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Passages to Paradise: Early Korean Immigrant Narratives from Hawai'i, by Daisy Chun Rhodes. Los Angeles and Taegu: Academia Koreana, Keimyung University Press, 1998. (ISBN 0-9657616-2-2). xxiii + 288 pp.

Reviewed by Richard S. Kim
University of Michigan

[This review first appeared in
Acta Koreana, 1 (1998): 157-60]

In Passages to Paradise: Early Korean Immigrant Narratives from Hawai'i, independent scholar Daisy Chun Rhodes has compiled over thirty oral history narratives from the American-born children of first-wave Korean immigrants, most of whom emigrated to Hawaii between 1903 and 1924. Passages to Paradise is the fruition of several years of interview work Rhodes conducted with the participants. Through the eyes of the second-generation, Rhodes provides readers with intimate glimpses into the lives of first-generation Korean immigrants. The oral histories also shed light on the experiences of the second generation, a conspicuously understudied group.

In her introduction, Rhodes explains that Passages to Paradise is intended to address deficiencies in the existing historical literature on early Korean immigration to the United States. Since much of the literature draws primarily upon written archival documents, Rhodes suggests that our knowledge of Korean immigrant experiences has been limited to a macro-level perspective that focuses on large-scale structural forces. These top-down histories often afford little or no agency to historical actors. They typically portray individuals as passive, helpless victims of huge economic and social forces that they cannot control or comprehend. Through the oral histories in Passages to Paradise, Rhodes attempts to complicate such portrayals by looking "at historical processes much more through personal experiences of those, for instance, who were directly and indirectly affected by national and territorial political decision-making" (pp. xvi-xvii). Rhodes, therefore, does not deny the significance of structural factors. Rather, she seeks to capture a sense of lived experiences within these larger forces.

The reasons and motivations for emigration from Korea was a primary area of inquiry for Rhodes in her interviews. In explaining the causes for migration and the subsequent patterns of immigrant adjustment, a macro-level perspective typically depicts immigrants as a monolithic, inchoate mass with collectively similar motives and experiences. In contrast, Rhodes aims to provide a bottom-up view that highlights the complexity and uniqueness of individual choices and decisions in the migration and adjustment processes. In doing so, Rhodes asserts that the compilation of first-person narratives in Passages to Paradise purports "to validate the lives of these Korean pioneers as individuals, thereby sharpening the identity of a group of people previously referred to only as Koreans who immigrated to Hawai'i" (p. xvii).

Overall, Rhodes skillfully uncovers detailed aspects of daily life among first-wave Korean immigrants and their children. Unlike some other oral history collections, Rhodes chose not to disrupt the narratives or reassemble disparate segments under interpretative categories. Given the diversity of experiences contained in the narratives, a cogent summary of the contents of Passages to Paradise is nearly impossible. Nevertheless, some shared topics and themes emerged from the collection of narratives such as work, school, marriage, family, politics, community, and culture. In seeking to validate the lives of individuals, Rhodes finds the extraordinary in the ordinary. Many of the narratives, more than half from women, contain compelling accounts of struggle and survival as immigrants and of how their families overcame severely adverse conditions to flourish in their respective economic and educational endeavors. In giving primacy to human agency, Rhodes shows readers the multiple ways in which individuals created strategies of resistance and adaptation to difficult circumstances in a new and occasionally hostile environment.

The oral histories also reveal insights into forms of ethnic solidarity and cultural resilience among Koreans in the U.S. Nearly all the narratives recounted experiences with the national liberation movement to free Korea from Japanese colonial rule. As a community in exile, many individuals coalesced around the common goal of preserving and maintaining their Korean identities in the U.S. At the same time, the independence movement created deep fissures in the community, often along factional lines that either supported or opposed Syngman Rhee. Though Passages to Paradise does not shed much new light on the Korean national independence movement, the narratives illuminate the extent to which the movement occupied the daily lives of most immigrants and their families.

Although Passages to Paradise offers valuable vignettes of an array of individual experiences, the book, as a whole, would have benefited from a more thoroughly developed contextual or theoretical framework to hold together the disparate information contained in the numerous narratives. For the most part, Passages to Paradise is descriptive and episodic, failing to provide a critical analysis of important issues. Such shortcomings are largely indicative of an overemphasis on a micro-level perspective. Individual motivations and actions are inevitably embedded within larger economic, political, and social contexts. The explication of these structural factors is necessary for a fuller understanding of the dynamics of decision-making processes at the individual level. In the foreword to Passages to Paradise, historian Wayne Patterson, author of The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896-1910, provides a general contextual discussion of the economic and political factors that precipitated Korean immigration to the U.S., but his discussion leaves little room for individual voices and human agency. Rhodes' attempts fill these gaps by shifting the focus of attention to actual lived experiences in the collection of oral histories that follow. Ultimately, however, Passages to Paradise fails to connect its first-person narratives to larger historical themes such as those set forth in Patterson's foreword. Without adequate contextual information, one cannot critically evaluate the reliability and the representative merit of the experiences recounted in the narratives in Passages to Paradise.

Overall, Rhodes seems to have underestimated her own role in the compilation of the oral histories in her book. In seeking to supplement scholarly works that rely exclusively on archival documents, Rhodes fails to recognize that oral histories, like written documents, are primary sources. Many of the narratives were incomplete and disjointed. For instance, chronological references to particular events and people were usually scattered throughout single narrative accounts. The disjunctive nature of the majority of the narratives in Passages to Paradise is characteristic of most types of primary source material. Like any other primary source, oral histories are incomplete scraps of the past that scholars must piece together to construct a historical argument, explanation, or narrative. Primary sources, thus, require an interpretative structure to give meaning and context to the information contained in them. Yet, Rhodes problematically assumes that the oral histories in her book are capable of standing on their own as autonomous historical narratives.

Despite its shortcomings, Passages to Paradise makes an important contribution to the literature on Korean American history. Given the dearth of oral history materials on early Korean immigrant life, Rhodes offers a useful resource. The information contained in the first-person narrative opens up an array of questions, issues, and topics for further exploration. As such, Passages to Paradise serves as a valuable building block for future research in Korean American Studies.


Citation:
Kim, Richard S. 1998
Review of Daisy Chun Rhodes, Passages to Paradise: Early Korean Immigrant Narratives from Hawai'i (1998)
Korean Studies Review 1998, no. 12
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr98-12.htm
[This review first appeared in Acta Koreana, 1 (1998): 157-60]

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