Cultural Identity in Eugenia Kim’s The Calligrapher’s Daughter Ng Wen Lee 1* Manimangai Mani 2 Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya 3 1,2,3 Department of English Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication Universiti Putra Malaysia Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia *E-mail address: wenleeng@ymail.com Keywords: Cultural identity, Korean Christian, cultural marginalisation, Korean tradition, western culture ABSTRACT. Eugenia Kim’s The Calligrapher’s Daughter (2009) is a well-received East Asian novel about a Korean Christian, Najin’s encounter with western culture. As an aristocratic woman, she is expected to uphold Korean tradition. However, as Najin realises that she is culturally marginalised by her father and the Korean traditional society mainly due to her gender, she picks up a foreign culture introduced to her, western culture. This move is extremely significant because after Najin driven by cultural marginalisation to embrace western culture, her cultural practices are no longer the same with traditional Korean women. This important turn of the novel has not been explored by scholars extensively. Thus, this study aims to depart from the cultural marginalisation faced by Najin. Furthermore, due to the fact that cultural identity formation is highly influenced by culture, there is a need to look into the changes of Najin’s cultural identity as she incorporates western culture into her Korean traditional culture. By investigating the changes of Najin’s cultural identity throughout the novel, this study finds that Najin has transformed from a nameless girl without an identity into an independent woman with the help of western education. 1. INTRODUCTION In his book The Long Revolution, Williams asserts that from a social perspective, culture is “a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour” (57). He further explains in the book chapter “Culture is Ordinary”, that a culture is made up of two aspects (Williams 93). The first aspect is the known directions and meanings which its members are trained to, while the second aspect is the new meanings and observations which are offered to and tested on its members. These two ordinary processes of human minds and human society cause the nature of culture to always be both traditional and creative. This is extremely evident as one meets foreigners, migrates to a new country, encounters a new idea or belief, or experiences colonisation. The culture of Koreans who converted to Christianity, is a good example that exhibits the traditional and creative aspects of culture. Chun-gil Kim writes that Koreans converted to Catholic Christianity after Korean scholars in China, who were exposed to Jesuits’ religious texts, brought these texts back to Korea (269). However, this religion was suppressed until reformation was launched. Beasley delineates that after Japan successfully forced Korea to open three ports for trade, Japanese influence began to become established in Korea (44). This led the king to promote reformation, as indicated by Ebrey and Walthall (373). As a result, missionaries gained entry into Korea and brought in Western institutions. This enabled the missionaries to spread Christianity and convert Koreans. More importantly, modern schools formed by missionaries enabled Korean women to be educated and promoted with a certain degree of gender equality (Ebrey and Walthall 310). Hence, it is apparent that when these Korean Christians were in contact with foreign cultures, they incorporated the foreign cultures into their traditional Korean culture to form new cultural practices. This, in turn, shows that the traditional aspect of these Korean Christians’ culture is their own Korean tradition, while the creative aspect of their culture is the foreign cultures they encountered through religion. International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Online: 2015-10-29 ISSN: 2300-2697, Vol. 62, pp 131-139 doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.62.131 2015 SciPress Ltd, Switzerland SciPress applies the CC-BY 4.0 license to works we publish: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/