강용흘의 『동양인 서양에 가다』에 나타난 인종, 젠더, 계급, 제국주의

Abstract

Younghill Kang is one of the pioneers who wrote Korean or Asian American literature in English. Whereas Kang's first autobiographic novel, The Grass Roof, describes the narrator, Chung-pa Han's life in Korea before his immigration to the west, his second autobiographic novel, East Goes West, portrays the process of the exiled Korean intellectual seeking an access into American life through western education and knowledge in the urban United States and Canada during the 1920s and 1930s. During that period Korean or Asian Americans were regarded as inherently unassimilable aliens threatening to the core of American culture and identity on the basis of race. A series of acts directed solely against Asian made them ineligible for citizenship and caused them to experience compulsory sexual segregation from Asian, white and other women. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the issues of race, gender, class and imperialism are interlinked in Kang's East Goes West by focusing on the relationship or conflict between the minorities, including Korean and African American men, and the dominant whites. In East Goes West Korean men, including Han, Kang's "fictional alter ego," had to be forcefully feminized in the dominant white society when they had to work as houseboys, domestic servants, cooks, waiters and farmhands because of the racial discrimination even though they were the yangban, or aristocrat, class in Korea. This shows that their gender and race identities were built under regulatory oppression of society. Kang also demonstrates how the ideology of white racial superiority marks classes when he shows most of Korean or African American men had to remain cheap labourers and they were racially identified as the natural working classes in East Goes West. This paper also focuses on Kang's ambivalent attitudes of both desire and disillusionment towards assimilation into mainstream American society in seeking to claim membership in that society.