Minor Transpacific

Near the end of this pathbreaking book, we learn the origin story of Min Jin Lee’s puzzlingly successful novel Pachinko (2017). As a Korean American undergraduate at Yale, accustomed to regarding Korean minorities as upwardly mobile, she was surprised to learn that the resident Koreans of Japan, known as the Zainichi (meaning “residing in Japan”), occupied the bottom rungs of that country’s socioeconomic ladder. The gap between these two branches of the global Korean diaspora reveals how contingent identity can be, and the project of both Lee’s novel and Roh’s study is to make sense of this gap: in the case of Pachinko, through a melodramatic rendering of a fictional Zainichi family over four generations; in the case of Minor Transpacific, through nuanced articulations of Korean American and Zainichi literary texts that foreground their overlapping encounters with empire. Specifically, we find Korean American literature—in addition to Pachinko, Younghill Kang’s East Goes West (1937), Nora Okja Keller’s Clay Walls (1987), and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999)—grappling with Japanese imperialism, and Zainichi literature—Kaneshiro Kazuki’s GO (2000), Yi Yang-ji’s Yuhi (1988), and Kim Masumi’s Moeru Sōka (1997)—haunted by American race and politics.Roh deftly groups these texts via his close engagement with recent trends in both Asian and Asian American Studies. If in the former there has been a growing body of work on the racial and affective dimensions of Japanese imperialism, in the latter there is now “wide recognition of the inherent instability and fluidity of Asian American racial identity, and the need for a framework that can adequately account for globalization, multiplicity, hybridity, and the decline of the nation-state” (9). That field’s long-running transpacific turn has provided one such framework, though as Roh points out, transpacific studies has a tendency to rely on problematic binary frameworks like colonizer-versus-colonized and the United States versus Korea. Eschewing such binaries as well as essentialized notions of Koreanness, Roh’s basis for comparison is a historically grounded triangulation of Korea, Japan, and the United States that enables writers from both branches of the diaspora to carve out third spaces inhabited by previously illegible, hybrid subjects.An excellent case in point here is Roh’s illuminating reading of A Gesture Life. Lee’s novel has been widely studied as a Korean American representation of the trauma borne by “comfort women” during World War II, through the eyes of the novel’s ethnically Korean protagonist, Doc Hata, who passes as Japanese both while serving in the Japanese military and, later, as an immigrant in New Jersey. While this character’s elusiveness has long been established by existing scholarship, Roh enables us to see him as a palimpsest of competing minority discourses: Asian American model minoritization alongside a Japanese practice of adoption (yōshi) that emphasizes an adoptee’s service to a family’s name and household; as well as a Japanese practice of assimilation (dōka) that “always already differentiates, creating the basis of discrimination against the Other” (92). That Hata adapts these Japanese practices in the United States, particularly in his troubled dealings with his half-Korean adopted daughter, seems fully convincing, at once providing a new way of reading this novel (Hata as enlisting his daughter into a “shared pan-Asian American prosperity campaign” [97]) and advancing Roh’s larger critique of Asian American Studies that unfolds across his book. According to him, imperial Japan was a blind spot for the field at its inception, when cross-ethnic alliances demanded a de-emphasis of political divisions in Asia. “In a way,” he provocatively suggests, “an odd parallel could be drawn between Asian America and Japan’s colonial project of creating a pan-Asian identity in service to a political project” (21).Roh’s chapters on Zainichi literature lend nuance to this critique. For those, like myself, largely unfamiliar with the Zainichi, Roh uses these texts to illustrate this population’s stateless limbo, caught in between Korea and Japan. While during the war, Koreans were citizens of the Japanese empire and viewed as belonging to the same race even while being kept at an arm’s length, after the war those that remained in Japan were deemed permanent aliens. Naturalizing as Japanese citizens was a possibility, but first-generation Zainichi in particular resisted doing so in the wake of colonial-era assimilation policies; instead, many ended up selecting either North or South Korean citizenship. Thus, in Kaneshiro’s GO the protagonist’s father seeks to change his North Korean citizenship to South Korean so that he can visit Hawaii, and interestingly, Roh reads the US and American culture as providing the novel a tertiary space for liberating “the Zainichi from the shackles of ethno-nationalist discrimination” (67). That is, the Zainichi are keenly attuned not just to the legacies of Japanese imperialism, but also to the allure of American hegemony—including American racial discourse (at one point Kaneshiro’s novel quotes Malcolm X) and the image of the upwardly mobile Korean American. Accordingly, in Yi’s Yuhi, a Zainichi student in Seoul finds herself out of place in her purported homeland and unfavorably compared by the South Korean narrator (though of course the novel is written in Japanese) to the narrator’s successful Korean American cousin. However, by Roh’s reading, the student and cousin occasion similar meditations on departures, leaving in their wake a melancholy that belies the “totalizing ideology of return” (119) to the Korean peninsula.Perhaps because they are largely unfamiliar to Anglophone scholars, the Zainichi texts, most of which are unavailable in English, often seem more compelling than their Korean American counterparts. Roh’s first chapter on Younghill Kang’s transpacific critique of Taylorist efficiency falls a bit flat, partly because East Goes West only mentions Japan in passing, partly because the chapter does not engage existing scholarship (e.g., by Colleen Lye and Iyko Day) that conceptualizes racial form vis-à-vis notions of Asian efficiency. Turning to Pachinko, one of its main characters, Solomon, while dating a Korean American woman, considers but then rejects American naturalization via marriage, just as his family has always rejected Japanese naturalization. Here, the triangulation of the United States, Korea, and Japan could not be more explicit, but also seems a bit hackneyed: after losing his multinational finance job, Solomon chooses to, in Roh’s words, “forge his own path” by staying in Japan and entering the pachinko gambling business dominated by the Zainichi (142). In contrast, Kim’s Moeru Sōka (The Burning Grass House), with which Roh’s final chapter pairs Pachinko, provides a more estranging instance of said triangulation. There we find a Zainichi woman, Ryoko, witnessing the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising alongside Korean American friends who own a South Central convenience store called Grass House. At one point, these friends criticize her impending decision to naturalize as a Japanese citizen, accentuating the gap between Japanese naturalization (for them, an obvious betrayal of Korean identity) and American naturalization (somehow not a betrayal). Later, Ryoko is rendered speechless after an elderly Korean American woman mistakes her for Japanese, telling her “Koreans my generation know Japanese. You know what I mean, right? A long time ago, in the next village over a young girl was taken to your country against her will” (quoted on 147). Before the Grass House goes up in flames, we also see an African American man accusing Ryoko and one of her Korean American friends of complicity with white supremacy, but then softening once it is pointed out that Ryoko is from Japan. As Roh makes clear, both Pachinko and Moeru Sōka work to denaturalize identity, but the Zainichi text clearly does so in a more nuanced, multilayered way, lacking easy choices.Roh has provided a great service by helping to make Zainichi literature legible to Anglophone scholarship and using these texts to reread Korean American literature. In the process he provides a wonderfully de-centered model for comparative and diasporic studies, one that bolsters these two communities’ efforts to grapple with two empires and imagine postcolonial futures from different sides of the Pacific

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