East Goes West

Description

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

A beautiful collectible hardcover edition of the father of Korean American literature’s “wonderfully resplendent evocation of a newcomer’s America” (Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker)

A Penguin Vitae Edition

Having fled Japanese-occupied Korea for the gleaming promise of the United States with nothing but four dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare to his name, the young, idealistic Chungpa Han arrives in a New York teeming with expatriates, businessmen, students, scholars, and indigents. Struggling to support his studies, he travels throughout the United States and Canada, becoming by turns a traveling salesman, a domestic worker, and a farmer, and observing along the way the idealism, greed, and shifting values of the industrializing twentieth century. Part picaresque adventure, part shrewd social commentary, East Goes West casts a sharply satirical eye on the demands and perils of assimilation. It is a masterpiece not only of Asian American literature but also of American literature.

Penguin Vitae―loosely translated as “Penguin of one’s life”―is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.“A Nabokovian stylistic tour de force.” —Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“The story of Chungpa Han is truly, like the old New York he encounters, as ‘million-hued as a dream.’ A wonderfully resplendent evocation of a newcomer’s America, Younghill Kang’s classic novel is as vibrant and pointed in its vision today as it was 60 years ago, and may prove to be one of our most vital documents. East Goes West deserves rediscovery.” —Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker

“Thrillingly timeless . . . The finest, funniest, craziest, sanest, most cheerfully depressing Korean-American novel . . . A vast, unruly masterpiece that is our earliest portrait of the artist as a young Korean-American . . . East Goes West’s tumbling prose and loose, picaresque structure feel amazingly ‘free and vigorous’ (per [Thomas] Wolfe) today. . . . The novelist and memoirist Alexander Chee’s rousing introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition . . . argues strongly for its relevance today. . . . Its value is in the heady mix of high and low, the antic yet clear-eyed take on race relations, the parade of tragic and comic bit players, and above all, the unleashed chattering of Chungpa’s distinctive voice. . . . The Penguin edition . . . reminds us of how excellent [Kang] really was. . . . This brash modernist comic novel still feels electric.” —Ed Park, The New York Review of Books

“Kang is as wide awake and high-spirited as he is scholarly and thoughtful, and he writes with a keen sense of character. . . . East Goes West offers a rich largesse of color and flavor, personality and impression and event. It is one of those rare books which will arouse interest, ring changes on laughter and leave its residue of thought.” —The New York Times Book Review 

“An immigrant epic that criss-crosses a less-than-welcoming American landscape . . . Thirty-year-old bestseller The Joy Luck Club perennially provides irrefutable proof Asian American stories warrant shelf space. That Penguin Classics—their venerable list considered a significant barometer of what comprises the Anglophone literary canon—has added this . . . is, undoubtedly, long-awaited, long-deserved recognition.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Kang is a born writer, everywhere he is free and vigorous: he has an original and poetic mind, and he loves life.” —Thomas Wolfe

“After Mr. Kang, most books seem a bit flat. . . . What a man! What a writer!” —Rebecca West

“Here is a really great writer.” —H. G. Wells

“[Kang is] the father of Korean American literature. . . . East Goes West is a stunning testament to [his] indomitable spirit, his perspicacious eye, and his special mirth. The book provides us with a rare view of how urban American life was experienced—and critiqued—by Korean immigrants in the 1920s. Sunyoung Lee’s afterword . . . offers original insights into what she calls Kang’s ‘acrobatic talent for mediation’ between ‘the faltering traditions of . . . Korea and the seductive promise of American modernity.’” —Elaine Kim, co-author of East to America: Korean American Life Stories

“Whitmanesque in scope,Younghill Kang’s East Goes West attempts both self-realization and comprehension of all of America. But an undercurrent of sadness haunts this story of a young man’s heroic American odyssey—the sadness of ‘exiled’ Korean men stranded between two worlds, living out their lonely lives on the periphery of American society, working in menial jobs far beneath their education.” —Kichung Kim, author of An Introduction to Classical Korean Literature 

“Unique and vividly realized . . . In its portrait of a young man’s fracturing idealism, it is also an extraordinary, if coded, critique of American materialism.” —Sunyoung Lee, from the Afterword

“Groundbreaking and inspirational . . . A call to action, a call for the country to live up to the dream it has of itself . . . This book is for all of us.” —Alexander Chee, from the ForewordYounghill Kang (1903-1972) was born in what is now North Korea and emigrated to the U.S. in his late teens. He studied at Boston University and Harvard and published widely in such outlets as The New York Times and The Nation. While teaching English at New York University, he was introduced by fellow professor Thomas Wolfe to legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, who would publish Kang’s books. Kang was the first Asian to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; he would be awarded two in his lifetime, among his many other honors.

