Native Speaker
Native Speaker
by Chang-rae Lee
THE LITERARY WORK
A novel set in New York City and its suburbs during the 1990s; published in 1995.
SYNOPSIS
A young man confronts past conflicts with his immigrant father and the frustrations of assimilating into American society as a second-generation Korean American.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
Chang-rae Lee was born in South Korea in 1965 and immigrated to the United States when he was three years old. He and his family lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and New York City before moving to the suburb of Westchester, New York. Lee’s father completed his medical training in the United States and became a psychiatrist after learning English. Lee himself attended Phillips Exeter Academy and then Yale University. After college, he worked as a financial analyst on Wall Street and then, in 1993, acquired a master of fine arts from the University of Oregon where he also taught creative writing. Lee went on to direct the creative writing program at Hunter College in New York and to launch his own set of novels before joining the creative writing faculty at Princeton University in 2002. His initial novel, Native Speaker, won widespread critical acclaim and distinction as one of the first Korean American novels to be released by a major American publisher. Fictionalizing a Korean American experience, Native Speaker portrays the diversity of and tensions between immigrant communities in late-twentieth-century New York.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
Post-1965 immigration from Korea
Anti-Asian sentiment in the second half of the nineteenth century led to Congress’s curtailing Asian immigration to the United States through the beginning of the twentieth century until the passage of the 1924 National Origins Act. Effective from 1929 to 1965, this act limited the number of immigrants from a country to 2 percent of their population already in the United States according to the census of 1890. Extending an earlier 1917 restriction, the Act almost entirely banned immigration from Asia. The measure that finally lifted this ban was the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which opened up immigration by allowing 20, 000 newcomers from every country. In addition to the quota, immediate family members of U.S. citizens—specifically spouses, minor children, and parents—qualified for entry under the provision for family reunification. In the first 10 years of the act, preferences were given to skilled workers and professionals, such as doctors, nurses, and engineers. The impact of the act on Asian American immigration has been monumental. Since 1965, immigrants from Asia have comprised half of all newcomers to the United States. The Asian American population more than doubled from 1970 to 1980, increasing from 1.4 to 3.5 million people (Osajima, p. 168). By the mid-1970s, Asian nations had replaced Western European nations as the top countries of origin for immigrants to America each year.
Before the twentieth century, there were fewer than 50 Korean immigrants in the United States (Park, The Korean American Dream, p. 9). The early- to mid-twentieth century saw a scant number of immigrants enter the United States from Korea in contrast to the totals from Japan, China, and the Philippines. One reason for the scant number lay in Korea’s status as a colonial land under Japanese rule until the end of World War II (1905-45). Since Koreans were colonial subjects of the Japanese empire, the U.S. authorities considered them part of the Japanese population. Meanwhile, Japan imposed restrictions on its own populace; in 1907 it entered into a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with the United States: in exchange for fair treatment and protection of Japanese residents who were already in America, Japan would prevent the emigration of new laborers to the land. Hawaii was an exception; wives and families of Korean immigrants who had earlier settled there were allowed entry until 1924. In any case, the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” affected Korea only minimally, since by 1905 Japan was already restricting emigration from Korea, to prevent the growth of Korean independence efforts abroad.
Some Korean war orphans, war brides, and scholarship students immigrated to the United States after the Korean War (1950-53), thanks to post-World War II legislation admitting entry to refugees and families of servicemen. But it was not until the previously mentioned Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 that a substantial increase occurred in the population of Korean immigrants. According to the United States census, the Korean American population grew astronomically from 70,598 in 1970 to 798, 849 in 1990, an elevenfold increase (Park, The Korean American Dream, p. 17). With this post-1965 influx, highly visible and substantial Korean American communities emerged across the nation, especially in urban areas such as New York and Los Angeles. Los Angeles has the largest population of Korean immigrants; New York, the second largest: “As of 1994, approximately 100,000 Korean Americans lived in New York City proper, with an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 living in the entire New York-New Jersey metropolitan area” (Kim, p. 43).
