rather than darker social critique that is evident from the tragedies depicted in East Goes West. The review concludes with what seems to be the most satisfying piece of information: “We are told by the publishers that Mr. Kang was successful in winning his lady-love, and that he is now an assistant professor in New York University as well as on the staff of the Department of Eastern Art in the Metropolitan Museum” (World Affairs, 264). This conflation of the author and narrator seems shift the focus from the actual message of the book to the facts of Kang’s own personal success, implying that for the character of Chungpa Han, “successful assimilation” as Kang’s editor Perkins wanted to see was fully achieved.

A 1937 book review by Katherine Woods in the New York Times similarly ignores the defining fictional form of the book, stating that the “story attracts and holds the attention as if it were a novel… but of course, East Goes West is not a 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 staff of the Department of Far Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum.” Woods went on to say that Kang “is no cynic. He never picks up a big stick. He merely tells us what happened, good and bad, the sad and the merry, and always alive.” This lack of outside acknowledgement of Kang’s creative artistry or his criticisms of America slowly transitioned into lack of interest. Elaine H. Kim describes how “Kang himself considered the second book more important, but The Grass Roof attracted more critical attention. Reviewers may have preferred the more exotic earlier book, which is set entirely in Korea, because East Goes West presents an unflattering view of the underside of American life from the perspectives of people locked out by the color bar” (“Roots and Wings”, 3). Years before this, Kim pointed out that despite Kang’s seeming success, “Not one of the characters in Kang’s East Goes West achieves his American dream (“Defining Asian American Realities through Literature,” 96). This demonstrates a shift in understanding of Kang’s book as one about optimism for American assimilation to one of a cynicism that the 1937 New York Times review failed to recognize.

East Goes West became more generative of various works of criticism at the turn of the millennium, highlighting some of the social critique Kang was trying to make. Aside from less optimistic insights into the Asian immigrant’s experience reflected in Elaine H. Kim’s work, the book has also been examined through gender and sexuality studies by Sau-ling C. Wong and Jeffrey J. Santa Ana, and through the lens of African American studies. In the article “The African-American Presence in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West,” Kun Jong Lee points out that “Kang’s East Goes West is unique in its inclusiveness of ethical/racial representation in Asian-American literary history… Of the many ethnic Americans portrayed in East Goes West, African-American characters loom large and have drawn most of Kang scholars’ critical attention “(329-30). Lee goes onto say that “Kang’s fiction is shot through with African-American culture, literature, and historical figures” and that scholars “should take into account not only the African-American characters but also African-American culture and literature that permeate the narrative” (331). Here, Lee first acknowledges that Kang’s work is “fiction,” and secondly raises questions about parallels and influences between different ethnic groups and literatures that are especially relevant to my own interests. Arguing that Kang shows a sense of solidarity with the African American characters in his book, readers could think about what such solidarity could mean when there is such division and racism among different ethnic Americans today. A prominent example that comes to mind is the shooting of the unarmed Akai Gurley by Peter Liang in 2014 and Liang’s subsequent indictment. In the following weeks over 3,000 members of the Chinese American community rallied together in New York to express their outrage at Liang’s seemingly unfair exclusion from (white) institutional power.

Although there doesn’t seem to be much discussion about the form of East Goes West, I think it would be interesting to move beyond the binary labeling of the book as fiction or non-fiction and think about what a fictionalized autobiography means. With the modern popularity of the memoir as a genre, which often straddles the line between fiction and non-fiction, we should begin to consider how an autobiography typically functions as a political tool or assertion of a rather American notion of individuality while some parts are strategically fictionalized. I think the book could fit into conversations concerning accusations that some Asian authors use orientalism to market their work, and into the debates about authenticity that always come up when dealing with elements of non-fiction—think Frank Chin’s criticism of Maxine Hong Kingston. East Goes West could also be paired with other modified autobiographical genres in Korean American writing, such as Dictee by Theresa Hak kyung Cha; perhaps the hybridity of genres in the context of Korean American texts could reflect the especially confusing nature of Korean nationhood, overshadowed by Japan or China and even more complicated by the split between the two Koreas and dependence on U.S. intervention.