Alexander Chee (foreword) is the bestselling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh and the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016 and The New York Times, and he is a contributing editor at The New Republic. The winner of a Whiting Award, he is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. He lives in New York City.

Sunyoung Lee (afterword, notes) is the publisher and editor in chief of Kaya Press, which specializes in literature from the Asian and Pacific Island diasporas. She lives in Los Angeles.

BOOK ONE

1

AN UNDYING BIRD . . . forever lives, forever breathes, forever, with its two wings fluttering, flies. That is the universe. It was there when there was the empty space of our non-existence. It is here moving still. Where it is, silence is never there. . . . And speaking with an Asian’s natural bias, it seems to me it is wrong to say, time passes. Time never passes. We say that it does, as long as we have a clock to calculate it for us. The two hands go, the iron tongue tells hours, we sense the experience of our own duration . . . we are illusioned. It is not time that passes, but ourselves. Time is always there . . . as long as there is life to use it. Only if no life existed, there would be no time. Time was because life was . . . as it is the mortal life to travel over the immortal time. The bird flies with the two wings, on and on. But the same time that occupied the Roman lovers is the same that Hamlet was insane in, and in the same I write and think of time. . . .

In the perpetual merry-go-round of the universe, suns, moons, planets, stars, the whole body of all ten thousand things shift with the shifting space and the eternal time that Orpheus asserted was in the beginning, but had itself no beginning. I, too, with my own life have skated upon the great time arena. I seem to have traversed much time, more than most men, although I am still in the early thirties. To the old-fashioned Oriental, life goes back, step by step, to many forefathers, in unbroken chain, and onward into descendants which are somehow he, not in any abstract coldly philosophical sense, but as the solemn vehicle of his Ghost and his God, his most material ghost which eats with them. My own life in actual books still extant in my Korean village was traced far back in this way to ancestors with the bodies of men and heads of cows. This lifetime, threaded to theirs over the mellow—gold distances of time, can it be the same which now sees New York City?—And I ask myself, did I fall from a different star?

Up to a short while ago, the other side of this earth was like the turned face of the moon to people of the West. But there once the men, the women and children, the plants, fruits, gardens and animals, all traveled together in a forgotten leisure. They sang songs, made love and ate heartily, because there was always time. There life grew in manifold harmony, careless, free, simple and primitive. It had its curved lines, its brilliant colors, its haunting music, its own magic of being.

Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,

Stains the white radiance of eternity

Until Death tramples to fragments . . .

Shelley has said. It was my destiny to see the disjointing of a world. Upon my planet in lost time, the heyday of life passed by. Gently at first. Its attraction of gravity, the grip on its creatures maintained through its fervid bowels, its harmonious motion, weakened. Then the air grew thin, cooler and cooler. At last, what had been good breathing to the old was only strangling pandemonium to the newer generations. . . .

I know that as I grew up, I saw myself placed on a shivering pinnacle overlooking a wasteland that had no warmth, that was under an infernal twilight. I cried for the food for my growth, and there seemed no food. And I felt I was looking on death, the death of an ancient planet, a spiritual planet that had been my fathers’ home. Until I thought to stay would be to try to live, a plant on the top of the Alps where the air is too cold, too stunting, and the wind too brutally cruel. In loathing of death, I hurtled forward, out into space, out toward a foreign body . . . and a younger culture drew me by natural gravity. I entered a new life like one born again. Here I wandered on soil as strange as Mars, seeking roots, roots for an exile’s soul. This world, which had sucked me in by its onward, forward magnetism, must have that in it, too, to feed and anchor man in the old durability . . . for in me has always burned this Taoistic belief in the continuity of living and of time. . . .

It was here . . . here in America for me to find . . . but where? This book is the record of my early search, and the arch of my projectile toward that goal.

