This paper reads Ronyoung Kim`s Clay Walls (1987) as a Korean American female bildungsroman, focusing on the novel`s last section, "Faye." In order to reevaluate this second-generation Korean American girl`s developmental narrative, I first contextualize it with Jade Snow Wong`s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), which not only shares its time frame but also affords many intriguing parallels to it in terms of nation, race, gender, and class. On the other hand, examination of Faye`s socially and racially diverse peers as well as Faye`s immigrant mother, Haesu, reveals the multiple venues through which the 1940s multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural America infiltrated into the young Korean American female subject. Vocalizing the impossibility of the ideal of successful incorporation into white America, Kim`s writerly desire to be heard is most expressively manifested by her female characters` search for autonomy, beyond the white-Asian dyad as well as beyond the ambiguous relationship between mother and daughter.