This paper analyzes Cathy Park Hong’s “Ballad of Our Jim” which is the first part of her third book Engine Empire, and explores how she rewrites the myth of the American West or the westward expansion propelled in the name of Manifest Destiny. By analyzing the poems which follow the path of outlaw white brothers or fortune-seekers travelling to California during the Civil War and their kidnapped half-Comanche Jim, the study shows that the poet attempts to reveal the violence and racism inherent in the Western myth and suggest the potentiality of racial hybridity represented by Jim. The poems in “Ballad of Our Jim” not only present pillage and violence by the outlaw gangsters and Jim adapted as their tool, but also reveal discrimination which victimizes racial others such as native Americans and the Chinese. Jim’s Comanche mother is banished by her “Injun killing” husband for a white woman, and a “Chinaman gets knifed for being what he is.” The white brothers suggest to eradicate racial others to build “the clear world” in the west. By contrast, “Our Jim,” the only survivor of the gang, is presented as a potent symbol of racial hybridity holding the indigenous element that cannot be assimilated by the dominant colonial forces, even though his fate is uncertain “in the denuded earth.”
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