2

From an old walled Korean city some thousand years old-Seoul—famous for poets and scholars, to New York. I did not come directly. But almost. A large steamer from the Orient landed me in Vancouver, Canada, and I traveled over three thousand miles across the American continent, a journey more than half as far as from Yokohama to Vancouver. At Halifax, straightway I took another liner. And this time for New York. It was in New York I felt I was destined really “to come out from the boat.” The beginning of my new existence must be founded here. In Korea to come out from the boat is an idiom meaning to be born, as the word “pai” for “womb” is the same as “pai” for “boat”; and there is the story of a Korean humorist who had no money, but who needed to get across a river. On landing him on the other side, the ferryman asked for his money. But the Korean humorist said to the ferryman who too had just stepped out, “You wouldn’t charge your brother, would you? We both came from the same boat.” And so he traveled free. My only plea for a planet-ride among the white-skinned majority of this New World is the same facetious argument. I brought little money, and no prestige, as I entered a practical country with small respect for the dark side of the moon. I got in just in time, before the law against Oriental immigration was passed.

But New York, that magic city on rock yet ungrounded, nervous, flowing, million—hued as a dream, became, throughout the years I am recording, the vast mechanical incubator of me.

It was always of New York I dreamed-not Paris nor London nor Berlin nor Munich nor Vienna nor age-buried Rome. I was eighteen, green with youth, and there was some of the mystery of nature in my simple immediate response to what was for me just a name . . . like the dogged moth that directs its flight by some unfathomable law. But I said to myself, “I want neither dreams nor poetry, least of all tradition, never the full moon.” Korea even in her shattered state had these. And beyond them stood waiting-death. I craved swiftness, unimpeded action, fluidity, the amorphous New. Out of action rises the dream, rises the poetry. Dream without motion is the only wasteland that can sustain nothing. So I came adoring the crescent, not the full harvest moon, with winter over the horizon and its waning to a husk.

“New York at last!” I heard from the passengers around me. And the information was not needed. In unearthly white and mauve, shadow of white, the city rose, like a dream dreamed overnight, new, remorselessly new, impossibly new . . . and yet there in all the arrogant pride of rejoiced materialism. These young, slim, stately things a thousand houses high (or so it seemed to me, coming from an architecture that had never defied the earth), a tower of Babel each one, not one tower of Babel but many, a city of Babel towers, casually, easily strewn end up against the skies-they stood at the brink, close crowded, the brink of America, these Giantesses, these Fates, which were not built for a king nor a ghost nor any man’s religion, but were materialized by those hard, cold, magic words-opportunity, enterprise, prosperity, success—just business words out of world-wide commerce from a land rich in natural resources. Buildings that sprang white from the rock. No earth clung to their skirts. They leaped like Athene from the mind synthetically; they spurned the earth. And there was no monument to the Machine Age like America.

I could not have come farther from home than this New York. Our dwellings, low, weathered, mossed, abhorring the lifeless line-the definite, the finite, the aloof-loving rondures and an upward stroke, the tilt of a roof like a boat always aware of the elements in which it is swinging—most fittingly my home was set a hemisphere apart, so far over the globe that to have gone on would have meant to go nearer not farther. How far my little grass-roofed, hill-wrapped village from this gigantic rebellion which was New York! And New York’s rebellion called to me excitedly, this savagery which piled great concrete block on concrete block, topping at the last moment as in an afterthought, with crowns as delicate as pinnacled ice; this lavishness which, without prayer, pillaged coal mines and waterfalls for light, festooning the great nature severed city with diamonds of frozen electrical phenomena-it fascinated me, the Asian man, and in it I saw not Milton’s Satan, but the one of Blake.

3

I saw that Battery Park, if not a thing of earth, was yet a thing of dirt, as I walked about it trying to get my breath and decide what was the next step after coming from the sea. It was oddly dark and forlorn, like a little untidy room off-stage where actors might sit waiting for their cues. The shops about looked mean and low and dim. A solitary sailor stumbled past, showing neither the freedom and romance of the seas, nor the robust assurance of a native on his own shore. And the other human shadows flitting there had a stealthy and verminlike quality, a mysterious haunting corruption, suggesting the water’s edge, and the meeting of foreign plague with foreign plague. I walked about the shabby little square briskly, drawing hungry lungfuls of the prowling keen March air-a Titan, he, in a titanic city-until in sudden excess of elation and aggression growing suddenly too hot with life, as if to come to grips with an opponent, I took off my long coat; and sinking down on a bench, I clapped my knee and swore the oath of battle and of triumph. The first part of a wide journey was accomplished. At least that part in space. I swore to keep on. Yes, if it took a lifetime, I must get to know the West.

