East Goes West
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East Goes West
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Narrated by:
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Song Yee
About this listen
"A wonderfully resplendent evocation of a newcomer's America" (Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker) by the father of Korean-American literature
A Penguin Classic
Having fled Japanese-occupied Korea for the gleaming promise of the United States with nothing but four dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare to his name, the young, idealistic Chungpa Han arrives in a New York teeming with expatriates, businessmen, students, scholars, and indigents. Struggling to support his studies, he travels throughout the United States and Canada, becoming by turns a traveling salesman, a domestic worker, and a farmer, and observing along the way the idealism, greed, and shifting values of the industrializing 20th century. Part picaresque adventure, part shrewd social commentary, East Goes West casts a sharply satirical eye on the demands and perils of assimilation. It is a masterpiece not only of Asian-American literature but also of American literature.
©1937 Younghill Kang (P)2021 Penguin AudioCritic Reviews
“A Nabokovian stylistic tour de force.” (Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel)
“The story of Chungpa Han is truly, like the old New York he encounters, as ‘million-hued as a dream’. A wonderfully resplendent evocation of a newcomer’s America, Younghill Kang’s classic novel is as vibrant and pointed in its vision today as it was 60 years ago, and may prove to be one of our most vital documents. East Goes West deserves rediscovery.” (Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker)
“Thrillingly timeless... The finest, funniest, craziest, sanest, most cheerfully depressing Korean-American novel... A vast, unruly masterpiece that is our earliest portrait of the artist as a young Korean-American... East Goes West’s tumbling prose and loose, picaresque structure feel amazingly ‘free and vigorous’ (per [Thomas] Wolfe) today.... The novelist and memoirist Alexander Chee’s rousing introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition... argues strongly for its relevance today.... Its value is in the heady mix of high and low, the antic yet clear-eyed take on race relations, the parade of tragic and comic bit players, and above all, the unleashed chattering of Chungpa’s distinctive voice... The Penguin edition ...reminds us of how excellent [Kang] really was.... This brash modernist comic novel still feels electric.” (Ed Park, The New York Review of Books)
“Kang is a born writer, everywhere he is free and vigorous: he has an original and poetic mind, and he loves life.” (Thomas Wolfe)