Ultimately, the legacy of East Goes West is a growing one, and we can hope to see more scholarship on Kang’s work. The legacy of Kang rather than specifically East Goes West is more prominent, as he was the first published Korean American author and seen as a pioneer of Asian American literature as a whole. It’s interesting to note that although it might have been due to the popularity of The Grass Roof rather than East Goes West, Kang actually became an American citizen through a private petition by his friends in 1940, over a decade before other Korean immigrants could be granted American citizenship. In the series of recommendations for Kang’s citizenship, the author Louis Adamic stated this: “Younghill Kang is, emotionally and intellectually, identified with America; his interests in America, in fact, are greater—in many respects—than those of all too many native Americans” (qtd. in Lee, 391). Kang being granted citizenship seems to prove the message that many earlier reviews misread from East Goes West—that the American dream was possible. However, this may not be quite a success story, as Kang did not produce anything substantial after East Goes West. While Kang settled and succeeded in America, he showed clear love for Korea through his visits, articles, and political gestures. Although Kang did work on some translations, especially a book of Korean poetry that was not well received, James Wade pondered upon Kang’s silence after the publication of East Goes West. Wade speculated that perhaps how East Goes West was received—not negatively, but perhaps incorrectly—might have been disheartening to Kang, and that Kang too felt the limits of the American dream: “somewhere in his middle years those vaulting aspirations were realized to be impossible… if he could not be the greatest, he would not settle for second-best: for him it was genius or nothing. Rather than compromise those ambitions cherished from childhood, he fell silent and saw his career ebb away into relative obscurity” (59). This is mostly speculation, of course. In any case, Kang was an extraordinary man, and East Goes West was an extraordinary book for its time even if the recognition didn’t come until later. As the anticipated Penguin edition suggests, East Goes West is now on its way to becoming recognized as a classic piece of American literature.

Works Cited

“East Goes West by Younghill Kang.” PenguinRandomHouse.com, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/606933/east-goes-west-by-younghill-kang-foreword-by-alexander-chee/9780143134305

Jones, F.C. “The Tragedy of Korea.” Pacific Affairs, vol. 41, no. 1, 1968, pp. 86–89. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2754721.

Kim, Elaine H. “Defining Asian American Realities Through Literature.” Cultural Critique, no. 6, 1987, pp. 87–111. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354257.

—“Roots and Wings.” The Signur Center Asia Papers: Korean American Literature. George Washington University, 2004.

Lee, Kun Jong. “THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN PRESENCE IN YOUNGHILL KANG’S ‘EAST

GOES WEST.’” CLA Journal, vol. 45, no. 3, 2002, pp. 329–359. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44325107.

Lee, Sunyoung, “Afterword.” In East Goes West. Chicago: Follett, 1965. Reprint 2006. 373-406.

Lew, Walter K. “Grafts, Transplants, Translation: The Americanizing of Younghill Kang.” Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital. New York, NY: New York UP, 2001. 171-190.

Lowitz, Leza. “Manoa.” Manoa, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999, pp. 201–203. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4229795.

“Other Books Received.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 26, no. 4, 1967, pp. 771-773, JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2051317.

Roh, David S. “Scientific Management in ‘East Goes West’: The Japanese and American Construction of Korean Labor.” MELUS, vol. 37, no. 1, 2012, pp. 83–104. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41440714.

Wade, James. “Younghill Kang’s Unwritten Third Act,” Korean Journal 13.4 (1973): 60.

Wong, Sau-ling C., and Jeffrey J. Santa Ana. “Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature.” Signs, vol. 25, no. 1, 1999, pp. 171–226. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175619.

Woods, Katherine, “Making of an Oriental Yankee,” New York Times book review 17. Oct. 1937:11

“World Affairs.” World Affairs, vol. 100, no. 4, 1937, pp. 263–264. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20663027.

“Younghill Kang, Writer, 69, dies.” New York Times, December 14, 1927, 14.