Abstract
This chapter looks into life-writing texts of the first-generation Korean American women who came to the United States in the early twentieth century, such as Mary Paik Lee’s Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (1990) and Lanhei Kim Park’s Facing Four Ways: The Autobiography of Lanhei Kim Park (Mrs. No-Yong Park) (1984). It examines how these early Korean women’s lives and life stories are characterized by ethnicity/race, class, and gender by looking at the nature of their movements across the international borders and around the continental America. By doing so, this chapter reveals the heterogeneous characteristics of Korean American and Asian American mobility—heavily influenced not only by race but also by class and gender.
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Notes
- 1.
Later generations of Asian immigrants, and particularly since the mid-1960s, have differed from their predecessors, since a significant number of them were professionals or highly skilled workers in their fields (Takaki, 1998, p. 420).
- 2.
Il-Han New, a successful businessman and author of When I was a Boy in Korea (1928), came from an affluent family in Pyongyang whose business was very profitable. He arrived in America in the 1900s when he was nine years old, having received a formal education.
- 3.
Younghill Kang belonged to the aristocratic class in Korean society and arrived in New York in the 1920s. Receiving a master’s degree from Harvard, Kang published a few works, including Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937).
- 4.
No-Yong Park published several works during his lifetime, including Making a New China (1929), An Oriental View of American Civilization (1934), and Chinaman’s Chance: An Autobiography (1940).
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Park, HY. (2021). First-Generation Korean American Women’s Mobility: Intersections of Ethnicity/Race, Class, and Gender. In: Banjo, O.O. (eds) Immigrant Generations, Media Representations, and Audiences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75311-5_3
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