Clay Walls
Ronyoung Kim deplores that "A whole generation of Korean immigrants and their American-born children could have lived and died in the United States without [others'] knowing they had been here," and says that "I could not let that happen" (Solberg 23). To that end, in 1987 she wrote Clay Walls in which she portrays an invisible minority group of Koreans who arrived in America from the early 1920s through the late 1940s. The plot follows the protagonist, Haesu, who descends from the Korean elite class called Yangban, as she has to make crossings, against her will, across two boundaries. First, she is forced out of the confines of her Yangban class through her family's arranged marriage for her to Chun, a man from the Sangnom class--a class which usually works for the Yangban. Second, she has to cross geographical boundaries by leaving her own country, which was then under the increasingly oppressive Japanese occupation, and making an unwanted and unexpected exile in America. She and her husband have to leave Korea, because her husband is wanted by the Japanese police as a political agitator under ludicrous circumstances of mistaken identity. The novel closely follows Haesu who is forced to undergo many drastic changes: intellectual
Haesu's husband, Chun, who is more concerned with his own personal welfare rather than with a patriotic cause, is half- comically mistaken for someone seriously involved in this movement and has to flee the country for an unwanted exile in America with the help of Reverend McNeil, an American missionary for whom he works. "Cultural Misreadings by American Reviewers. It was the only way to overcome his class differences and to get the permission of Haesu's Yangban parents. He says that this voice is often drowned out by the passions that are induced by our dependence on others; our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with our selves. When she ridicules Chun in unfettered disdain as working like a trained animal, Chun becomes furious, and explodes: "I'm just a farmer's son. Even though they carry the name of Chun, not her aristocratic name, she incongruously insists that her children are Yangban. Chun simply executes her decisions with financial resources that he has made through his hard work. This is another reason we do not have full-fledged gender issues developed here from Haesu's viewpoint. The Korean version of Confucianism endorses a very stratified patriarchal society in which the reverence for authority is much emphasized to bring about a balanced social order. " (28) Later, when she is preparing to return to Korea, she buys the best Hartman trunks, worth two hundred dollars.
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Acceptance Essays
