Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Native Speaker, author Chang-rae Lee introduces readers to Henry Park. Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American—a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away.

 

Park's harsh Korean upbringing has taught him to hide his emotions, to remember everything he learns, and most of all to feel an overwhelming sense of alienation. In other words, it has shaped him as a natural spy.

 

But the very attributes that help him to excel in his profession put a strain on his marriage to his American wife and stand in the way of his coming to terms with his young son's death. When he is assigned to spy on a rising Korean-American politician, his very identity is tested, and he must figure out who he is amid not only the conflicts within himself but also within the ethnic and political tensions of the New York City streets.

 

 

 

Native Speaker is a story of cultural alienation. It is about fathers and sons, about the desire to connect with the world rather than stand apart from it, about loyalty and betrayal, about the alien in all of us and who we finally are.

 

 

 

"A novel of extraordinary beauty and pain…nothing less than brilliant." —Frederick Busch

 

one of the year's most provocative and deeply felt first novels...a searing portrait of the immigrant experience."—Vanity Fair

 

"With echoes of Ralph Ellison, Chang-rae Lee's extraordinary debut speaks for another kind of invisible man: the Asian immigrant in America...a revelatory work of fiction."—Vogue

 

"The prose Lee writes is elliptical, riddling, poetic, often beautifully made."—The New Yorker

 

"Deft, delicate...The book's narrative is lyrical, its plot compelling...The novel's interwoven plots and themes, its slew of singular characters, and Henry's ongoing recollections and reflections are rich and enticing."—Boston Globe

 

"A tender meditation on love, loss, and family."—The New York Times Book Review

 

 

 

PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel
Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award
QPB New Visions Award
American Book Award
Oregon Book Award
PEN/West Translation Award: Finalist
ALA Notable Book
Granta Award: Finalist

 

 

 

 

Korean American Henry Park is "surreptitious, B+ student of life, illegal alien, emotional alien, Yellow peril: neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy…" or so says his wife, in the list she writes upon leaving him. Henry is forever uncertain of his place, a perpetual outsider looking at American culture from a distance. And now, a man of two worlds, he is beginning to fear that he has betrayed both—and belongs to neither.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, QPB's New Voices Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and the Oregon Book Award. It was also an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for a PEN West Award, and Lee was named a finalist for Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40 Award. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and numerous anthologies. He lives in New Jersey, and is the director of the MFA program at Hunter College in New York City.

 

 

 

 

 

 

YALE Bulletin&Calendar 

April 14, 2000          Volume 28, Number 28  

 

 

 

 

Writer Chang-rae Lee was featured at a book reading and an Ezra Stiles College master's tea,

where he gave advice to the aspiring writers in his audience and signed copies of his novels

"Native Speaker" and "A Gesture Life."

 

 

 

 

 

Award-winning novelist discusses
the art of writing and reading

 

 

 

 

Novelist Chang-rae Lee knew he wanted to be a writer the moment he finished reading James Joyce's "The Dead."

The author of the award-winning novel "Native Speaker" remembers reading the short story when he was 11 years old and thinking, "Wow, I think I know what art is. This is art." His aim as a writer has been to "approximate the feeling" he had at that moment for his readers.

Lee, a 1987 graduate of Yale College, returned to campus on April 5 and 6 to read from his latest novel "A Gesture Life" and to answer questions about the art of writing at a tea in the Ezra Stiles College master's house.

 

In addition to Joyce, Lee counts among his favorite authors Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and William Styron -- writers who are "conscious of their own language," he said. Reading their work, explained Lee, you get the "feeling that they're handwriting it out, that every word has texture and contour."

 

Lee went on to describe his favorite writing as that which he "can hardly bear to get through because it's almost a physical thing." This visceral response is what Lee hopes to elicit from his readers.

 

"I've always felt that if I could write something that you as a reader can hardly bear to read because it's so true or so real or so essential in some way, then that's good," said Lee.

 

Although he wanted to be a writer from an early age, Lee never thought he could make a career out of it. After college, he headed to Wall Street and a career in finance. When the nephew of Hollywood film director Joseph Mankiewicz relayed some advice from his famous uncle -- "jobs are for suckers" -- Lee thought to himself, "I should just do what I want to do."

 

He left his job after a year and enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon where he wrote "Native Speaker" as his thesis. The book, about a second-generation Korean who works as a privately employed spy and at home deals with a shaky marriage and the death of his young son, won the PEN/Hemingway and the American Book Awards.

 

Lee confessed to being a writer who is "obsessed" and "focused on language," working on a sentence "five, six or a dozen times" until it's perfect before moving on. He admitted that "it's a stupid way of writing; it's absolutely not the recommended method." Writing this way has even forced Lee to throw out whole books as a result.

 

"For me, the unit of measure is the sentence, and I really can't change it sentence by sentence," he explained. "You spend so much time on that sentence. How can you extract it or make it do something different?"

Lee, who is the director of the writing program at Hunter College in New York City, had some words of advice for the aspiring writers in the audience. He emphasized that the most important thing for new writers is "to figure out your own voice." According to Lee, all stories have been told before, but "it's in the telling of it that makes a writer special."

 

Lee went on to note that a good writer is a good reader first. He urged writers not only to read but to re-read what they love and ask themselves, "Why do I love this particular language? Why do I love this particular style of writing?" Re-reading can also remind a writer of what is important, said Lee, who reads Joyce's short story collection "Dubliners" every year to remind himself of that first feeling he had when he read "The Dead."

 

-- By JinAh Lee

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Visions of me in the whitest raw light": Assimilation and Doxic Whiteness in
Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker

Tim Engles
Department of English, Eastern Illinois University

 

 

In Chang-rae Lee's first novel, Native Speaker, the protagonist is jolted by the death of his son and the subsequent departure of his wife into intensification of a lifelong identity crisis. The book's guiding metaphor, figured in Henry Park's job as a spy, cleverly elucidates the immigrant's stance as a watchful outsider in American society, but Henry's double life also figures largely in his equally representative struggles to decide for himself what kind of person he is. As a child of immigrant parents, Henry is, in Pierre Bourdieu's useful terms, endowed with a bifurcated "habitus," two sets of culturally induced predispositions. By novel's end Henry has achieved an implicit resolution of his crisis, largely by identifying certain of his own habitual patterns of thought and behavior as cultural inheritances from his immigrant Korean parents, then rejecting them.

 

As with many works in which central characters move throughout the story toward new conceptions of their own identities, it is tempting to read Henry's self-recognition as something he attains on his own by critiquing his conception of himself from some neutral space outside its borders. As Henry puts it in an aside on his work, he chose the field of spying because it seemed "the perfect vocation for the person I was, someone who could reside in one place and take half steps out whenever he wished [. . .] I thought I had finally found my truest place in the culture" (127). However, while Henry does make a determined effort throughout his account to come to terms with his own identity, his outward movements toward a seemingly objective, private perspective are indeed but "half-steps." As I will argue throughout this paper, while Henry does register at times the recognition that he can never be fully objective about the effects Korean culture has had on him, he seems oblivious to the effects middle-class white culture has had on him. Immersed as every American is in a sea of undeclared whiteness, Henry reveals that he has tended to adopt unwittingly a middle-class white perspective on himself, a tendency only heightened by his marriage to a white woman, Lelia.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cftde/hcmns.html

http://www.yale.edu/opa/arc-ybc/v28.n28/story10.html

http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/native_speaker.html