American Utopias of the First-generation Korean Immigrants in East Goes West

Abstract

The paper concentrates on East Goes West by Younghill Kang, who, as the first Korean immigrant to write novels in English in the first-generation Korean American writers, offers an alternative voice on the immigrant life in the host land against the strategies adopted by most Korean American writers. Within the nascent Korean American literature by most first-generation Korean American writers, the bulk of them display strong Nationalism of resistance in oppositional terms to Japanese occupation or Western imperial culture, epitomizing Korea and the Korean patriotic spirit in their literature instead of Korean Americans in the U.S. They expose a collective trauma, the displacement from the ancestral homeland with yet an attachment to the home in term of custom, language and folk culture that exist consciously or subconsciously in the memory.  Unlike his peers who are mainly riveted by the Korean memory, Younghill Kang attempts to query and subvert the imagining of a monolithic American Dream. With his four major Korean immigrants who fail to achieve their American dreams, Kang doubts and challenges American mottos of progress, equality, assimilation and upward mobility by keeping the contradictions between the promise of freedom and the reality of race discrimination, between economic survival and dreams of intellectual accomplishment, and between the ideal of America and actual experience of life in its marginal existence. By intersecting Emersonian American dream and Franklinian American dream through the characters, Kang reveals that both a moral Utopia and a material Utopia are daydreams for the marginal Korean immigrants.