창래 리의 원어민과 숙이 킴의 통역사에 나타난 한국계 미국인의 정체성 문제

Abstract

Youngmee KimThis paper tries to read Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker and Suki Kim's The Interpreter in the context of various discussions of Asian American identities. These two novels are found to be different from the recent tendency of transnational identities or diasporic identities in that they focus on the American context when they present the problematic subject positions of Korean Americans, and that they try to show the protagonists' search for their identities not by exploring the relationship with their fathers' homeland but by claiming their American identities with their ethnicity. In a sense these two novels remind us of the cultural nationalism in 1960s and 1970s because the two protagonists attempt to speak their experiences with their own voices as Korean Americans. But they also keep distances from the cultural nationalism because they do not put any meaning or value in the Korean cultural traditions imposed by their fathers and they are even not free from the desire for assimilation in American society. In the minds of the two protagonists, contrasting tendencies are found; one is the criticism for the discriminative American society, the other is the desire for the integration into American society. This duality of the two protagonists reflects their dual and fragile subject position as Korean Americans, being included and excluded in American society. As far as this duality is the result of the duality of American society, these two novels can be read as a critique of America.