BOOK REVIEWS125 and behavior deficiencies, and who are living in a disintegrating family environment . The authors criticize the American ideology that touts "home" as a haven and "community" as the protector of the home. These two pillars of support for American society are no longer available in the deindustrialized, racialized, and impoverished urban America. In the concluding chapter, the authors examine the impact of the 1992 riots on Korean Americans. It is clear that Korean Americans were portrayed in a certain conceptual frame by the American mainstream media. Whether the resulting image of Korean Americans in the popular imagination would prove to be an asset to them remains to be seen. It is also true that, despite the diversity within the Korean American population, the 1 992 riots affected most of them, if not physically, then certainly psychologically, thus contributing toward group solidarity among Korean Americans in general, and the politicization of the second-generation in particular. The authors examine five political options available to Korean Americans, but they do not speculate on the likely consequences of each option. The authors suggest that they have used the title, Blue Dreams, because the color blue evokes both despair and hope. They even claim that dreams are considered blue in Korean society. However, this is hardly true. Only dreams that suggest success for the dreamer are considered blue. Thus the Korean expression ch'öngwun üi kküm (dream of blue clouds) is judiciously used to imply that the dreamer is hopeful of success. The color blue may mean despair and depression within the context of American culture, but it does not signify the same in Korean culture. Robert H. Kim Western Washington University A Korean Confucian Encounter with the Modern World: Yi Hangno and the West, by Chai-sik Chung. Korean Research Monograph 20. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1995. 268 pp. A Korean Confucian Encounter with the Modern World is essentially a study in Korean intellectual history. Chai-sik Chung focuses on the writings of Yi Hangno (1792-1868), a well known Neo-Confucian scholar, to illustrate the great cultural gulf that existed between late Chosön Korea and the Western world on the eve of Korea's opening to the West. Yi's total rejection of the West's culture, values, and practices—as Yi understood them—vividly illustrates the power of Neo-Confucian ideals among many of Korea's yangban elite during the nineteenth century. Somewhat less directly, Chung's study also 126KOREAN STUDIES, VOL. 21 offers suggestions concerning the particular difficulties that Korea has experienced in moving from a traditional to a modern society. The book itself is broken up into five specific sections. Chapter 1, "General Cultural Orientations in Traditional Korea," provides a broad overview of the impact of Neo-Confucianism on Korean culture during the Chosön period. After first noting Korea's traditional cultural and philosophical dependence upon Chinese civilization, Chung then discusses the establishment of the Chos ön (Yi) dynasty and the rise of Neo-Confucianism as the preeminent philosophical force in the kingdom. As the author remarks, "The founding of the Yi dynasty was not merely another dynastic change from Koryö to Chosön. Rather, it was a pivotal transition from a culture dominated by Buddhism to a society primarily dominated by Confucianism. To the founders of early Yi, turning to the Confucian Way was not an act culturally disjunctive to their heritage, but a proud resumption of the cultured way of governing human beings and society exemplified in antiquity in their land by the sage-king Kija" (17). The Confucianism that the Chosön dynasty stressed, of course, was the Neo-Confucianism of the Song philosopher Zhu Xi, with its strong emphasis upon metaphysics , loyalty, and authoritarianism. As the centuries passed, Neo-Confucian scholars in Korea increasingly stressed the need to maintain ideological orthodoxy. All "deviant" thought systems—whether in the form of Buddhism, Taoism, shamanism, or even challenges to Zhu Xi's writings within the Confucian tradition—had to be rejected. This rigidity was not simply an effort to reinforce proper thought and behavior, but also a way for the literati and various government bureaucrats to maintain...