Asian American literature, as King-Kok Cheung explains, emerged from the impact of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s, and can be defined as works written by people of Asian descent born in or immigrating to North America (1).3 Cheung goes on to indicate that Asian American writing, to this day, has had several significant shifts. The main concern for Asian American writers in the past—such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (1943), Milton
Murayama’s All I Asking For Is My Body (1959), and Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1981)—was to claim America, to stress race and masculinity, and to delve into
social history as well as communal responsibility. Nevertheless, for the younger generations—like Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days (1989), David Mura’s Turning
Japanese (1991), and Ginu Kamani’s Junglee Girl (1995)—the focus has changed to
writing about diaspora and developing multiple interests in ethnicity, class, sex/
sexuality, postmodernism, poststructuralism, along with multiculturalism (Cheung 1-17). The younger generations of Asian American writers do not always, more specifically, stick to the subject of being Americans, yet attend more to the theme of their family roots, that is, the original ethnicity. In this regard, Korean American
3 As Ronald Takaki expounds in “From a Different Shore: Their History Bursts with Telling,” the roots of Asian Americans are so diverse and can be traced back to China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (4). However, I am of the opinion that Takaki omits some countries which also could be considered Asian, such as Thailand, Indonesia, or the countries in South Asia and the Middle East, like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, and so on. For further information, please consult Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1998).
literature seems to follow the paradigm shift in Asian American literature, which also could be observed in Chang-rae Lee’s works. In the following discussion, I would like to elaborate on the variance and the significant characteristics in Korean American literature.
Korean American literature, according to Elaine H. Kim, is particularly rooted in and circumscribed by Korean American social history and sociopolitical
circumstances (“Korean American Literature” 157). Early Korean American authors illustrate Asian or Korean Americans as aliens because of their discernible ethnic features. Sometimes they write to claim America so as to express how wonderfully and successfully they have become westernized or Americanized. Most of the novels in this period are largely autobiographical and written by Korean immigrant
intellectuals. Aside from this, Japanese colonization of Korea also plays an important role in the development of Korean American literature, for it stimulates “the particular anguish of the exile deprived even of the sustaining illusion of a triumphant return
‘home’ after a life of toil in a country where she/ he felt hated” (“Korean American Literature” 158). In this phase, Younghill Kang (1903-72), a pioneering Korean American novelist, could be the best representative. The setting of his first novel, The Grass Roof (1931), is in colonial Korea, and the protagonist, Chung-pa Han, is
imprisoned briefly by the Japanese for his political participation in Sam Il Oondong.4 He dreams to flee from Korea to the US, never relinquishing his hope to find
acceptance in American life, only to fail in his American dream. Nevertheless, in Kang’s second novel, East Goes West (1937), Han and other Korean exiles finally arrive in America. Via these characters, Kang tries to “[call] into question U.S.
4 According to Elaine Kim’s footnote 7, “Sam Il Oondong was a series of massive peaceful
demonstrations protesting Japan’s colonization of Korea that began in Korea on March 19, 1919, and lasted for several months, during which thousands of Koreans were killed and imprisoned” (“Korean American” 183).
American nationalist narratives of progress, quality, assimilation, and upward mobility with his portrait of Korean immigrants’ endless wandering” (“Korean American Literature” 159).
Nevertheless, recent Korean American writers in Hawaii present a different facet in terms of Korean American identity and literature. As Elaine Kim states, Korean heritage for them is significant but not the only identity they possess. More concretely, it is possible for them to claim to be Asian, Korean, and American all at once, to be increasingly hybrid and heterogeneous (“Korean American Literature” 170-71). Take Gary Pak’s The Watcher of Waipuna (1992) for instance. It is a collection of short stories in which the characters belong to numerous races. Nevertheless, they are “not defined exclusively or even primarily by their ethnicity. . . . [Instead], their ethnicity describes them” (“Korean American Literature” 171), which appears to resonate with the change of Asian American literature mentioned earlier, that is, multiculturalism, heterogeneity, and peculiarity. Nowadays, the trend of Korean American literature, as Elaine Kim analyzes in “Roots and Wings,” is no longer mainly about the connection between Korea and Korean Americans. The key elements for younger Korean
American writers are “US imperialism in Korean history, racism in immigrant life, and issues of gender and sexuality in family and society. At the same time, there should be more focus on different ways of being Korean in America” (“Roots and Wings” 15).
