East Goes West (1937) by Younghill Kang

 Book Review

East Goes West (1937)

by Younghill Kang

  Before I wrote this post I went back and looked at my post that collected books on 1930's American Literature.  Looking at the list of books- which is basically the relevant selections from the original 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die with an eye towards updating and revision, it's clear that the place to cut is from the books selected from the world of detective fiction/noir.  This category is hugely over-represented, 7 of something like 25/26/27 titled over all.  

   Looking at replacements... I'm sure I would put a book by John Fante in there though I couldn't tell you which.  East Goes West, the first novel by a Korean-American novelist, is another strong candidate to replace the fourth Dashiell Hammett novel in the 30's American lit canon.  Clocking in at a stout 400 plus pages, East Goes West is a picaresque of the American east coast from Boston to New York, written by the author, a Korean national who "slipped"(used by the editors of the book) into the country the year before the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 rendered legal immigration to the USA illegal for Asian nationals (Kang never obtained United States citizenship though he spent the rest of his life here after emigrating from Japanese controlled Korea).  

  I heard about Kang and East Goes West while reading A Man of Two Faces by Pulitzer Prize winning author and Professor of Literature, Viet Thanh Nguyen.  Kang was mentioned as a candidate for the American literary canon who had been nonsensically excluded based on racism- that was the argument in the book.  This is the second and last book from his list of a handful of titles- the other was America is in the Heart (1947)by Carlos Bulosan.  

  East Goes West does deserve inclusion for being a strong POV picaresque and a "first" for that particular POV (Korean-American.)  I thought Kang's observation of academic life in New York and Boston were interesting on many levels.   You would hope that the Asian-American experience would have some representation in the American literary canon starting the 1930's.