My paper intervenes in the ongoing critical debate surrounding the Korean American writer Younghill Kang. Diverging from other critics who have explored Kang's work in the context of Korean nationalism and Japanese imperialism, I argue that Kang rewrites Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance in his 1937 autobiographical novel East Goes West. Hawthorne’s novel exemplifies the contradictions of the American romance by staging the growth of a utopian community bound together by a mutual commitment to creating a more egalitarian world before the resurgence of individual affections threatens to nullify the enactment of lasting reform, even on the miniaturized scale of a single, self-selecting group. Kang rewrites the literary form he adapts from Hawthorne in order to narrate an Asian American realist romance that critiques the racist logic of American anti-miscegenation laws while pointing to an emerging alliance between Korean immigrants and their white allies, yet--like Hawthorne--Kang ultimately defaults to a mode of individual self-determination that remains ambivalent towards the viability of efforts to shift race relations beyond one’s immediate circle.