In Search of My America is a book that will impact generations to come. It is comparable to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in style, Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker in issues, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior in narrative complexity. Lee's unique style truly amplifies her unique perspective of the United States as an Asian American immigrant woman.
--Ken Atchity, author of The Messiah Matrix
In Search of My America is not only timely but also prophetic. It offers much needed perspectives on immigration, democracy, and race relations in academia, a revelatory subject rarely discussed. Drawing on her own experiences as an adult immigrant from Korea, Lee interweaves revisionist mythmaking with personal storytelling and cultural critique, enacting what Gloria Anzaldúa names autohistoria-teoría-an innovative form of theory-making developed, in part, by risking the personal. As she masks and unmasks herself, Jid Lee masks and unmasks the United States as well, offering brilliant insights into this country's psyche, including what Anzaldúa might call our "Shadow Beast."
--AnaLouise Keating, author of Women Reading Women Writing
Jid Lee examines the multiple selves she has to create to become a successful Korean American and ultimately an American. As layers and layers of the author's selves are revealed, the reader is treated to an honest, courageous memoir. She describes the micro-aggressions she has to cope with because of her race and gender, and forces us to confront what she calls the "banality of racism." What is so revelatory about this book is that she exposes the demoralizing impact of racist love as well as racist hate. Lee offers a new, multidimensional definition of racism and an insightful look into what it takes to become an American.
--Monic Ductan, author of Daughters of Muscadine
In Search of My America is a searing account of the rigor and drama of pursuing a life of letters. Jid Lee's voice is gripping and honest, and her story is a forceful rendering of a range of passions -- intellectual and embodied -- grounded in the politics and pain of national belonging.
--Josephine Nock-Hee Park, author of Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian America Poetics
An unsparing, brutally honest memoir about a Korean immigrant woman making her way through a world stacked against her. She tells the unadorned truth about her life in America, no matter how beautiful or ugly. She writes a book about how to become an American, how to embrace America's merits and reject its flaws.
One can see that her love for America is truthful because it has been repeatedly tested by the threat of hate. She maintains an intensity of focus attuned to the vitality of moments in frank, direct prose. It is a raw, unfiltered meditation on life robustly lived, regardless of the challenges that conspire against her.
--Joseph Jeon, author of Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry
Jid Lee arrived in the United States at age 24, speaking little English, and rose to become a tenured professor in English at an American university. Her memoir, In Search of My America, is her story of how she made her dreams a reality, and her love for the "husband country" where she made her home. The tales it recounts relate a series of inconvenient but important truths for us as white Americans to absorb about the experience of Asian Americans, and the day-to-day unexamined assumptions and racial and gender stereotyping that they are forced to deal with in this country.
--Greg Robinson, author of The Unsung Great: Stories of Extraordinary Japanese Americans
American idealism always preaches a good game, but Lee discovers that it still refuses to acknowledge the systematic racial prejudice permanently baked into the culture . . . This starkly honest memoir is an insightful, and at times, painful journey of one very uncompromising woman.
--Bill Drucker, Korean Quarterly
I read Jid Lee's To Kill a Tiger in 2010, and I've been waiting to read In Search of My America for the last fourteen years. In To Kill a Tiger, she writes about her life in Korea, but in In Search of My America, she writes about her life as an immigrant in America. The book is so absorbing and graphic that I could feel almost physically what she had to go through to succeed in America.
Until I picked up In Search of My America, I had never thought an autobiography could be so brutally honest and courageous. I've read many immigrant autobiographies, but none of them is as powerful as hers. It stands out not only as an immigrant autobiography but also as a book of literature. It is highly artistic with beautiful aesthetics.
I admire Lee's tenacity and her drive to achieve the highest goals she can. While reading To Kill a Tiger, I wasn't able to put it down until I finished the last page. I had the same experience with In Search of My America.
--Patricia Kelly, Florida
In Search of My America is a revelatory book. Being natives of the United States, we cannot fully imagine the difficulties that an immigrant faces in navigating the perilous waters and the barriers of cultural assimilation.
In this sophisticated work, Lee explores the complexity of human nature and delves into the issues of racism, sexism, and other manifestations of injustice experienced by her in America, the land of the free and proponent of justice for all.
Lee shows an astute awareness of the psychodynamics of the people she observes. In her book, the author describes what she calls the "banality of racism." All people have within themselves an innate seed of racism that gets programmed into the deep recesses of their subconscious minds, which later comes to the surface and is manifested when a person feels angry at a member of another race. Even the most liberal of people are subject to the banality of racism.
Although Lee felt the sting and burden of injustice in her American journey and her criticism of her adopted country is certainly justified, she still has hope for the future of America. She envisions America as a place of fairness, equity, justice and democracy for all, although these ideals have the potential to be threatened.
--Barry Lamb, Tennessee
The book, In Search of My America, describes how a young female emigrant who grew up in a very oppressive South Korean society falls in love with the liberal culture of the United States of America. Her journey to become a fully committed citizen of her adoptive country confronts her with a reality of racial hypocrisy that she had not at all expected to encounter in literary circles of Academia, typically recognized as a beacon of tolerance.
As she endeavors to crack the glass ceiling of that institution to find her rightful place, she embarks courageously on a perilous dance performed between professor and graduate student in English literature, or should one even dare say between master and servant, which leads her to undergo debilitating self-doubts and tremendous suffering. At the same time, her undeterred longing for social justice induces her professors to also experience self-doubts, and ultimately awareness of their inherent cultural and racial biases.
The description of the inner workings of this encounter between the ones teaching and the one being taught, which happens to be in this case that of white female American professors with a female Asian emigrant, will not only benefit, in my opinion, interracial dialogues in this country, but also any conversation between those in power and those who are not. Only with such interactions will the tenets of our Constitution become more of a reality.
--Sylvie Grignard, Iowa
Through introducing us to her own story in To Kill a Tiger, Lee leads us down a path of self-discovery toward understanding our own histories, childhood and difficult family relationships.
To Kill A Tiger is an engrossing and big read. . . . Jid Lee has fine narrative skills, winding her story through time and place. . . .
From a childhood of injustice, poverty and emotional torment, Jid Lee built the life she longed for and became who she wanted to be. The details are intriguing, the history is important, but it is the tremendous achievement of breaking free that resonates most powerfully. . . .
. . . . But her book is also an unabashed act of social and political activism, which sums up her life's mission in the US: "Trying to persuade my American audiences to see what I see. . . ."
The weaving of Korea's relationships with America and Japan into the narrative of everyday Korean life . . . . is deftly handled. . . . Lee is particularly astute when writing about the Korean War, delving into its long and complicated incubation . . . . Jid Lee gives us her version of events. . . . Lee effortlessly intertwines the stories of her family life with the wider concerns of her country and her continent.
The political sundering of Korea was by no means a simple split. . . . Discussing everything from the Japanese occupation in the first half of the twentieth century and forward, To Kill a Tiger is a fascinating and informative read that should not be ignored.
Tigers can be menacing animals and their attacks are often fatal. The metaphoric tiger in Jid Lee's To Kill a Tiger is all that. . . . Throughout Ms Lee's memoir, interwoven with her family's story, is the history of Korea during much of the 20th century. . . . Ms Lee has written a compelling and engrossing account of her life and her country's history. . . .
. . . . Even at the age of six, Lee could see her dilemma. How could she cultivate a warrior spirit in herself and yet be the meek, self-abnegating woman her family and culture demanded. . . . The backdrop to Lee's childhood is Korea's turbulent political history. . . . She has resolved the dilemma presented in her grandmother's story and defeated the tiger with courage, perseverance, and insight. It seems like a very Korean happy ending.