influences on her self-identity as a Yangban.
             Clay Walls is a historically accurate novel that brings into prominent relief the social and cultural situations of the first-generation Korean immigrants in the early twentieth century. Haesu was born to a Yangban family in Korea at the turn of the century, which coincides with the troubling last decades of the Yi Dynasty. It was in 1910 that Japan forcefully annexed Korea and concurrently embarked on a ruthless policy of annihilating Korea's political and cultural identity. The colonization made Koreans feel "Korea is dead" because "no person is as sad as the person without a country" (Takaki 278). From that time onward, Koreans' fierce and persistent resistance against a very harsh Japanese colonial rule brought about several nation-wide uprisings. The first non-violent independence movement culminated on March 1, 1919, during which the Declaration of Korean Independence was publicly proclaimed at Pagoda Park in Seoul, the capital. In the process of suppressing this peaceful demonstration, the Japanese regime massacred more than 7,000 and wounded more than 15,000 peaceful Korean demonstrators. Furthermore, to root out the possibility of a subsequent liberation movement, the Japanese declared that anybody participating in the independence movement would be punished severely, and, to prove a point, staged many merciless killings of Koreans all over the peninsula. 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.
             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. During the Yi Dynasty and pr...