Well, mine was not oath of battle in the militaristic sense. I was congenitally unmilitaristic. Inwoven in my fabric were the agricultural peace of Asia, the long centuries of peaceful living in united households, of seeking not the soul’s good, but the blood’s good, the blood’s good of a happy, decorously branching family tree. In the old days the most excitement permitted to the individual man, if he got free from the struggle with beloved but ruthless and exacting elements, was poetry, the journey to Seoul, wine, and the moons that came with every season. His wife, usually older than himself and chosen by his mother and father, would be sure to know no poetry, but she would not begrudge him a feminine companion in Seoul, or even in some market place near-by-one of those childlike ladies who having bought—or more often inherited—the right to please by the loss of other social prestige, must live on gaiety, dancing, and fair calligraphy. But any wholehearted passion would have shivered too brutally the family tree. And I had done far worse. I had refused to marry my appointed bride. I had repeated that I would not marry, at the ripe age of eighteen. I had said, with more pride than Adam ever got out of sinning in Eden, that I must choose the girl, unhelped by my forefathers or the astrologers or the mountain spirits. And this rebellion against nature and fatality I had learned from the West. Small wonder I had struggled with my father over every ounce of Western learning. I had gone against his will to mission schools, those devilish cults which preach divorce in the blood, and spiritual kinships, which foster the very distortions found, says the golden-hearted Mencius, in the cleverish man. I had studied in Japanese schools and it must be confessed, my studies had brought ever increased rebellion and dismay-to me as well as my father.

The military position of Japan-intrenched in Korea in my own lifetime—forced me into dilemma: Scylla and Charybdis. I was caught between—on the one hand, the heart-broken death of the old traditions irrevocably smashed not by me but by Japan (and yet I seemed to the elders to be conspiring with Japanese)-and on the other hand the zealous summary glibness of Japan, fast-Westernizing, using the Western incantations to realize her ancient fury of spirit, which Korea had always felt encroaching, but had snubbed in a blind disdain. Korea, a small, provincial, old-fashioned Confucian nation, hopelessly trapped by a larger, expanding one, was called to get off the earth. Death summoned. I could have renounced the scholar’s dream forever (plainly scholarship had dreamed us away into ruin) and written my vengeance against Japan in martyr’s blood, a blood which like that of the Tasmanians is strangely silent though to a man they wrote. Or I could take away my slip cut from the roots, and try to engraft my scholar inherited kingdom upon the world’s thought. But what I could not bear was the thought of futility, the futility of the martyr, or the death-stifled scholar back home. It was so that the individualist was born, the individualist, demanding life and more life, fulfilment, some answer to his thronging questions, some recognition of his death-wasted life, some anchor in thin air to bring him to earth though he seems cut off from the very roots of being.

And this it was-this naked individual slip-I had brought to New York.

“Dream, tall dreams,” I thought. “Such are proper to man. But they must be solid, well planned, engineered and founded on rock.”

Had I not reached the arena of man’s fight with death? I sat there on a park bench, savouring rebellion, dreaming the Faustian dream, without knowing of Faust, seeing myself with the Eastern scholarship in one hand, the Western in the other. And as I sat it grew colder. I had thought a little of spending the night on that bench. It appealed to me to wake up here with the dawn and find myself in New York. It would not be the first night I had slept roofless in a large city. But in the inner lining of my cap, I had four dollars, all I had left, in fact, after my long gestation by boat and by train. I decided to get myself the birthday present of a room.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	1.2700 × 5.2000 × 8.0000 in
Series	Penguin Vitae
Imprint	Penguin Classics
ISBN-13	09780143136286
ISBN-10	0143136283
Author	Alexander Chee, Sunyoung Lee, Younghill Kang
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC019000, FIC051000
Subjects	satire books, classic books, fiction books, books fiction, realistic fiction books, asian fiction, korean american literature, asian american literature, penguin gifts, classic literature, books about immigration, east goes west, alexander chee, books about immigrants, books about Korea, Korean diaspora, Korean American novel, Asian American novel, WWII, war, classic, fiction, mystery, classics, FIC019000, novels, race, Literature, Japanese, asian, saga, book club, literary fiction, Asian American, FIC051000, penguin classics