Excerpt from East Goes West

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.

…

My exile seems as if ended. But I have never gone back. The opportunity has not come. My father’s family is all dead or scattered. My own beyond-time, time-traveling ties have been made on American soil. There are besides political difficulties besetting the Korean who returns to the native shores. Perhaps spiritually, it would be difficult to return wholeheartedly, and I would be there an exile from America. The soul has been molded to the Western Patter, the whole man has become softened somewhat by the luxuries of Western living. I could hardly hope now to run barefoot over ice and snow, as in my village the boys were proud to say they could, on feet as flexible and padded as the puppies’ armored shoe of skin. When I finally go back, it will only be for a visit.

Younghill Kang, East Goes West, New York: Kaya Press, 1997, pp. 5-6 and pp. 367-368.
Reprint by permission of Kaya Press.