This surge in population entailed the immigration of a certain strata of Korean newcomers. Because of occupational preferences in the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, almost three-quarters of the post-1965 Korean immigrants were middle class and college educated. The emigration of this strata of Koreans has been attributed not only to American policy but also to the South Korean economy. Its focus on industrialization and modernization after the Korean War created an internal demand for lower-paid, unskilled labor and resulted in a scarcity of jobs for the college graduates, so many opted to seek their fortunes in the United States. By the early 1990s, however, emigration from South Korea had slowed because of a booming domestic economy.
Korean American entrepreneurs
By the mid-1980s journalists had begun to chronicle the proliferation of Korean-owned businesses in New York City and Los Angeles. Journalists focused attention on these small businesses to a degree not experienced by other facets of the Korean American population. Mainstream media such as the New York Times reported on the increasing success and dominance of Korean American enterprises, such as the greengroceries owned by Mr. Park in the novel. In the 1980s and 1990s, Korean Americans owned most of the greengroceries in a host of neighborhoods around New York City as well as other urban centers. Profitable in their own right, these Korean-owned small businesses also boosted the economies of their local areas.
The initial economic resources of Korean immigrants partially explains their tendency to become small business owners in the United States. Because a large majority of the post-1965 immigrants came from a middle-class background, some brought financial resources from Korea. Others pooled the savings they had earned in America with fellow immigrants or borrowed from relatives and friends. In Native Speaker, Henry’s father is such an entrepreneur. The seed money for his first store comes from a ggeh (also spelled kye), a “Korean ‘money club,’” described as an informal “rotating credit association” (Lee, Native Speaker, p. 50; Abelmann and Lie, p. 133). Like a bank, the ggeh collects savings from members, then doles out funds on a rotating basis, an arrangement that helps jump-start small businesses owned by Korean entrepreneurs. The strategy appears effective. More than twice as many Koreans work for themselves than whites in America, and with considerable success. In a 1989 survey, 40 percent of employed Korean American men owned their own businesses, and 44 percent had household incomes over $50,000 (Abelmann and Lie, p. 129). While other Americans may be impressed by this degree of financial success, it does not alleviate the many obstacles that Korean entrepreneurs must face: “crime, high commercial rents and taxes, unwieldy city regulations, and stiff business competition” (Kim, p. 169). Also many entrepreneurs are plagued with less visible social problems. Even in the success stories featured in the New York Times, many small business owners and their frequently unpaid family members report ten-hour workdays for six or seven days a week and, in certain cases, dangerous working conditions. Crimes or bankruptcies of these businesses are likely underreported and missing from popular statistics (Tabor, p. B1). In Native Speaker, Lee balances Mr. Park’s apparent financial success and security with stories of other Korean shopowners who are robbed, beaten, killed, or forced to watch their stores burn to the ground.
The myth of the model minority
Early-twentieth-century America considered Jews the “model minority” in relation to mainstream society when it came to achieving economic and academic success (Bell, p. 28). In mid-to-late-twentieth century America, the media portrayed Asian immigrants as the new “model minority,” whose members embodied the ethics of hard work, discipline, and duty to family and community stressed in their Asian homelands.
At the height of the civil rights movement during the 1960s, the economic and educational success of Asian Americans was compared to the lack of educational achievement or community infrastructure among other racial minorities. The mainstream press has portrayed Asian Americans as succeeding without the help of federal programs like welfare, in contrast to other minority groups. But recent critics note that this comparison masks underlying conditions that perpetuate poverty and other social ills in Asian American, African American and Latino communities. Journals of the mid-to-late twentieth century continued to portray Asian Americans as a model minority. Articles depicting Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans as such appeared in the U.S. News & World Report and
THE “KOREAN AMERICAN DREAM” FOR THE SECOND GENERATION
In recent interviews. Korean immigrants showed disappointment in their occupations as shopkeepers and small business owners and surprise al their entrepreneurial status, given the advanced academic degrees they acquired back in Korea or even in America. Although more than 70 percent of the men emigrate intending to own businesses in America, first-generation immigrants have expressed hope that their children will not face the same discrimination, economic uncertainty, and occupational isolation they have encountered as small urban business owners. The dream is for their children to become professionals and to thereby avoid this fate (Abelmann and Lie, p. 129).
