Native Speaker (An immigrant fiction by
Chang-Rae Lee)
Brief Biography of Chang-rae Lee
Chang-Rae Lee was born
in Seoul, South Korea, in 1965, but his family emigrated to the United States
when he was three years old. He grew up in Westchester County in New York,
where his father opened a psychiatric practice. When he was a teenager, he
attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, obtaining a
prestigious education that eventually led him to Yale University to study
English literature. He graduated in 1987 and went on to work very briefly as an
analyst on Wall Street before attending graduate school at the University of
Oregon. His first novel, Native Speaker, served as the thesis for
his Master of Fine Arts degree and was published in 1995, ultimately winning
him the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel. He has since gone on to win
many other literary awards, and his 2010 novel, The Surrendered,
was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. He has also taught creative
writing at widely respected institutions like Princeton University and Stanford
University.
Historical Context of Native Speaker
Native Speaker takes place in the 1990s, a period
during which the United States’ immigrant population was on a steady incline.
The number of undocumented immigrants peaked in the year 2007 and then tapered
down again, contrary to the common assumption that immigration to the United
States has seen a consistent increase in the last 30 years. The 1990s therefore
saw a somewhat unique influx of migration and, consequently, a mixed response
about whether or not the nation should increase or decrease the number of
immigrants coming the country. Polls have shown that the majority of Americans
in the early 1990s were more hesitant to welcome immigrants than they were in
the early 2000s, perhaps because many people stopped fearing that an increase
in the immigrant population would make work harder to find. However, the
general attitude that the immigrants in Native Speaker face is
decidedly unwelcoming, as evidenced by the fact that many of John Kwang’s
undocumented constituents get arrested and face deportation at the end of the
novel. In a way, then, Native Speaker predicts the controversy
surrounding immigration and deportation that eventually came under the
political spotlight of the 2010s.
Summary
Henry Park is a Korean American man who lives
in New York City and works as a spy of sorts. His job is to go undercover in a
variety of contexts and gather information about a specified target. His boss
is a man named Dennis Hoagland, whose firm gets hired by outside
clients to gather information about “people working against their vested
interests.” In general, the people Henry spies on are usually wealthy
immigrants who secretly support insurrections or revolutions in their home
countries.
Most recently, Henry was assigned to gather information
on a Filipino therapist named Emile Luzan. It’s normally easy for Henry to stick
to his invented backstory, but he had a hard time doing this because life was
in shambles: his wife, Lelia, had recently gone to Italy
alone. Her departure was tied to the fact that their son, Mitt, died at the age of seven.
Lelia felt alone with her grief because Henry never
talked about it, but Henry just isn’t a very expressive person. This is thanks
to his Korean upbringing. His family moved to New York City from Korea when he
was young, and his father worked hard to open grocery stores
in the city. He did this with money from a Korean “money club.” After Henry’s mother died when he was 11, his father
moved Henry to a wealthy neighborhood north of the city and didn’t dwell on his
wife’s death. Henry eventually became accustomed to his father’s silent, stoic
ways.
These days, Lelia has returned from Italy but hasn’t
moved back in with Henry. She’s still angry about the way he mourned Mitt’s
death, which happened when they were staying with Henry’s father during the
summer. Mitt eventually wound up becoming close friends with the white children
in the neighborhood, but during a rowdy pig pile at a birthday party, Mitt was
crushed beneath the weight of the other boys and died.
Back in the novel’s present, Henry has been avoiding his
company’s office because he doesn’t want to talk to Hoagland about what
happened during his Luzan assignment: Henry developed a real therapeutic
relationship with Luzan and planned to warn Luzan to be careful. But two of his
coworkers appeared and took Luzan away before Henry could say anything. One of
those coworkers was Jack, an older Greek man who’s a mentor to
Henry. Now, Henry has been put on a new assignment, and Hoagland has instructed
Jack to oversee it.
Henry is supposed to gather information about a Korean
American city councilman named John Kwang. The fact that both Henry and Kwang are
Korean Americans living in New York City is supposed to make the job easy for
Henry, whose task is simply to work at Kwang’s new political headquarters in
Queens as an intern. He’s supposed to write periodic reports about Kwang’s
activities and send them to Hoagland. But he’s slow to get started, since he’s
preoccupied with what’s happening in his relationship with Lelia. Henry turns
to Jack for advice on how to fix his marriage, knowing Jack had a happy
marriage before his wife died. In turn, Jack not only acts as a professional
mentor, but also as a friend and confidante—and yet, it becomes increasingly
clear that his advice to Henry about how to handle the Kwang case comes
directly from Hoagland.
