ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how an excavation of a new transpacific archive can help us rethink modern Korean literature by calling attention to recently discovered manuscripts by an early Korean American writer, Nak Chung Thun. I contend that Thun’s short story “A Pitiful Grave” unsettles the ethnolinguistic assumption of a Korean literature as written in the Korean language by Korean writers and for Korean readers. Although written in Korean, this story is implicitly addressed to a broad American reading public, to the extent that it intervenes in the US racist anti-miscegenation law by depicting an interracial romance and marriage between a British man and a Chinese woman and notably does not feature a single ethnically Korean character.