Newsweek in 1966, citing above-average academic achievement and family income as some of the markers of Asian American success. In the 1980s, articles in journals like the New Republic the markers of Asian American succ cess and reestablished Asian Americans as the model minority for another generation. The articles showed them as surpassing whites in education and income: Asian American students appeared in substantial numbers in elite universities; they scored higher on the math Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) than whites; Asian immigrants were more likely to be college educated than white Americans; and the Asian American median family income had exceeded the white median by the 1980s. But scholars have countered such favorable look at these generalizations with often overlooked statistics: below-average per capita income; uncompensated overtime; and underemployment and poverty among the more recent immigrant groups, as well as the more established Asian American communities. A majority of Southeast Asian refugees, to take one example, live below the poverty line, and many do indeed depend on welfare because of unemployment, forced occupational changes and lack of English proficiency (Le, pp. 176-79). Economic success and above-average family income are balanced against the hours of uncompensated labor by family members in family-owned businesses and against the high number of family members who contribute to the overall household income. In the 1980s, the rate of Korean Americans working without pay in a family business was nearly three times that of any other ethnic group (Bell, p. 30).
The Novel in Focus
The plot
The novel unfolds from the first-person perspective of Henry Park, a second-generation Korean American. Henry contemplates the recent departure of his white American wife, Lelia. They are now separated, and their 10-year marriage is in danger of disintegration. He and Lelia have become increasingly estranged since the accidental death of their seven-year-old son, Mitt, a few years earlier. Lelia is unnerved by Henry’s unemotional reaction to their son’s death and his refusal to discuss it or their failing marriage; at one point she accuses him of being an “emotional alien” (Native Speaker, p. 5).
During their 10 years together, Lelia has provided the benchmark for what “American” means to Henry. His non-Korean wife seems to be Henry’s foray into American society. In particular, Lelia provides for Henry a standard measure for the English language, for she is a freelance speech therapist for children learning English as a second language or struggling with speech impediments. Henry is continually fascinated by Lelia’s seemingly effortless ability to speak the language and guilelessly express her emotions: “What I found was this: that she could really speak. At first I took her as being exceedingly proper, but I soon realized that she was simply executing the language. She went word by word. Every letter had a border. I watched her wide full mouth sweep through her sentences like a figure touring a dark house, flipping on spots and banks of perfectly drawn light” (Native Speaker, p. 11). During their first meeting, Lelia notices that Henry is fastidious regarding language, and her noticing this attracts him to her: “You look like someone listening to himself. You pay attention to what you’re doing” (Native Speaker, p. 12).
As Henry attempts to adjust to life without his son, and now without his wife, he reflects on his troubled relationship with his father, pondering how his father’s stoicism and silence toward him conditioned Henry to behave in much the same way as an adult. Much of Henry’s childhood is spent apart from his father, who comes home exhausted and short-tempered from managing the greengroceries Mr. Park owns. When Henry’s mother dies while Henry is young, Henry is further distanced from his father by the sudden unexplained arrival of a Korean housekeeper, who becomes his father’s companion and presumably his mistress. Kept at a distance, Henry learns little of his parents’ lives in Korea and in America.
Henry muses on his son’s death and the loss of his dreams for Mitt’s future. He sees his son, a biracial child, as having a claim on opportunities available to white Americans, opportunities that have been denied to Henry and his immigrant parents. Frustrated by his inability to assimilate fully into white American life and wanting his son to be free of this limitation, Henry treats Mitt accordingly. He encourages the boy to spend as much time with his mother as possible and to avoid contact with his father’s racial heritage so that it will not “contaminate” Mitt’s American future. But Henry recognizes the flaws in this approach. In privileging American culture over Mitt’s Korean heritage, he seeks an entirely American identity for his son, “a singular sense of his world, a life univocal, which might have offered him the authority and confidence that his broad half-yellow face could not. Of course, this is assimilist [sic] sentiment,” observes Henry, “part of my own ugly and half-blind romance with the land” (Native Speaker, p. 267). After his son’s death, Henry finally recognizes that he attempted to abandon his own Korean heritage through his aspirations for Mitt.
