“Native Speaker” by Chang-rae Lee (post 1): Since other Korean-American characters are not like protagonist, what is his problem?

Henry Park, second generation Korean-American, first-person narrator-protagonist, is married to Lelia, a white American woman. At the beginning of the novel, she describes him as “surreptitious…emotional alien,… sentimentalist, anti-romantic…stranger…spy” (1, p. 5). He is employed by a private American company to infiltrate organizations and write reports.

One hundred and twenty-one pages later, Lelia elaborates and Henry replies:

She says, “I realized one day that I didn’t know the first thing about what was going on inside your head. Sometimes I think you’re not even here, with the rest of us, you know, engaged, present. I don’t know anymore why you do things…I don’t know what you need in life. For example, do you need your job?”

He replies, “I’m not understanding what you mean by need.”

“See what I mean?…Maybe it’s a condition with you. I just know that you have parts to you that I can’t touch…

He says, “I tried to answer but I couldn’t. I wanted to explain myself, smartly, irrefutably. But once again I had nothing to offer. I had always thought that I could be anyone, perhaps several anyones at once” (1, pp. 126-127).

Comment

Multiple personality is a condition in which a person can be puzzling even to the people who know them best, because they have hidden “parts” (alternate personalities) and are “several anyones at once.” If that is Henry’s condition, it is unacknowledged, and I will be interested to see if it is clarified in the rest of the novel.

1. Chang-rae Lee. Native Speaker. New York, Riverhead/Penguin, 1995/1996.