"Imagined Flights, Shattered Visions: Rethinking Korean American Identity in Gary Pak’s A Ricepaper Airplane"

Türkçe

This article examines how Gary Pak’s A Ricepaper Airplane (1998) reimagines Korean American identity within a transpacific framework that challenges conventional narratives of migration and belonging. Rather than reproducing familiar assimilationist tropes, Pak’s novel insists on alternative ways of situating both Korean American subjectivity and American identity at large. The novel demands that American history be redrawn to include transpacific as well as transatlantic frameworks; it replaces the mythology of voluntary migration and self-reinvention with the paradigm of exile, in which migration is compelled by historical violence and oriented toward the preservation of cultural memory; and it destabilizes the entrenched assumption that whiteness or legal citizenship constitutes the baseline of American belonging. Through its engagement with historical detail, its construction of exile as an alternative to the American Dream narrative, and its interrogation of racialized forms of inclusion and exclusion, A Ricepaper Airplane not only broadens the scope of Korean American literature but also redefines the very terms of American identity.