Updated, 6:30 p.m. | Our live conversation about Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel of immigration and New York City politics, “Native Speaker,†is now underway. Post your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.
“Native Speaker†examines the uneasy assimilation of a young Korean-American, Henry Park, against the backdrop of a culturally diverse New York whose identity politics are becoming more fragmented. Henry’s means of income serve as a metaphor â€" and an arguably heavy one â€" for his own sense of self-fracture. He is a man with a complicated set of allegiances, to a mythic America, to a largely unknown Korea, to working-class beginnings and suburban affluence. Henry works in a field where he is required to wear many masks, as a spy in a corporate espionage firm that keeps its eye on foreign dissidents, agitators and the intensely ambitious.
The central target Henry is after in the book belongs to that final category: an Americanized (down to his J. Press clothes) Korean-American city councilman with mayoral aspirations who winds up scandalized. The politician, John Kwang, has the ease that Henry’s own father, with his broken English, never mastered despite ascending the class ranks, building a chain of Korean groceries and ultimately moving his family from Flushing to the hedges-and-stonework world of Ardsley in Westchester County.
Henry harbors ambivalence about his family’s trajectory, but in a sense that is a lot less interesting than the certainty with which the move to the upper middle class is rendered. “Native Speaker†has an early ’90s optimism about economic opportunity for immigrants in New York: the idea that great success will follow any effort to work hard. The good fortune Henry’s father experiences is a given.
But how true is that anymore (if it ever was) in a city where inequality has been rising sharply? How many second-generation Americans have the luxury of ennui? Of discomfort about leaving cramped apartments for thousands of suburban square feet?
At a level of emotion, I found the book very moving but I do question and would like to discuss the narrative necessity of having had Henry’s son Mitt die (in a way that is never sufficiently explained). Is ethnic suburban affluence itself murderous?
Let me know what you think, or what else about the book engaged your interest, in the comments below.