Professionally, Henry is a spy for a private intelligence agency. His characteristic guardedness and secrecy serve him well in this capacity. Since graduating from a prestigious East Coast university, Henry has spied on individuals targeted by anonymous industrial and political concerns from all over the world. Before Mitt’s death, Henry enjoyed the subversive nature of his occupation, reveling in his ability to gain the confidence of and information from his unwitting subjects. But after his son dies, Henry’s failure to express his emotions compromises his ability not only to preserve his marriage but also to perform his job. In working as a spy, Henry attempts to avoid the trauma of his son’s death and the responsibility of being Korean American: “I had always thought that I could be anyone, perhaps several anyones at once. … I found a sanction from our work, for I thought I had finally found my truest place in the culture” (Native Speaker, p. 127). He finds security in the different personas he takes on in his work as a spy; he assimilates to the point of invisibility.
At the beginning of the novel, Henry reveals that he has already failed in one assignment with a Filipino American psychiatrist. In order to reestablish his loyalty to the company and his dedication to the work, Henry takes on a new assignment to gather information on John Kwang, a city councilman from Flushing, New York, and a tremendously successful self-employed Korean immigrant. Although Henry is never told how the information will be used, he suspects that Kwang’s political ambitions have made him an enemy of the current mayor. Against the ineffectual rhetoric and inaction of the Mayor De Roos, Kwang’s charismatic leadership of the multiethnic communities of New York City places him in the forefront of the next mayoral race.
As Henry continues to work undercover as a volunteer in Kwang’s political campaign, he finds himself gaining the friendship and confidences of the enigmatic politician himself. He keeps comparing Kwang to Henry’s own father and also to himself as he attempts to fathom the true nature of the councilman. Kwang seems to be a quintessentially self-made man and a leader whose charisma can win over New York City’s often fractious, multiethnic populations. As he continues to work with Kwang, Henry finds himself increasingly unable to forget about the past traumas of his life: his mother’s sudden death, his father’s emotional inaccessibility, his son’s accidental death, and possible failure of his marriage.
After Kwang’s campaign office is mysteriously fire bombed and two of the workers are killed, Kwang chooses Henry to manage a doptinga fina not unlike the ggeh, the rotating credit association, that financed the first greengrocery opened by Henry’s father. However, unlike his father’s ggeh, Kwang’s fund sets out to help all his constituents of various racial backgrounds, not just the Koreans. Kwang develops the idea of the ggeh from a fund to promote the financial success of family and friends into one that incorporates the larger network of his constituency. The aim is not only to promote their economic prosperity but also to mobilize them politically. A hostile media perverts the truth, though. The press portrays Kwang’s interracial, interethnic ggeh as an unsavory operation, “a pyramidal laundering scheme, a people’s lottery, an Asian numbers game” (Native Speaker, p. 301). Thanks to his enemies, vast records of contributors to his ggeh, including names and addresses of illegal immigrants, wind up in the hands of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Soon after, Kwang is involved in a car accident with a young undocumented woman. The incident has immoral overtones for the general public, since the woman is not his wife and is in the country illegally. Publicly disgraced in all aspects of his life, the incident irrevocably ruins Kwang’s political career.
A KOREAN AMERICAN CASUALTY IN THE LOS ANGELES UPRISING
In Native Speaker John Kwang refers to the death of Charles Lee in a store bombing of his family’s business. The fictional death of Lee, a young Korean American, echoes the real-life shooting of eighteen-year-old Edward Lee during the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. Of the 58 fatalities in the uprising, Lee was the only Korean American to die in the urban violence.
As he watches Kwang’s downfall, Henry begins to reconsider his role in it and his more general undermining of other Asian Americans and of immigrant communities. He faces the fact that he has pursued his occupation at the expense of other Asian Americans and irrevocably destroyed the lives of immigrants who, like his father, like John Kwang, and even like himself, aspire to prosper in America. In the final scene, Henry has left his job and assists his wife in teaching English to immigrant children, adopting a final mask as a “Speech Monster” to entertain the students.
