earticle

영어

The paper examines Korean American writer, Suki Kim’s debut novel, The Interpreter. In the novel, Kim presents tragic dissolution of a Korean American’s family. Interestingly, the family’s struggle and tragic breakdown is closely linked to their unaccomplished tasks of translating differences between Korean and American languages and culture. The paper analyzes how the immigrant parents’ linguistic isolation triggers tragic social, economic, and cultural marginalization of the Korean American family. Besides, the parents’ nostalgia for the lost home country and the resulting inability to come to terms with multi-cultural America makes the parents fail in becoming reliable cultural translator for their Korean American daughters, Suzy and Grace Park. The daughters, thus, fails to bridge the gap between their isolated Korean home and mainstream American culture they face outside their home. By depicting three characters’ failures in their tasks of translating between Korean and American languages and culture, Suki Kim successfully problematizes the imbalance of power existing between Korean and American side of the hyphenated identity of Korean Americans. The paper examines these problematizations and the following hope of creating new de-hyphenated Korean American identity presented in the text.