The United States is a nation of immigrants. Only the Native Americans are indigenous to this continent, and at some point in their history they may also have come to this region from Asia across the Bering Strait or by some other means. In this century, consecutive waves of immigration from different parts of the world created tensions with Americans already living in this country, for they believed that the immigrants were taking their jobs, gorging the welfare roles, and somehow reducing their overall standard of living. Beginning in the 1920s, the object of the law was to favor certain kinds of immigrants and to keep out others. More immigrants were permitted from western Europe and fewer from southern and eastern Europe, and Asians were totally excluded, primarily to prohibit Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos from acquiring U.S. citizenship. These restrictions would be relaxed after World War II. In her novel Clay Walls, Kim Ronyoung writes about the experience of Koreans in America in the period before World War II, a period of some racial tension as well as international conflict on both costs as the forces that would lead to the war were gathering. a reviewer noted that the book interweaves three themes--Korean culture, American racism, and Korean nationalism--into this novel, as indeed it does. These themes are shaped by the forces of the era and in turn illuminate many of those forces.
The family that serves as the center of this book is a Korean family living in the United States and forced to take menial jobs because that is all they can get in America. The racism of the era is apparent early in the book as Haesu decides not to clean toilets and quits her job. The woman she is working for refuses to pay her as agreed and begins to call her a name:
Haesu knew they were words she would not want translated. She turned on her heels and walked out (6).
Her husband works as a houseboy and is called just that...