The first celebrated Korean American author, Younghill Kang 강용흘, 姜龍訖 (~1903–1972), believed only literature told the whole truth, and that it was the most permanent of the arts. “We were in Berlin when Hitler burned the books, but those cannot be destroyed,” said Kang to the New York City Post on October 2, 1937, while he was promoting his novel East Goes West. “In 221 B.C., a foreigner, Shi Huang Ti, conquered China and his first aim was to destroy all books. Two thousand scholars were buried alive, the aim being to leave people with the idea that he was their first emperor. A few years later some scholars who miraculously escaped set to work and from memory restored all the classical literature that had been destroyed,” he said. Eight decades since Kang gave that interview, East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937), his original, hilarious, and irrepressible novel, has become a Penguin Classic. Yet his first novel, The Grass Roof (1931), remains out of print.
Between Kang’s first publications and his canonization today is a complicated story shadowed by politics. Considered “the father of Asian American literature,” Kang, ever visionary, understood that questions of power and race shape literary history. He set his sights higher—nothing less than “the immortality of the soul,” in his own words. The soul? He rubbed shoulders with the Lost Generation—bereft after the devastation of the First World War—the likes of modernists F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe in Manhattan. “Tom” was Kang’s closest friend. A fellow NYU professor, Wolfe introduced Kang to Scribner’s legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins, and the rest became history: Perkins acquired Kang’s first book. Kang and his poet-wife, Frances Stacy Keely (1903–1970), established themselves within New York City’s intellectual elite in the 1930s, living amongst bohemians and the “unchurched” in a building owned by the nearby St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery.
Dizzying international success came with Kang’s English debut, The Grass Roof. This first book “treated of the Orient,” he informed Yaddo in his project proposal for a second book he was undertaking in 1932. The Grass Roof introduces his fictional alter ego, Chungpa Han, as a single-minded, precocious child who treks to Seoul then Tokyo to further his education, looking to the West as the future. It is a story of the artist as a young man in rural Korea and the disappearance of the old ways due to Japan’s colonization. Praised effusively by British writers Rebecca West and H. G. Wells, The Grass Roof was translated into German, French, and Czech, and even became assigned reading for American GIs in Korea.