N a t i v e S p e a k e r by Chang-rae Lee Our Readers' Essays

Maureen Bowman       Ruth Greenwood       Hyung Jin Park       Mary Riley

Maureen Bowman:      When I first opened Native Speaker, by Chang-Rae Lee, I was prepared to read it with a cynical eye. From the first page, I was sucked into the world of Korean-American shadow man Henry Park. Chang-Rae Lee's prose is hauntingly lyrical. Anything he says sounds so good that what he says is almost beside the point. Lee's use of oral analogies throughout the book is well done. The Asian immigrants never learn to speak English in quite the same way the native speakers do. They cannot pretend to be what they are not. Each of them tries, but fails utimately to assimilate. Each character is coping with his or her own loss. Henry is haunted by the gruesome, accidental death of his son. To Henry, his son represents all that he is not and never could be. The most touching moment of the novel came when Henry expressed his disappointment at his son's birth. The baby's Asian appearance troubles Henry, who wanted to have a truly American family with his wife, Lelia. Henry is, in turns, the mourning father, the loving husband, the dutiful son to his father and the respectful employee to political figure John Kwang. Lee's description of these relationships in Native Speaker is faultless. Henry Park is the undercover spy who is trying on personalities, and finding himself through the eyes of the other characters in the novel. Ruth Greenwood:      I have never ridden on one of those amusement park rides in which you are enclosed in a cage on the perimeter of a wheel that begins to spin, and suddenly the bottom drops away. Pinned back by centrifugal force, you do not fall. The difference between that ride, and my first reading of Native Speaker is that I never saw the bottom drop away as I read. In a coffee house run by Korean students in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it was one of my first nights out alone after the birth of my son. I drank my cappuccino, finished my paper, and looked at the bookshelves for something else to read. New magazines intrigued me, but I can't read Hangul, Korean script, and my understood Korean is limited to "hello" and "thank you" and the names of good things to eat. The sole English volume was Native Speaker and so I began reading. From sunset until all the other chairs were stacked atop tables, I read. I cried for a fictional son and ached for the paralysis of his fictional father. I contemplated larceny as I got up to leave, but decided the book was too large to hide, and that others deserved to be caught up in it too. I found a copy in the library the next morning, and disappeared into it, as much as a newborn infant would allow. My son, now five years old, has just begun to read, and for how intently I absorbed this book as I nursed him, I know that when his time comes to read it, he will already have a taste for it, subtle, bitter, sweet, a story of life revolving, terrifying...and yet we survive. Hyung Jin Park:      I decided to read this book in the midst of busyness with multiple roles as a student, father, and husband. The reason was a kind of obligation mixed up with personal curiosity about the author and the book's title. At first, I was intrigued not so much by the title as by the native name of the author in the poster which especially stood out for me (a Korean) in a place like Princeton Public Library.      In my understanding, the Native Speaker was a story of a journey toward self-awareness of "belonging": from alienation to affiliation, from detachment to attachment. I believe that it is an awakening process. The author unfolds this experience with linguistic symbol and metaphor. Henry Park's reluctant attitude to his roots was refigured.      All too often, I heard a specific notion when we talked about ethnic experience in America: "identity." The ambiguity, crisis, and struggle centered around identity, a problem of belonging. We all belong to some sort whether we feel pride or shame. We must belong to some kind because we were born to some kind. I will call this sense of belonging a sense of culture. We cannot deny the force of culture, that milieu in which we are being molded consciously and unconsciously. This force is most realistically felt in a place like America. The language, the most powerful force and symbol of one's culture, was symbolically picked up by the author to sketch one's journey to configure one's identity.      To me, the climax was towards the end of the book. (p. 337) Henry's sense of identity was deepened and enlarged with his sympathetic understanding of his father and his emphatic listening to the native immigrants. Identity, I am saying, is not in a sense of narrowness. It is to be enlarged, meaning by no means thinness. It is to be deepened. Enlarging with deepening is, I believe, a learning process of true maturity, our understanding of human condition.      