Native Speaker

Kwang and Henry both must be many different people all at once. That both men develop several identities to be a part of the world is indicative of their roles as Asian Americans and signifies what connects them to one another intuitively. Henry is a good spy because he has a lifetime of practice being different people. As a child, he played the dutiful Korean son at home and the white-proximate American at school. With his wife Lelia, he is secretive and unexpressive, but inwardly he is full of deep emotions and intellectual connections. Henry got his job as a spy because Dennis was able to see this in him and take advantage of it. Similarly, Kwang balances many roles: politician, husband, arbiter of power, manager of lives. Kwang’s roles are also in response to the expectations of white America. As a member of a minority community, Kwang must both be reverential to white power while advocating against minority injustices. Both Kwang and Henry’s well beings are diluted by this role play. Henry notices that Kwang has lost strength. One man can’t take on so many roles and burdens. Henry sees that same quality in himself, which is why he still roots for Kwang even as he discovers the shadier dealings Kwang is in charge of. Ultimately, both men are doomed to disappoint themselves and the people who rely on them. Far from being a character flaw, Lee highlights these characteristics as a criticism of American ideas of assimilation and model minority myths. Kwang and Henry are products of their environment and society. They are people who have internalized what white America expects of them and who destroy themselves seeking that approval.

Unlike Kwang, Henry does not succumb to white America’s expectations. Henry is the fulfillment of certain Asian American stereotypes, but he is also the antithesis to these stereotypes. His role as a spy is a subversion of certain minority norms, but he can only be a subversion because he is so close to the conflicts inherent in immigrant and ethnic American communities. This further symbolizes a broken America. Henry has only accomplished everything his father and his adopted country wanted from him: A strong work ethic, emotional displacement, sacrifice, and screwing over someone less powerful to raise his own status. Henry finally discovers that taking on both the stereotypes and the subversiveness of his job has degraded his sense of self. He is no longer part of the immigrant or Korean communities because he is actively working to betray them. Nor is he part of the elite white community he works for, because he is too much of an Other. Living between both worlds, Henry realizes that neither side will accept him. This is Kwang’s problem as well. If he operates Queens the way his Korean community raised him to, he practices a type of business widely misunderstood by powerful white institutions. If he adopts the tactics of powerful white institutions, he rejects his own community. The reality is that Kwang would never have had a successful run for mayor of New York City because society is not prepared to place power in the hands of a man torn between different tribes.

In these chapters, Kwang's many dark sides are revealed. While externally he is seen as a charming, intelligent, and capable politician, in his private life he keeps many deplorable secrets. Kwang has a hidden violent streak. Away from the public eye, he hits women, cheats on his wife, flexes his power over weaker people, and is instrumental in killing Eduardo out of vengeance. It is implied that Jack and Dennis know this about Kwang but give Henry the opportunity to find it out for himself. Though Dennis and Jack may not have known all of the details of Kwang’s dark life, it is certain that no one would hire their firm to find out intel on a man who is wholly good. This has always been Henry’s mistake. He wanted Kwang to be unimpeachable because of what Kwang meant to him. Kwang represented a possible new era for people who look like Henry. His power, wealth, and popularity proved to Henry that people could respect and like a Korean American. When Henry discovers Kwang’s dark secrets, he loses respect for him, which propels Henry on the final leg of his journey towards self-respect. Henry can’t rely on a persona like Kwang to change society for him. Instead, Henry must live his life respecting himself and extending compassion to others. Kwang is not the miracle fix that Henry didn’t know he always wanted. Kwang is, unfortunately, a fallible human being like everyone else.

Henry doesn’t fault Kwang for employing undocumented workers, though the media does. Henry knows this part of Kwang’s life well; that there simply isn’t time or importance placed in figuring out how to make everything above-board. In America, time is money and money is power. Kwang knows this well and works for power and the wellbeing of his community without ensuring that everything is legal. This is part of the reality of the immigrant experience, but it is an experience that too many Americans are ignorant of or careless about. The victims of this conflict haunt Henry. Ji-yun, the sixteen-year-old waitress at the Korean bar who is put into a coma after a drunken car ride with Kwang is a victim of the same institutionalized bigotry that have harmed, but not victimized, Henry. Ji-yun is a sacrifice Lee uses to show his reader that there are detrimental human consequences when society turns away from people who need help, who only hope to achieve stability. The unknowability of Ji-yun is important. She does not speak. She is ordered around by Kwang, then forced to follow along with him. She ends up in a coma, unable even to defend herself or give her identity to the authorities. Ji-yun parallels the character of the housekeeper Henry grew up with. Here, Lee makes a commentary about intersectional identity. Though Asian Americans as a whole are oppressed by structures of white imperialistic power, women in particular are victims of intersectional prejudice. Men like Henry and Kwang can at least attempt to gain and flex power. But the Asian American women in this novel are largely silenced, a symbol of the failures of empathy between immigrants under the same oppressive systems.

In this novel, Lee references a major event in the Asian American immigrant community. In 1993, an old cargo ship called The Golden Venture ran aground near the shores of New York City. In the cargo ship were over 200 Chinese immigrants, all of whom were entering America illegally. They had paid a powerful figure in the New York Chinese community, Sister Ping, to smuggle them into the United States. But the Golden Venture was an old and overloaded ship. Ten people drowned fleeing the scene, and the rest were rounded up by authorities. The story of the Golden Venture exposed the danger of achieving the American Dream. Human beings had no choice but to leave their lives in the hands of people who cared only for the money they were earning through manipulation and strong-handing hopeful immigrants. That the over 200 people aboard the Golden Venture would risk their lives for a chance at the American Dream highlights the power of the American Dream, but the failure of the Golden Venture reveals the fallacy of that American Dream. Allusions to this event, as well as the arrests of the undocumented Americans working for Kwang’s operation and businesses, moves Henry. The plight of the undocumented American helps Henry better appreciate his own standing. His situation is imperfect and is riddled by racism. But he is, in many regards, safe. He lives the life that people on the Golden Venture sacrificed their lives for.

Henry learns a valuable lesson about the limitations of our dreams and our inability to appreciate what we have. Kwang also learns this lesson, albeit in more extreme terms. In this novel, Kwang is an Icarus, a man who flies too close to the sun. Like Icarus, Kwang grows too confident in his environment. Fueled by the American Dream, he believes he is unstoppable, and, like Icarus, he burns up. In watching Kwang’s downfall, Henry loses hope for the Asian American community, but he gains a new outlook for his own life. The pressures placed on Kwang to represent the Asian American community mean that his failures are shared by the wider Asian American community, whether this is fair or not. Henry sees Kwang’s failure as his own. Lee is sympathetic to these characters; he points the blame to the society that raised Henry and Kwang to believe that only hubris, ambition, and merciless drive would elevate their status to become “real” Americans.

Despite the many chapters that contain overwhelming tension and conflict (both external and internal), Lee shifts the tone at the end of the novel to hope. Henry discovers the beauty of diversity in New York City. He has spent decades internalizing self-hatred and projecting his own shame of being a non-native English speaker onto other immigrants. But he discovers that there is something unique, admirable, and celebratory behind their different accents. He misses his father, who feared his son would adopt his accent. He mourns the loss of people like Ji-yun, who didn’t have his opportunities and privileges even though they deserved them. He wanders through New York, impressed by its vastness, its cosmopolitanism, and its myriad groups of people. Henry realizes that he has been in the home where he belonged the whole time. Though it is implied that there are more challenges ahead for him and Lelia, Henry has a second chance at happiness and the power of experience to mend his life by starting with his own self-esteem.