Interracial tensions
Set in New York City, Native Speaker takes place in a multiethnic, racially strained environment. Both Henry’s father and John Kwang have roots as small business owners in communities that cater to a diverse nonwhite clientele. Kwang rises to citywide prominence because of his talent for forming multiracial political coalitions and developing broad support among immigrants and citizens. Often he is called upon to resolve misunderstandings between Korean immigrant shop owners and their black customers. The strain reflects a real-life tension, which came to a head in two crises that shook Korean Americans in the 1990s: the 1990 to 1991 African American boycotts of Korean-owned stores in New York City and the 1992 Los Angeles uprising.
KOREAN AMERICANS IN POLITICS
The Los Angeles Uprising galvanized Korean American community leaders to meet and discuss unified political objectives in the wake of racial scapegoating (Park, “The Impact,” p. 286). Forming Korean American Democrat and Republican organizations, the Korean American community helped elect Republican Jay Kim a United States Representative of California in November 1992. Kim would become the first Korean American to win election to federal office.
The 1990-91 boycott of Korean American stores in New York attracted national attention in the black and Korean American press. An earlier 1988 boycott in the Bronx had put so much pressure on a store after it fired a black employee that the store was forced to close down altogether. Now, in 1990, a second boycott began that would last for 16 months. It is alleged that on January 18, 1990, Bong Ok Jang, manager of the Family Red Apple store in Flatbush, Brooklyn, argued with and beat up a black female customer. An angry crowd gathered when an ambulance arrived and rumors circulated that the woman had slipped into a coma. The crowd began a protest that would become a boycott not only of the Family Red Apple store but also of another greengrocery across the street, which had protected an employee fleeing the crowd that gathered after the dispute began. The 16-month boycott, including picket lines outside the Family Red Apple and Church Fruits stores, was mostly organized by the December 12th Movement, a New York City coalition of black political organizations that had been protesting hate crimes and violence against African Americans since the late 1980s. The movement called for a “merchant apology, the conviction of the Korean merchant(s) involved in the alleged beating, and the closing of the two Korean-owned stores” (Kim, p. 43). Korean and black groups sought out newly elected Mayor David Dinkins, New York’s first African American mayor, to mediate the dispute. Political inaction on his part as well as that of President George Bush after multiple appeals led to thousands of Korean Americans’ gathering at City Hall on September 18, 1990, in thousands of Korean Americans “New York City history” (Kim, p. 179). Still, the picket lines continued until finally the Family Red Apple store was sold on May 30, 1991.
In Native Speaker, over the course of Henry’s relationship with Kwang, Korean-owned businesses endure store-burnings, demonstrations, vandalism and boycotts. Racial strife blights all of New York’s boroughs, testing Kwang’s leadership of his multiethnic constituency. In a pivotal speech that appears to clinch his mayoral candidacy, Kwang mentions the shooting death of Saranda Harlans, an African American mother of two. This anecdote echoes the real-life killing of African American teenager Latasha Harlins in South Central Los Angeles in 1991. A Korean storeowner, Soon Ja Du, shot Harlins in the back of the head after a physical struggle between the two women over a purchase. For her crime, Du received a light sentence of probation and community service, which outraged African American communities across the country. In Lee’s fictional New York, the death of Saranda Harlans and the perceived injustice in the severity of the offender’s legal punishment leads to arson, rioting and boycotts of Korean-owned stores that jeopardize Kwang’s ability to lead the city.
Another incident highlighted the explosive relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department and African Americans. After a traffic stop in 1991, Rodney King, an African American, was displayed on a truncated snippet of video tape to have been beaten repeatedly by four white police officers. The final portion of the episode was recorded by a home video camera and sold to and broadcast over national media networks. On April 29, 1992, the four white police officers were acquitted of criminal charges in the King beating. The verdict sparked the Los Angeles Uprising of April 29-May 1, which took place in South Central Los Angeles and resulted in the deaths of 58 persons, injuries suffered by more than 2,400, and $717 million in property damage. Korean American businesses sustained the highest percentage of damage in this urban conflict (Abelmann and Lie, pp. 2, 8).