To me, Henry is a reality, not a fictional figure. I, myself being a father who is raising two American born children, know this reality deeply well. We often hear the complaints from my own: "I wish I could be an American!?" This heard my wife and I when we earnestly tried to help their homework in our kind of English. We observed that my kids were very afraid of being different, culturally. This cultural phobia of being different is often manifested in their reluctance to carry a lunch pack or bag with any Korean alphabet. For me, one thing I have learned from the American life style is "difference," the OK-ness, and openness towards difference. "Don't be afraid of being able to be different." This novel reminded me of the first joke on my American life, still ringing in my ear: FOB (fresh off the boat), SOB (still on the boat), and finally BOB (back on the boat).      Finally, if I add one more, I was attracted not only by the novel itself, but also by the author whose career is quite unorthodox to the parents of Korean-Americans who often impose their American dreams on their kids, pushing them into a stereotyped path to become good professionals, doctors, lawyers, and engineers. So far I have hardly found a second generation like Chang-Rae Lee in the career as a novelist, poet, or humanist in this country. In that sense, I praise that this novel is a breakthrough. Mary Riley:      "Rich with disparate melodies," Native Speaker addresses the nature of language, ethnicity, age and gender. All become woven together in a tapestry of understanding, misunderstanding, history and human nature--authentic steps to learning more about the "other," the one outside oneself. The reader has an opportunity to share in the author's search for empathy across gender lines. The cross-cultural nature of the work provides a lens through which the male voice attempts to reflect upon his female counterpart. It is through the voice of Henry Park, the protagonist and narrator that the reader learns about Lelia his spouse.      Lelia offers a substantial range of contrast to the quiet, contained Henry who "mostly come[s] by the midnight coach." She is a New Englander, of Scottish descent and, according to her father, "a Mac truck on Pinto tires." Henry, the first person narrator and Korean-American, provides the reader with an insight into Lelia--not in a traditional Western approach of examining the relationship from the standpoint of the stereotypical misunderstood spouse--but instead by means of the raw material of character obtained through observation and reflection.      The marriage of Lelia and Henry provides the mercurial backdrop against which Henry's developing consciousness, also seen as an adult coming-of-age story, takes place. The reader learns about Henry as Henry learns about himself. The novel's protagonist does this by contrasting himself with those around him--his spouse, his father, his colleagues, his employers and the subjects he observes for his job as a "stranger, follower, traitor, spy."      Chang-rae Lee uses a present tense chronology to describe Henry's progression out of his job and back into his marriage to Lelia. He uses flashbacks to show Henry's reflections on his early development and first generation immigrant goals of assimilation balanced with respect for one's cultural heritage. His reflections also provide background for other, inter-generational relationships, particularly those with his son and his father. Native Speaker breaks new ground, however, in its insights about the female gender through a male narrator's point of view.      In his courtship of Lelia, Henry says, "I did something then that I didn't know I could do…. I put myself in her place." He observes himself as "an assimilist"; he observes Lelia "who has it over me in spades"; and he reflects on them together. "Lelia and I tended to dwell in the corners along the periphery."      Henry often describes breakthroughs in consciousness by showing the darker side of what he has learned. Lelia, a teacher of speech, also becomes for Henry a teacher of life from the female perspective. For example, "It struck her how a man could seem to gain a little bit of magic or grace or virtue with every woman he was with, but that a woman…relinquished something each time, even if it ended mutually and well."      Cross-gender insights also appear between Henry and some of the other female characters in the novel, such as his father's housekeeper and Janice, who works on a political campaign with Henry. One of Henry and Lelia's early fights centered around the fact that the Korean housekeeper had no name of her own--at least as far as Henry and his father were concerned. They called her "Ahjuhma," a respectful term in Korean for a household servant. Henry eventually came to see her as "someone standing for real before her own life." Janice once told Henry about John Kim, a Korean-American boyfriend in college with whom she argued and who "wouldn't say anything back." Henry thought that he might have told Janice "that [John's] silence was more complicated than she presently understood."      Native Speaker offers many stories within its intricately woven narrative. It brings to readers not only an expanded multi-cultural literary voice, but also one that contains hope for 21st century egalitarian male-female relationships built out of diversity, contrast and attempts at mutual enlightenment through empathy.

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