123 6 Koreans in Exile:Younghill Kang and RichardE.Kim Joseph Jonghyun Jeon Born roughly three decades apart, Younghill Kang (c. 1903–72) and Richard Eun-kook Kim (1932–2009) were the two most prominent early Korean/ American writers, 1 if by “early” we mean before the Asian American move- ment in the late 1960s and the emergence of Asian American literature as an explicit category. Both lived as children through Japanese colonization in what today is known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or North Korea (not to be confused with the Republic of Korea or South Korea). Both immigrated as young men to the United States where they pursued univer- sity educations and advanced degrees. As writers and professors in U.S.aca- demic institutions, both also achieved a fair amount of success. Their works, mostly autobiographical iction, gained a good deal of initial recognition in the United States in part because they ofered an insider’s view of a Korean culture in tumultuous times to an audience that could only view it from afar. In addition, they share similar career trajectories:both made an immediate splash in American public culture but soon vanished from public life after a decade or so of high visibility (Kang in the 1930s and Kim in the 1960s) with their books going out of print. Both also gained new audiences for their earlier work either posthumously or late in life:Kaya Press, a publisher specializing in Asian/American diasporic writing, republished Kang’s East Goes West in 1997 and Penguin republished Kim’s The Martyred in 2011 as part of their Penguin Classics series. Although Kang wrote his most visible work before the Korean War and Kim produced his afterward, their commonalities might encourage us to read these writers as witnesses to a larger historical continuum that encompasses Korea’s cultural, political, and economic emergence into global modernity, initially under the protection of and later in partnership with the United States, and also one that overlaps an even broader geopolitical recalibration, as the growth of Asian economies in the second half of the twentieth century increasingly demands a revision of earlier models of east-west relations. As DB 2(2:23 2C 9CC#B)))423$:58"$84"$C$B 9CC#B5":"$8/1 .")!"255 7$" 9CC#B)))423$:58"$84"$ ,"BC"! "8 "! 0D 2C BD34C C" C9 23$:58 "$ C$B "7