Asian American Identity: Illusion, Reality, and Belonging
This paper examines three short stories centered on Asian and Asian American experience: Kim Yong Ik's "They Won't Crack It Open," Chita Divakaruni's "Silver Pavement, Golden Roofs," and Mei Evans's "Gussuk." Through close reading, the paper explores how each work treats the dichotomy between illusion and reality in depictions of life in the United States, the motif of blindness as a vehicle for self-deception, and the shifting sense of ethnic and cultural identity experienced by characters navigating unfamiliar social environments. Together, the three analyses illuminate recurring themes of displacement, belonging, and the psychological costs of idealized images of America.
- Blindness as Metaphor in 'They Won't Crack It Open': Literal and metaphorical blindness as thematic device
- Illusion vs. Reality in the American Dream: Contrasting ideal and real images of American life
- The Perpetuation of Illusion Through Physical Distance: How distance sustains self-deception about America
- Cultural Identity and Belonging in 'Gussuk': Lucy's shifting ethnic identity in an Alaskan village
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What makes this paper effective
- The analysis of literal versus metaphorical blindness in "They Won't Crack It Open" demonstrates careful attention to symbolic structure, tracing how a concrete physical condition reinforces the story's thematic concerns.
- The comparative approach across three stories reveals a unifying pattern — the gap between idealized and actual American life — without forcing the texts into an artificial argument.
- The observation that illusion requires physical removal is a genuinely insightful claim, grounded directly in textual evidence from Cho's journey and Dick's contrasting behavior in Korea versus the United States.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates thematic close reading: rather than summarizing plot, it identifies a central symbolic motif (blindness, the unbroken coconut, the "Gussuk" label) and shows how each motif carries interpretive weight across the narrative. This technique is applied consistently across all three stories, giving the paper analytical coherence.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized into three numbered sections, each addressing a different story or pairing. The first two sections treat Kim Yong Ik's story from complementary angles — symbolic structure, then the real-versus-ideal dichotomy — before the third section turns to Evans's "Gussuk" and the theme of ethnic identity and belonging. Each section functions as a self-contained analytical unit while reinforcing the paper's overarching concern with illusion, reality, and cultural displacement.
Blindness as Metaphor in 'They Won't Crack It Open'
"They Won't Crack It Open" by Kim Yong Ik concerns the dichotomy between reality and illusion, and explores this theme by means of a blindness motif. There are two types of blindness in the story: literal blindness and metaphorical blindness. Literal blindness is manifest in those whose eyes are weak. Cho, the first-person narrator, works at a Korean school for blind children. In the United States, the character who suffers from literal blindness is Dick's mother, whose eyes had begun to weaken before he left for the war.
The literal blindness in the story draws the reader's attention to the theme of metaphorical blindness. The first case of metaphorical blindness is that of Cho and his students. Dick tells them what he later calls "fairy tales" about his lifestyle in the United States. He sketches for them an image of luxurious homes, each equipped with a television and a luxury car. He draws a picture of an idealistic absence of poverty, where every American is both fabulously rich and fabulously happy.
Indeed, Cho's memories of Dick suggest that Dick believed his own stories to some degree. By blinding the already blind children to the realities of the situation — and seeing them happy as a result — Dick made himself happy as well. Cho remembers him as a cheerful person, which made Cho's disillusionment upon meeting him in America all the more painful.
Both Cho's and Dick's blindness falls away once they arrive in the United States. Ironically, it is Dick's half-blind mother who removes the last of any illusion Cho might have held about Dick's lifestyle and circumstances. Dick is not originally from the United States, and his mother reminds Cho of the native Korean women who have suffered throughout their lives.
Dick also blinds himself to a certain degree by wishing to obtain employment that would suit the social status he had manufactured for his friends in Korea. Ironically, he is therefore both unwilling and unable to pursue work that might at least serve as a vehicle toward realizing that illusion.
Illusion vs. Reality in the American Dream
In both Kim Yong Ik's "They Won't Crack It Open" and Chita Divakaruni's "Silver Pavement, Golden Roofs," there is a marked dichotomy between the real and the ideal in terms of the image of the United States. This tension is central to understanding how Asian American literature has engaged with the myth of the American Dream.
In Ik's story, Dick deliberately deceives his friends — the teacher Cho and the blind children in Korea — about his home and his lifestyle in the United States. Cho's initial narrative indicates that Dick created an illusion of perpetual material wealth for all Americans. The author begins to signal that something is amiss from the moment of Cho's arrival at a United States train station. Cho expects Dick to meet him there, but Dick does not appear, and the reader senses that things are not as they seem.
Cho attempts to rationalize Dick's absence during his taxi journey to Dick's home. All illusions are, however, dismissed as soon as he arrives. Dick's cheerful disposition has been replaced by a perpetual grimness, a mean attitude toward his mother, and a drinking problem. Cho's physical movement from Korea to the actual location of Dick's home dissipates the illusion of wealth entirely. The blind children who remain in Korea are able to maintain their illusion because those who have seen the reality choose not to reveal it to them.
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