Several distinctly identifiable groups:
▪ Foreign students and political exiles who came to the US between the early part of the century and the mid-1960s
▪ Children and grandchildren of immigrants to Hawai'i between 1903 and 1905, when sugar planters launches an intense though short-lived campaign to recruit Korean plantation labor
▪ Children of immigrant farm and cannery workers in California and on the Pacific Coast in the early decades of this century
▪ Children of the post-1968 immigrants, whose presence in the US was made possible by changes in US immigraiton quotas in 1965.

History:
▪ Historically, Korean Americans, like other Asian Americans, were materially and discursively excluded form the mainstream of US American life, denied subjectivity, and defined according to the degree of threat they were thought to pose to the dominant culture at particular points in time.
▪ The earliest Korean American writing emerged from the contex of a century and a half of persistent and deeply rooted racist inscriptions of Asians in both official and mass culture as grotesquely alien 'others.' Pressed to demonstrate the falseness of these representations, early Korean and other Asian American writers often attepted to present the 'true story,' sometimes by shoing ho Asian Americans could become successfully 'Westernized' or 'Americanized.' For writers who had to fight even to establish themselves as discursive subjects, dealing with subtleties, hybridities, paradoxed, and layers must have seemed impossibly luxurious.
▪ The double impact of US racial discrimination and Japan's colonization of Korea effectively limited the growth of Korean American communities for six decades. Political and economic development of Korean American communities was also impeded by the 'double colonization' of Korean immigrants, who could not look to their homeland as a source of merchandise for trade or for diplomatic assistance as other immigrants in the US traditionally did, with carying degrees of success.

Immigrant writers (born in Korea?):
▪ The early Korean American literary voice is largely autobiographical and speaks primarily from the perspectives of members of an elite class of education, nonlaboring immigrants.
▪ Younghill Kang (1903-72) - he came to represent Korean and Koreans to Western readers, for whom he was both purveyor of the unfamiliar in terms of a faraway Oriental nation and reinforces of the familiar in terms of popular notions about backward peoples yearning for the light of the West.
§ The Grass Roof (1931).
§ East Goes West (1937) - presents an unflattering vie of the underside of US life from the perspectives of people locked out by the color bar. Stories of rejection, brutality, loneliness, and hunger; subjects - Korean exiles in the 1920s and 30s, their work, aspiration and absolute exclusion from American social and intellectual life.. Kang satirizes both the misguided optimist and naivete of his characters and the arrogance and ignorance of the Americans who reject them. The book calls into question US American nationalist narratives of progress, equality, assimilation, and upward mobility.
▪ Richard E(un Kook) Kim - The Martyred (1964) - explores the human conscience and the meanings of evil, suffering, and truth. The Innocent (1968) - focuses on events surrounding a military coup d'etat in South Korea; the characters are all male army officers who learn the dangers of soft-hearted emotionalism and discover that at times one is forced to do evil deeds in order to be truly moral. Lost Names (1970) - Japanese occupation of Korea, emphasis on the anti-Japanese activities of son and father.
▪ Ty (T'ae Young) Pak - Guilt Payment (1983) - collection of short stories. Mostly male-centered war and adventure stories.
▪ Sook Nyul Choi - her characters are women who are able successfully to survive the privations of foreign occupation and the turbulence of war without husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, from whom they are separated by political upheaval and war. In both novels USA is seen as a promise or a promised land.
§ Year of Impossible Goodbyes (1991) - set in northern Korea near the end of WWII; then Russian and Korean Communists after the war.
§ Echoes of the White Giraffe (1993) - refugee life and young love are depicted from a teenage girl's point of view. Sookan is compelled to leave because she understands too well the limitations facing her and other women in Korean society, even though they exhibit extraordinary courage and strength during times of political upheaval.

Second-generation women writers:
▪ The daughters of early, mostly working-class Korean immigrants in Hawai'i and on the mainland began to imagine in the 90s their parents' lives in fictional and nonfictional accounts as well as in oral histories collected by researchers. The promised land hoped for in Choi's novels is not what these second-generation Korean American women writers imagine.
▪ Margaret K. Pai's The Dreams of Two Yi-Min (immigrants) (1989) - traces five decades in the history of the author's family in Hawai'i. The book details the mother's participation in the movement for Korean independence from Japanese colonial rule, the father's attempts to succeed in his own business, and the subtly strained relations between them as they struggle to establish their livelihood and raise their children in the adopted land.
▪ Mary Paik Lee's Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (1990) - autobiographical account of her and her family's life in USA, their search of a livelihood during time sof relentless poverty and race discrimination.
▪ Ronyoung Kim (Gloria Hahn): Clay Walls (1987) - a daughter's perspectives on her immigrant parents' changing and often conflicting notions about being Korean in California meant in the decades between the two world wars.

Emerging young Korean American writers of the 1990s:
▪ Though acutely conscious of the insinuation of their forebears' lives into their own, they were born after the war, and their work emerges from their hybridity, heterogeneity, and multiple positions as raced and gendered Korean American subjects in the West.
▪ Gary Pak (b. 1952) - born in Honolulu.
§ A Ricepaper Airplane (1998) - about an outspoken Korean immigrant union leader in Hawai'i at the turn of the century. Pak is not necessarily interested in Korean nationalism itself but rather bringing to the light the hidden, the forgotten, and the derogated, whether it be Asian labor leadership, Korean history, or the pidgin spoken in Hawai'i.
§ The Watcher of Waipuna (1992) - a collection of short stories. The characters belong to many different ethnic groups, not defined exclusively or even primarily by their ethnicity. The narratives are infused with reminders of Hawaii's blended 'talk-story' traditions, incorporating elements of the supernatural, spirited dialogues in pidgin, and vivid adventures told from a child's viewpoint. Sinister suggestions of atrocities wrought by racism and green, often seen opaquely by children.
▪ Cathy Song (b. 1955) - born in Honolulu. Poet. Picture Bride (1982). Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (1988). Song cherishes and writes about her Chinese and Korean heritage and her roots in Hawai'i, among other things.

Young woman writers of the 90s:
▪ Many of the daughters of these immigrants belong to what some Korean Americans call the '1,5 generation,' a term coined in the late 70s and early 80s to denote those who were born in Korea and speak Korean but were educated primarily in the US. Key elements for the younger writers is their experience of America, which involved the interplay of racial, ethnic, female, and colonial subjectivities.
▪ Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-82) - DICTEE (1982) - a subversive book about a specific set of excluded experiences. It undermines popuarly accepted notions of genre and of history and questions common assumptions about time, place, origins, identity. By questioning the notion of progress from fragmentation to wholeness or from immigrant to citizen, Cha challenges the US nationalist narrative.
▪ Marie G. Lee (b. 1964) - addresses the issue of how young Korean American struggle to find a place for themselves in a society that is ignorant of their cultural roots. Finding My Voice (1992). If It Hadn't Been for Yoon Jun (1993). Saying Goodbye (1993).