The Yellow Book

Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. THE YELLOW BOOK, a cross-genre meditation on what it means to be Korean/American and write, begins with a moment of doubt, in which the speaker, forced into speech by his interlocutor, is no longer sure he is who he is: "You sure you're not Jackie Chan? [...] Honestly, I say, I don't even know." The speaker opts for camouflage, transformation, and evasion. The book, similarly, aims to elude identification, to contradict itself. It moves broken-tongued, between memoir and essay and poem, between body and footnote, between Korean memory and English utterance, between remembrance and forgetfulness, between history and fiction. Populated by a varied cast of characters--a god, a bear, a tiger, Mr. Miyagi, Jack London, a fictionalized version of Civil War general Franz Sigel, and a non-fictitious chihuahua--THE YELLOW BOOK is a travelogue, a picaresque, a mythology, a catalog of grievances, an act of revenge, an apology, a joke book, a defiance, an obeisance, a performance, a slander, a love letter, a manifesto, a refutation.