Sources and literary context
After immigrating to the United States at an early age, Lee examined his own struggle with assimilation into American society, a struggle that found its way into Native Speaker. “Did I so desperately want to belong so much that I did things—like refusing to translate for my mother, like going to Exeter, like dating white women—for that reason? … I wonder about the betrayals I had made—to myself, to my family” (Lee in Belluck, p. 1). More specifically, because Korean was his first language and he acquired English only in grade school, Lee has expressed in interviews an anxiety about the English language that troubles his protagonist Henry in Native Speaker.
Lee acknowledges diverse literary influences such as Walt Whitman and James Joyce, crediting especially Whitman’s descriptions of Queens and Joyce’s character Gabriel from “The Dead” (a short story in Dubliners, also in Literature and Its Times). Among other influences cited by Lee are the novelists Kazuo Ishiguro, John Cheever, and Yukio Mishima.
Novels by and about Asian Americans have historically been characterized by the strong presence of an ethnic community that not only provides the thematic conflict but also nurtures the main character as he or she struggles with the experience of assimilation into American society. The novel’s protagonist Henry Park is distinctive because of his isolation from other Korean Americans and even his father, leading one reviewer to describe Lee’s work as a “newer and rawer” portrayal of a contemporary immigrant experience than those that preceded it (Eder, p. 13). Native Speaker has also been described as an ethnic bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, in light of the self-knowledge and self-awareness attained over the course of the story by its protagonist.
Reception
Native Speaker was published to critical acclaim in mainstream newspapers and magazines. In 1996 the book won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a first novel. Most reviewers identify two dominant themes in Native Speaker, the spy thriller and the bildungsroman of ethnic assimilation into larger society. One reviewer for The Independent discusses Lee’s development of the detective element “while adding in the question of immigrant identity as well” (Beckett p. 30). Some reviewers were disappointed by the spy plot in its implausibility, but these same reviewers showed enthusiasm for the poignant depiction of the immigrant family in contemporary American society. Although Richard Eder deemed Lee’s story and writing choppy at times, he showered praised on “the figure of Henry’s father, whose love is expressed in sacrifice, whose sacrifice is expressed in harshness and whose harshness distills into an odd hint of poetry,” deeming the portrayal to be “a memorable one” (Eder, p. 13).
—Lynn Itagaki
For More Information
Abelmann, Nancy, and John Lie. Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Beckett, Andy. “I Spy with My Little Eye.” Review of Native Speaker. The Independent, 13 August 1995, 30.
Bell, David A. “The Triumph of Asian-Americans.” New Republic, July 1985, 24-31.
Belluck, Pam. “Being of Two Cultures and Belonging to Neither: After an Acclaimed Novel, a Korean-American Writer Searches for His Roots.” New York Times, 10 July 1995, B1.
Eder, Richard. “Stranger in a Strange Land: A Novel of a Newer, Rawer Immigrant Experience.” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 19 March 1995, 3, 13.
Kim, Claire Jean. Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Le, Ngoan. “The Case of the Southeast Asian Refugees: Policy for a Community ‘At Risk.’” The State of Asian Pacific America: Policy Issues to the Year 2020. Los Angeles: LEAP Asian Pacific Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1993.
Lee, Chang-rae. Native Speaker. New York: head, 1995.
Osajima, Keith. “Asian Americans as the Model Minority: An Analysis of the Popular Press Image in the 1960s and 1980s.” In Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies. Eds. Gary Y. Okihiro et al. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1988.
Park, Edward J. W. “The Impact of Mainstream Political Mobilization on Asian American Communities: The Case of Korean Americans in Los Angeles, 1992-1998.” In Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Park, Kyeyoung. The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Song, Min. Review of Native Speaker. Amerasia Journal 23, no. 2 (fall 1997): 185-89.
Tabor, Mary B. W. “Unfulfilled Promises.” New York Times, 26 October 1992, Bl.