Spatial Imagination and Narrative Voice of Korean- American Experience in Gary Pak’s <i>A Ricepaper Airplane</i>

Abstract

This study reads Gary Pak’s A Ricepaper Airplane (1998) as a reflection of the Korean-American diasporic imagination in Hawai’i and their turbulent experience. Through Sun Wha’s recollection of his eventful past as revolutionary, activist and labourer, both in Korea and Hawai’i, Pak dramatises the rootlessness which results from inability to be attached to a particular locality. The theme of exile features prominently in Pak’s spatial imagination of both Hawai’i and Korea, illustrated through Wha’s continuous fight for survival from the Japanese occupiers, Hawai’ian labour plantation owners, and his ultimately futile endeavour of returning home to Korea. This paper further problematises readers’ active role in constructing a mental model of simulation though the textual cues of spatialisation and narrative voice in navigating Wha’s narration. Narrative voices, especially the slippage between the Standard English of the omniscient narrator and the Hawaii Creole English (HCE) of Sun Wha’s recollection problematises the issue of “who sees” and “who speaks” which highlights the polyvocality of Wha’s narration. To conclude, the study posits that the spatialisation and blending of narrative voices in A Ricepaper Airplane catalyses the immersion of readers into a site-specific, creolised-world mediated by polyvocal narration which come together to represent diasporic imagination of Hawai’i and Korea.