In the first weeks of his internship, Henry notices how
much the other volunteers respect Kwang. They see him as a unifier who’s
representative of New York’s immigrant communities. One volunteer, a young man
named Eduardo, stands out as being especially devoted
to Kwang. Eduardo is a 23-year-old—though he looks older—college student who
has become close to Kwang. As for Kwang himself, he has a magnetic presence and
hasn’t yet confirmed or denied whether or not he’ll be running for mayor. The
current mayor, De Roos, is clearly nervous that Kwang will
make a run for the position, so he has been criticizing him in public.
As Henry works his way into the Kwang organization, he
manages to reestablish contact with Lelia. He does this by asking if he can
borrow tape recordings she has of Mitt, saying he wants to hear their son’s
voice. This leads to a late-night conversation at their mutual friend’s
apartment—a conversation in which Lelia makes it clear that she left Henry
because she’d had enough of his silence and secrecy, she hates that he never
talks about Mitt, and she also dislikes his commitment to his job. After this,
Lelia and Henry begin to see each other more regularly.
Slowly but surely, Henry endears himself to Kwang, who
takes an interest in him because he’s Korean American. Henry likes Kwang
because he reminds him of a younger version of his father. The closer Henry
works with the councilman, the more Kwang takes him under his wing, which only
makes Henry feel worse about sending information about him back to Hoagland.
Jack pays him several visits and encourages Henry to do his job, indicating
that Hoagland is getting impatient.
Around this time, Lelia moves back in with Henry. They’ve
been on good terms ever since a trip to clean out his father’s house (his
father died not long after Mitt). On this trip, Henry finally opens up to Lelia
about his feelings. He even tells her about his difficulties at work,
explaining that he’s under pressure to dig up dirt on Kwang. He also implies
that Hoagland might want him to make something up if he can’t actually find
anything scandalous about Kwang. But Henry’s hesitant to do so because he knows
Kwang might get hurt; after all, he recently learned that Luzan was killed in
an alleged “accident” while traveling.
One night, Lelia and Henry are watching the news and
discover that Kwang’s headquarters have been bombed. Two people died: a
custodian and Eduardo. Henry immediately contacts Hoagland and Jack, but they
claim to have had nothing to do with the bombing. After this, Kwang’s political
operation moves to his house in Queens, where Henry starts working late and
taking on many of Eduardo’s duties. Everyone on the team is tense: Kwang still
hasn’t made a statement about the bombing and refuses to be seen in public.
He’s unraveling. Late one night, he comes downstairs and drinks with Henry.
There have been rumors in the news that Eduardo was secretly renting an
expensive apartment in Manhattan. People think Kwang was bankrolling him, but
they don’t know why. When Henry tries to broach the subject, Kwang gets angry,
and their conversation devolves into an argument in which Kwang shouts at
Henry. Henry backs down, and then Kwang declares that they’re going out
together.
It's almost four in the morning when Kwang tells Henry to
drive him into the city. They stop to pick up Sherrie, Kwang’s PR coordinator. They then go
to a Korean after-hours club where the waitresses shower the (mostly male)
clientele with flirtation and physical affection. Henry can tell that Kwang and
Sherrie have been here together before; they’re clearly having an affair. Once
inside a private room, Kwang tries to pair Henry off with the waitress.
Noticing that Henry is very uncomfortable, Sherrie decides to leave—but the
door is locked. Kwang jumps up and physically restrains her, so Henry defends
her by tackling Kwang. Sherrie slips out of the room, and then Kwang turns his
rage on Henry. He’s quite drunk, and he claims that everyone is against him.
Even Eduardo was against him, he says, explaining that Eduardo was stealing
information. When Kwang found out, he says, he hired a Korean gang to take care
of the matter, though he claims he didn’t know they’d bomb the headquarters.
Henry is speechless and leaves as Kwang sits back for a lap-dance from the
waitress.
