A Study Guide for Chang-Rae Lee's "Native Speaker"
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A Study Guide for Chang-Rae Lee's "Native Speaker" - Gale
13
Native Speaker
Chang-Rae Lee
1995
Introduction
Korean American author Chang-rae Lee vaulted onto the literary scene with his 1995 debut novel Native Speaker, a fictional memoir by a professional spy in his early thirties whose marriage is in jeopardy and whose latest assignment is the challenge of his career. Lee moved with his family from South Korea to New York City at the age of three, and his familiarity with the experience of fitting into American life as an unmistakable immigrant—one whose appearance and, especially, difficulty with the English language set him apart—is evident in the psychological nuances inherent in his protagonist. Henry Park begins narrating his story at the point when his Anglo-American wife, Lelia, has stepped back from their marriage by taking a solo vacation in the Mediterranean. She leaves behind a forthright list of qualities she perceives in her husband, including traitor
and the partly facetious Yellow peril: neo-American.
Henry proceeds to plumb his recollections of his now-deceased family members for perspective on the person he grew up as and the person he has become. He also delves into the implications of his work as a spy at an independent, non-violent American firm focusing on the surreptitious acquisition of information on immigrant targets. Henry is assigned, in particular, to Asian Americans—whose lives may be endangered by his espionage. While Henry plaintively seeks to salvage his marriage, he faces a professional crucible in his assignment to an up-and-coming, magnetically personable Korean American politician, John Kwang, who is navigating tensions in Korean and African American relations in 1990s Queens, New York City. The novel does include infrequent profanity and discreetly detailed scenes of a sexual nature between husband and wife. Native Speaker met with critical admiration and received several awards, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award.
Author Biography
Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, on July 29, 1965, to parents Young Yong and Inja Hong Lee. In 1968, his mother took his sister and him to join their father in New York, where he was then a psychiatric resident. They first lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Lee's father soon founded a practice in Westchester County. His mother, an assertive basketball star back in her South Korean high school, retreated inward in America, owing to the seemingly insurmountable language barrier. Lee's own immersion in the English-speaking world came with kindergarten in suburban New Rochelle, where the family had moved. He found himself so busy absorbing the sense of the language that he hardly spoke at all. His mother urged him to choose an American name, and after several weeks he settled on Chuck
; by then his friends already knew him as Chang-rae, and even he soon forgot his new name, so he kept his original name.
By the time he finished elementary school, Lee was the family's translator, though he sometimes scolded his mother for being unable to speak with the banker or shopkeeper by herself. In these situations, he felt both shame and hurt for his mother. Such feelings contributed to his eventual determination