A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Filipino literary identities and constructs already poeticizes – no matter how uneasily and
variously – a ‘dispersed nationality’ and the experience of multiple dislocations.” 195
The last Asian group to consider is the Koreans. While Hawaiian sugar planters
launched only a short but intense recruitment campaign from 1903 to 1905, Korean
immigration to the mainland United States lasted from the early part of the 20 th century
until the mid-60s. Both places found new settlers after the liberalization of immigration
laws in 1965 mentioned earlier. 196 There are almost no accounts of early immigrants such
as laborers and G.I. war brides. Elaine Kim notes: “Many Korean American viewpoints
are represented only through the filtering memories of an English-speaking descendant or
the modifying lens of a writer’s class privilege.” 197 In good Aiiieeeee! fashion, Kim
cautions readers not to overlook the narrating ‘daughters’ and their fascination with the
exotic lives of their immigrant forebears. This argument, however valid, is in danger of
falling back into the trap of reading literary texts for their ethnological authenticity.
Autobiographical writings testify to a perceived need for societal visibility of Korean
immigrant families. Ronyoung Kim argues on the dust jacket of her 1987 novel Clay
Walls: “A whole generation of Korean immigrants and their American-born children
could have lived and died in the United States without anyone knowing they had been
here. I could not let that happen.” 198 When claiming Hawaii’s Korean writers Nora Okja
195 Campomanes in Cheung 1997: 102.
196 The Korean War is, like the Vietnam War, the initial endorsement of the Marcos regime, and, more
recently, the Gulf War (and probably the Afghanistan campaign and the second war in Iraq will have to be
added to this list), an example for political instabilities that caused Asians to settle in the United States.
Ironically, these instabilities have often been created or intensified by U.S. intervention in the first place.
197 Elaine H. Kim, “Korean American Literature,” in Cheung 1997: 156-91, here 156. A pioneer in Korean
American writing was Younghill Kang, whose autobiographical fictions deal with exiled Korean
intellectuals in the urban United States of the 1920s and 30s. Richard E. Kim’s 1964 Korean War novel The
Martyred is still the only work by an Asian American writer nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. Ty
Pak’s adventurous 1983 novel Guilt Payment links the author, who taught English at the University of
Hawaii in the 1970s and 80s to other male writers, “many of whom accept the subordination of women as
natural and even desirable” (165). Female perspectives come from writers like Sook Nyul Choi, whose
novels for adolescents describe the endangered position of women in recent Korean history, as her young
protagonist dreams of going to America while witnessing the prostitution of Korean women for Japanese
soldiers during World War II occupation as well as experiencing refugee life in the Korean War. Marie G.
Lee complements this genre with her novels of young Korean Americans ‘finding their voice.’ The most
experimental writer of Korean background has probably been Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The term coined for
those like her born in Korea but educated mainly in the U.S. is ‘1.5 generation.’ Besides her influential
DICTEE (1982) she has published other written and visual art, worked with video and performance to
challenge hegemonic notions of mimesis and reproduction.
198 Quoted by Kim in Cheung 1997: 169. A similar impulse seems to have engendered both Margaret K.
Pai’s 1989 The Dreams of Two Yi-Min and Mary Paik Lee’s 1990 Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean
Woman in America. However, while Clay Walls attempts to render an intergenerational dialogue, the
narrators of the two ‘factual’ accounts are rather effaced from their stories.
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