Book Review: Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

Literature-in-the-hyphen, with its characters who have culturally “hyphenated” identities, is now part of the mainstream American education curriculum, as well it should be. The best of such literature draws us in and offers us the opportunity to see the world with a culturally-distinct, binocular vision. The “-American” cultures that imbue these works with essential contextual nuance simultaneously serve as a stand-in for the overall American national cultural fabric. We are born into a culture that claims authority in the person of our family and we are propelled into a stereotype of a national culture that demands adoption.

Native Speaker’s first-person narrator, Henry Park, is the roughly-woven protagonist. The warp and woof of first-generation immigrants can initially produce a somewhat uneven intertwining. The threads of Park’s life tug against each other in ways that leave his blended fabric an awkward fit.

Park’s parents immigrated to the U.S. yet live within their more comfortable cultural community as Koreans first and as Korean-Americans second. His father’s strict adherence to the authoritarian ways of Korean families abrades Park’s developing mixed cultural identity. His resentment of his family’s preservation of Korean ways continues into Park’s adulthood when he feels the strain of his (attempted) adoption of American ways even more deeply. That contrast becomes more striking  with his marriage to an American-born white woman, Lelia. Their child, who has died before the story begins. The circumstances for this loss serve as a poignant trope for bigotry’s sometimes dire consequences. Lee sees that failure to support cultural and racial diversity causes serious rifts among its multicultural components-- rifts that are too often deadly. Henry and Lelia struggle in the wake of the loss of their much loved son. The question of whether their marriage has also died restates an ambivalence about cultural interweaving.  

Park-as-narrator is uncharacteristically open about his personality’s mismatch to the dominant American culture; his extreme reserve is ill-matched to the comparatively open and blunt styles of Americans (such as his wife). And while Park-as-narrator lays bare his wish, yet inability, to transform his personality to become more “American” (especially in his interpersonal relations), Park-as-character is an extraordinarily private man who operates in the dark shadows of a Korean (-American) underworld, working hard to reveal nothing about himself. He methodically adopts professional identities that serve his purpose, then discards them. But even in this, Park has great difficulty with the segregated dimensions of his identity. Again, there is danger-- even death-- if these distinct identities begin to integrate.

The integration of who we are is a challenge for all of us. As with all fine literature, Native Speaker speaks to this larger truth.