Around this time, Jack meets Henry in a diner and urges
him to give Hoagland information. One of the duties Henry took over from
Eduardo is organizing Kwang’s “money club,” which Kwang has styled after the
traditional Korean ggeh to
empower his community of immigrants. Henry is in charge of keeping track of all
the people who contribute to the ggeh, and now Jack tells him that Hoagland wants a copy of the list
of names. After some hesitation, Jack delivers the list.
Kwang is arrested the following day. Kwang returned to
the club the previous night, got drunk, and crashed his car while driving with
one of the waitresses, a 16-year-old Korean girl. His entire political team is
thrown into chaos, but not just because of the scandal—there’s also a report
that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has gotten its hands on a list
of people participating in Kwang’s “money club.” Most of the people in the club
are undocumented immigrants, and by the time Henry is watching the news broadcast,
the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service reports that they
have all been arrested and will be deported. Henry is devastated. He feels as
if he has betrayed his own people, and he refuses to ever work for Hoagland
again. He now knows Eduardo was another of Hoagland’s operatives.
Henry quits his job and spends his days walking through
Queens. He sometimes passes by Kwang’s old house. Kwang himself has moved back
to Korea with his family, but Henry still thinks about him. Otherwise, he spends
time with Lelia and helps her in her job as an ESL teacher, going into
classrooms and helping children work on their pronunciation—an activity that at
least makes him feel like he’s helping the immigrant community instead of
hurting it.
Character Analysis
Henry Park
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Henry
is a Korean American man living in New York City. The novel’s narrator, he
works as a spy for Glimmer & Company, a company that gathers information
about people for anonymous clients. Most of the people Henry spies on are
wealthy immigrants with ties to revolutionary groups in their home countries,
but he generally tries not to think about how the information he gathers will
be used. Instead, he focuses on inhabiting his invented backstory, which is
normally easy for him because he’s used to fitting into his surroundings; he
feels particularly well-suited to this role because of his multicultural
identity, which has taught him how to manage multiple modes of
self-presentation. However, his job also requires a lot of secrecy, which puts
a strain on his relationship with his wife, Lelia. To add to this strain, Henry
and Lelia already have a fair amount of tension in their relationship because
of their different ways of responding to their son’s death. Their son, Mitt,
died at the age of seven, and while Lelia wants to talk about her grief, Henry
remains mostly silent about his feelings and simply wants to move on. Feeling
alone with her sorrow, Lelia leaves him to be on her own for a while. Around
the time she comes back, Henry starts a new assignment as an intern at the
political headquarters of a city councilman named John Kwang.
Like Henry, Kwang is Korean American, and Henry can’t help but identify with
him—Kwang even reminds him of his father.
Although Henry has spent the majority of his life cultivating the American
aspects of his cultural identity, he now gets in touch with his Korean cultural
values, admiring Kwang’s ability to put those values to use as a prominent
public figure. As he works with Kwang, he repairs his relationship with Lelia
by opening up about his feelings. In turn, he gradually transforms throughout
the book from a secretive, guarded spy to someone who’s more open and who wants
to empower his fellow immigrants instead of conspiring against them.
Lelia
Lelia is Henry’s wife. Originally from Massachusetts, she
works as a speech specialist who helps people learn English and improve their
pronunciation. When she first meets Henry at a party in Texas, she tells him
that she can tell he’s not a “native speaker”—not because he has an accent, but
because he looks very concentrated when he’s speaking, as if he’s carefully
listening to himself to make sure he doesn’t make any mistakes. They end up
getting married and having a little boy named Mitt, who dies in a freak accident at the age of
seven. The tragedy puts an enormous strain on Lelia’s relationship with Henry,
mostly because his stoic way of dealing with his grief makes her feel like she
has to handle her sorrow all by herself. She doesn’t want to just move on from
their son’s death; in fact, she doesn’t even feel capable of
doing such a thing, since merely listening to tape recordings of his voice
makes it impossible for her to even move for days at a time. Henry, on the
other hand, silently wrestles with his sadness while telling everyone that both
he and Lelia are doing fine. His unwillingness to talk about his emotions
aligns with the fact that he has to keep so many secrets about his job. Lelia
knows that he is some kind of spy, but he will never tell her any details. In
short, she feels cut out from his life, so she leaves him and travels to Italy
for several months, where she has an affair before returning to New York City
and living with one of her and Henry’s friends. Gradually, however, Henry
starts to open up to her more and more, and this makes it possible for them to
repair their relationship. By the end of the novel, Lelia feels less alone with
her grief, even if the tragedy of Mitt’s death still weighs heavily on her.
