Younghill Kang was born in the Hamkyong Province in northern Korea in 1903 and, after living in Japan for three years, immigrated to the United States in 1921, at the age of 18. Escaping Japan's invasion of Korea in 1894 and its subsequent annexation and occupation of Korea in 1910 where it “cut off all emigration” and entering the United States three years before Congress passed the 1924 immigration law, effectively banning Asian populations, Kang found himself not only in exile but also, unlike eastern European immigrants who are arriving at the same time, ineligible for US citizenship. This placed him in a unique position among American immigrants. Unlike other working- class Asian and European immigrants, Kang, as a Korean intellectual/ scholar, found himself as a man in exile from two countries, Korea and Japan, with a strong desire to make the United States home. Explaining the status of his citizenship on his 1931 Guggenheim application, Kang writes: “In practice an American and permanently located here, but debarred by the United States Government from naturalization as an Oriental. I am not a citizen elsewhere, since the Korean Government was dissolved [by imperial Japan] in 1910.” Thus Kang enters the United States as an exile and remains an exile until 1952 when Asian Americans were granted limited citizenship. Kang “was never afforded a permanent niche in American life. Always a visiting lecturer, he was never offered a stable teaching position,” dying in New York City in 1972. It is within this exilic context that Kang, the father of Korean American literature, wrote The Grass Roof and East Goes West.

Upon its publication in 1937, Kang's East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee was defined by many mainstream reviewers as a novel about assimilation, latching onto the implications of its subtitle. “[W] hen you see the whole life of this engaging young Korean who came to New York at the age of eighteen,” writes M. L. Elting, you will understand how he made “himself into an ‘Oriental Yankee.’ ” Describing Kang's East Goes West as a “conquest of America,” Robert Morss Lovett writes, “Landing with only four dollars in a strange and almost hostile country he made his way up, not like one [of] Horatio Alger's boys by hard work and good luck, but rather by a certain Oriental stoicism, and a passive yielding to the stream.”