Chapter 19 - Richard Eun-kook Kim

Summary

The literary career of Richard Eun-kook Kim may best be viewed as a set of narrative responses to his biography and the broader political dilemma of modern Korea, one beset by differential and competing historical colonialisms and ideologies on the peninsula. Key figures in the USA were marshalled to serve Cold War interests by making literature a central instrument in winning transnational hearts and minds; Kim would benefit from this by becoming the first Asian to enroll in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, from which he would draft his first novel, The Martyred, whose popularity signaled that readers viewed Kim and his work as an expression of US liberal value from an Asian beneficiary of the Cold War project. But Kim’s form of realism actually serves as a form of narrative autonomy from such expected discursive capture. This, and in his later forays into speculative fiction and elegiac life writing – the novel The Innocent (1968) and collection Lost Names: Scenes of a Korean Boyhood (1970), respectively – Kim narrates a Korean temporality that seeks to minimize, even as it acknowledges, the influence of imperial powers.