Henry’s Father
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Henry’s
father was a Korean immigrant who came to the United States with his wife and
son (Henry), settling in New York City and opening a grocery store. A
disciplined man of few words, he was a hard worker who earned a master’s degree
from one of the most respected schools in Korea. When he came to the United
States, though, he essentially started over, working long hours to become the
successful owner of multiple grocery stores throughout the city. He never
talked about work at home, and his wife never asked him about his day. When
Henry started asking about his father’s job one evening, his mother pulled
him aside and told him not to talk about the grocery stores, explaining that
such talk was beneath his father—after all, he had graduated from a highly
respected institution in Korea and was only working as a grocer to give Henry a
better life; instead of making him talk about the stores, then, Henry should
simply keep his father company during his few hours of relaxation. Later,
Henry’s mother died when he was only 11, but his father didn’t spend much time
mourning their loss—instead, he announced that he and Henry would be moving to
a wealthy suburban neighborhood north of the city. Henry hated the idea of
this, but his father didn’t care: he thought it was what was best for Henry.
Plus, moving into a bigger house in the suburbs was his image of what it meant
to succeed in the United States. Not long after they moved, his father hired a
young Korean woman—whom he and Henry called Ahjuhma—to care for the house, and
though he never showed any feelings for her when Henry was still a child, Henry
realized when he was in college that his father and Ahjuhma had become
companions and romantic partners. He died shortly after Mitt,
but Henry thinks about him often, especially because John Kwang reminds
him of the old man.
John KwangCharacter Analysis
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John
Kwang is a Korean American city councilman in New York City. Henry is
assigned to infiltrate his political organization and gather whatever
information he can about Kwang, but he ends up identifying with the councilman
and developing an admiration for him. Much like Henry’s father,
Kwang is a self-made immigrant from Korea who has managed to become successful
in the United States. He’s charismatic and is able to make people feel seen and
understood, which is why he’s able to unite a diverse group of constituents
throughout his home borough of Queens. But he also faces political obstacles.
The current mayor of New York City, Mayor De Roos, is
threatened by him and criticizes him often, since it’s rumored that Kwang might
run for mayor. The more Henry gets to know Kwang, the more he connects with him
about their shared Korean cultural values. He sees Kwang as an elder worthy of
respect. but Kwang frequently transcends this dynamic by inviting Henry to
treat him like a peer, However, it’s always clear that Kwang holds the power in
the relationship—on the surface, that is. In reality, Henry’s the one who holds
the power because he’s a spy, which is apparently a dangerous position to be
in, considering that Kwang has Eduardo killed
after discovering that he’s a spy. After the bombing of his headquarters, Kwang
begins to spiral and lose hold of his power. He eventually gets arrested for
drunk driving and crashing his car on the way home from a Korean after-hours
club with an underaged waitress (who is possibly a sex worker). Around this
time, Henry steals a list of participants in a “money club” (or ggeh) that Kwang has organized, and
that list is eventually used against Kwang and his supporters, as the
government rounds up the many undocumented immigrants who participate in the
“money club.” Even though Kwang was just trying to empower the immigrant
community, then, American society villainizes him, and Henry deeply regrets the
role he has played in the councilman’s undoing.
Eduardo
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Eduardo
is a young Latino man who works for John Kwang.
When Henry first meets him, he’s told that Eduardo is a college student
studying political science and helping Kwang’s organization when he’s not
studying. He strikes Henry as a very devoted volunteer, though he also looks
older than his purported age of 23. Kwang, for his part, is very fond of
Eduardo and lets him handle the “money club” (or ggeh) that he has established to
help financially empower his constituents. After discovering that Eduardo is
actually a spy, though, Kwang hires a Korean gang to handle the situation, and
the gang bombs the Kwang headquarters while Eduardo is working late one night.