Furthermore, in terms of the perspective on gender and sexuality, “[m]ale writers who have dominated Korean-American literature up to the late seventies have rarely attempted to create multi-dimensional female characters in their works” (Kyhan Lee 26). More specifically, they are male-centered and accustomed to accepting or
objectifying women as the subaltern (“Korean American Literature” 165-66). In order
to change the unfair situation, more and more female writers, such as Sook Nyul Choi, write for Korean and Korean American women so that they can really know and remember Korea with its war history. In Chang-rae Lee’s novels, we can observe the features of early and recent Korean American literature. Meanwhile, we can also see that female characters are important in his novels.
Chang-rae Lee, viewed as the most prominent contemporary Korean American writer by Heinz Insu Fenkl in 2004 (20), could be thought of as the best representative for the transition of Korean American literature I mentioned above. The settings of his books are still surrounded by war, Korean American history, and sociopolitical
circumstances. However, his novels also address the issues of racism in the
community or society and of sex/ sexuality in family, which are two points mentioned by Elaine Kim as characteristics of works by younger Korean American novelists.
Aside from these, he blends the Hawaiian writer’s thinking toward being Korean or Asian in the US within the story, namely, to claim to be Asian, Korean, and American at the same time. Most important of all, Lee tries to tell readers that one’s selfhood is significant for one’s life: we should be the masters of our life instead of being
controlled by it.
Among his first three novels, all written in first-person narration, I have chosen Native Speaker and A Gesture Life as my primary texts for analysis because of the
numerous analogies between them.5 The heroes—Henry Park in Native Speaker as well as Franklin Hata in A Gesture Life—are Asian American outsiders who
eventually acquire similar insight into identity. Both of them would like to start a family in America, and long for a successful fulfillment of their American dreams.
Nonetheless, their American life appears not to go so smoothly. Henry hopes and
5 His latest book, The Surrendered, has been just published so I will not take it into consideration in this thesis.
strives to be a well-assimilated American, but gets confused gradually when working as a spy. Hata also dreams to be thought of as an American, but everyone still calls him Hata instead of Franklin owing to his apparent “Japaneseness.” They both
experience a journey of searching for selfhood, nationality and ethnicity, along with a sense of belonging. Most significantly, the female characters in the novels—Lelia, Sunny, and Kkutaeh—are not just suffering women or the disadvantaged but are set as decisive turning points for Henry’s and Hata’s life journeys. Nevertheless, as we can know from the endings of the stories, both Henry and Hata step on a more distinct road in life than before. Henry eventually reunites and lives with his wife again, whereas Hata leaves his daughter, grandson, and the familiar American town in the long run. Moreover, in the two novels, Lee successfully combines the conventions and the innovation of Korean American literature. In Native Speaker, Korean American social history is subtly written into the storyline, while the memories of World War II and the Korean comfort women are finely inserted into A Gesture Life. On top of history and war, Lee pays much attention to the multidimensional and heterogeneous society in both books. He expresses concern about racism, marriage, and transnational adoption. Meanwhile, he also takes advantage of multiculturalism, and arranges various characters with different ethnic backgrounds to strengthen his belief in unmatched racial peculiarity.
Unlike Native Speaker and A Gesture Life, in Aloft, Lee explores identity issues based upon an insider’s perspective. The protagonist in his third novel is Jerry Battle, an Italian American whose family is a diluted mix of Italian Asian and Latin American.
According to Philip Culbertson’s review of Aloft, Lee writes brilliantly “about identity and relationships, about the every-dayness of our regular lives, and about the fears and anxieties that characterise our inner dialogue.” Through interacting with his grown children, late wife, and girlfriend, Jerry comes to an understanding of himself better.
However, Lee mainly focuses on interpersonal relationships, family identity, and human nature that are different from what interests me in the other two books, namely, national and racial identity. Hence, I choose to analyze Native Speaker and A Gesture Life in this thesis. Furthermore, in addition to the traits of Koran American literature,
his novels are highly concerned with the form of the Bildungsroman. With the genre, he successfully narrates the dilemma of the Asian American in between two different cultures. In the following section, I will dwell on the literature review with reference to the two novels.