Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea: Immigrant Generations and Myth Creation

Abstract

The town of B-Mor in Chang-rae Lee's novel On Such a Full Sea is a representation of a first-generation immigrant society. Residents have been a community for more than one hundred years, and their isolation from the rest of society has stagnated their progress and assimilation. Fan, in fact, represents the second-generation immigrant who leaves behind the enclave society. Liwei is a representation of the third-generation immigrant who seems fully assimilated but yearns for his lost cultural identity. The story of Fan as told by the narrator is a fictionalized myth, meant to rekindle the revolutionary spirit and to help the people of B-Mor break out of the stagnant first-generation immigrant slump they have been stuck in for a hundred years. The paper analyzes the portrayal of immigrant generations within On Such a Full Sea and the subsequent myth creation by the novel's narrator.