Eduardo dies in the blast, attracting controversy and media attention to
Kwang’s entire political operation. At first, Henry doesn’t know why Eduardo
was killed and fears that his own company, Glimmer & Company, had something
to do with it. But Kwang eventually tells him the truth while drinking one
night, and Henry realizes that Eduardo must have been working for Glimmer &
Company, too—perhaps to make sure Henry didn’t mess up the Kwang assignment.
Jack
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Jack
is a Greek immigrant who works alongside Henry at
Glimmer & Company. He serves as something of a mentor for Henry, since he’s
been a spy for a very long time and is thus very knowledgeable about the trade.
In fact, he no longer works undercover like the rest of his colleagues, having
informed Dennis Hoagland that
he didn’t want to do so anymore. However, because Jack is such a valuable
asset, Hoagland has forced him to stay on as a consultant of sorts, asking him
to oversee the other operatives, all the while dangling the promise of full
retirement as a way of keeping Jack invested in the job. The reason Hoagland
sees Jack as so valuable is because of Jack’s past as an operative for the CIA
in Greece, where he was often in dangerous situations, meaning that he’s quite
experienced—and that he has seen and done some very violent things.
Nonetheless, Henry likes Jack and frequently asks him for relationship advice,
since Jack had a long, happy marriage until his wife died of cancer. Despite
their close relationship, though, it becomes increasingly clear over the course
of the novel that Jack will remain loyal to Hoagland by pressuring Henry to do
various things he doesn’t want to do. Jack doesn’t like making
things difficult for Henry in this way, but he’ll do seemingly anything to make
sure he’ll be able to retire soon. He thus pressures Henry into stealing the
list of people who contribute to John Kwang’s “money club,”
which is the vital information that Glimmer & Company has apparently been
hired to obtain.
Dennis Hoagland
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Dennis
Hoagland is Henry’s
boss at Glimmer & Company. He’s a control freak who claims to care about
his employees’ well-being but, in reality, only cares about them insofar as
they’re able to successfully complete their assignments. For instance, he
frequently calls to check up on Henry in the period after Lelia leaves him to be on her
own, but Henry can tell that Hoagland doesn’t legitimately care about Henry’s
emotional state—he just wants to make sure he’ll be able to complete his next
assignment. To that end, Hoagland frequently sends Jack to
check on Henry’s progress as he works to gather information about John Kwang.
When Henry has trouble transmitting sensitive information about Kwang, Hoagland
senses his hesitation and sends Jack to put some pressure on him. On the whole,
both Henry and Lelia see Hoagland as an unpredictable, somewhat dangerous
person, which is why Henry doesn’t simply quit his job in the middle of the
Kwang assignment: there is, after all, no saying what Hoagland might do to him
if he were to do this.
Emile Luzan
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Emile
Luzan is a Filipino immigrant living in New York City and practicing as a
therapist. Because he supports a controversial cause in the Philippines,
Glimmer & Company has been hired to scrounge up information about
him. Henry is
assigned to learn more about Luzan by posing as one of his clients, and though
Henry is normally good at sticking to his invented backstory, he finds himself
unable to stop talking about his real life
in his therapy sessions with Luzan. There’s a kindness and openness to Luzan
that makes Henry want to be honest with him—there’s also the fact that Henry is
still mourning the death of his son. Plus, he goes to Luzan while Lelia is abroad, so he’s lonely
has a lot on his mind. Eventually, it becomes clear that Henry has lost sight
of his assignment. He goes to Luzan for a final session and plans to tell him
to be careful, wanting to say that Luzan should be cautious about traveling and
when he’s around strangers. But when Henry steps out of Luzan’s office for a
drink of water right before telling him this, he finds Jack and
another colleague, who physically force him to leave the building. Shortly
thereafter, Luzan dies in an alleged accident while traveling, and Henry
gathers that he was killed for political reasons—perhaps by the very same
people who hired Glimmer & Company to spy on him.
Ahjuhma/The
Woman
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Ahjuhma
is a young Korean woman who moves to the United States when Henry’s father hires
her to work as a housekeeper in the wake of Henry’s mother’s
death. Henry doesn’t
know much about her, since she seems to spend the vast majority of her time in
the kitchen. When he comes home from college, though, he realizes that Ahjuhma
and his father have developed a close relationship and sometimes sleep
together, though their bond has more to do with companionship than romance.
Later, Henry visits his father’s home every summer with Lelia and Mitt,
and Lelia takes an interest in Ahjuhma—whose real name isn’t actually
“Ahjuhma.” One night, Lelia asks Henry what her name is, and she’s appalled to
learn that he doesn’t know. She sees this as a sign that Henry doesn’t think
his father’s housekeeper is worthy of respect, but the real reason he doesn’t
know her name is that there would never be a context in the Korean language for
him to call her anything but “Ahjuhma,” which means “aunt” or “ma’am” and is
what Korean people call women who aren’t related to them. Ahjuhma’s presence in
the novel serves as a reminder of the differing cultural values between Korean
and American society.
Sherrie
Chin-Watt
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Sherrie
Chin-Watt is a Chinese American woman who runs PR for John Kwang’s
political organization. She’s married to a successful businessman, but he’s
seemingly always away on business, and she appears to have devoted herself to
Kwang’s campaign. As Henry gets
closer to Kwang, he realizes that the councilman is having an extramarital
affair with Sherrie, though Sherrie later distances herself from him when he
suddenly becomes engulfed in scandal.
Janice
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Janice
is a young white woman who works as John Kwang’s
schedule manager. She also handles responsibilities like scouting out the best
place for Kwang to make public appearances. She works closely with Eduardo and Henry,
training them to make sure that the cameras can always see Kwang when he
appears in public. Out of all Kwang’s supporters, volunteers, and employees,
Janice is perhaps the most dedicated to Kwang’s burgeoning political movement,
as evidenced by the fact that only she and Henry stick around once he’s
surrounded by scandal and negative media attention.
Mayor De Roos
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Mayor
De Roos is the mayor of New York City and one of John Kwang’s
political opponents. De Roos is actually a Democrat just like Kwang, and he
even helped the councilman at the beginning of his (Kwang’s) career. Now,
though, he’s worried that Kwang will run for mayor, so he subtly criticizes him
in the media. His main tactic is to imply that Kwang uses illegitimate tactics
to organize the immigrant community, accusing him of paying people to support
him.
Pete
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Pete
is one of Henry’s
coworkers at Glimmer & Company. At the end of his time with John Kwang,
Henry gives Pete and their other coworker, Grace, a
list of everyone who has contributed to Kwang’s “money club.”
The list ends up being used to identify and deport undocumented immigrants.
Mitt
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Mitt
was Henry and Lelia’s son, who died in a tragic
accident at a birthday party when he was seven years old. His death puts an
enormous strain on Henry and Lelia’s relationship, and it isn’t until Henry
finally opens up about his own grief that they’re able to mend the tension
between them.
Henry’s Mother
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Henry’s
mother was a Korean woman who immigrated to the United States with Henry’s father.
She died when Henry was
just 11 years old, and he didn’t have time to mourn her death: his father
quickly moved on with life and made it clear that he and his son shouldn’t
dwell in sorrow.
Symbol
analysis
The Ggeh (The “Money
Club”)
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In Native Speaker,
the concept of a ggeh, or a Korean “money
club,” symbolizes the power that can arise when community members come together
and support each other. Henry’s father, for instance, is able to open his
first grocery store because he belongs to a small ggeh,
to which he and other Korean men contribute money on a rolling basis with the
knowledge that—at some point—they will receive a large amount for themselves.
This system enables Henry’s father and his fellow Korean immigrants to fund
their business ventures and become successful in the United States—something
they might not have been able to do without the communal approach to funding.
As somebody who understands how powerful and productive
it can be to unite a community in this way, John Kwang establishes a large-scale ggeh for any of his constituents who want to
participate, thus bringing the Korean tradition to other racial and ethnic
groups living in Queens. At first, it works quite well, giving his constituents
something resembling financial stability in times of need. However, the ggeh soon attracts suspicion from the government,
which disapproves of the concept because it doesn’t report earnings to the tax
authorities. Through Glimmer & Company (and, in turn, through Henry), the Immigration and Naturalization
Service ends up obtaining the list of people who belong to the ggeh, and it uses this list as a way of identifying
and deporting undocumented immigrants. The ggeh therefore
comes to represent not just the power of unity and communal support, but also
the unfortunate fact that Americans in positions of power are often deeply
suspicious of foreign practices and traditions that empower new Americans.
