The Blindness of Native Speaker

III. The Social Blindness of Lee’s Native Speaker

Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker is regarded as a “spy novel.” Yet, as literary critic Tina Chen points out “Henry is at pains to distance himself from the spy hero”. It takes Lee’s protagonist Henry Park 17 pages to say that, “in a phrase, we were spies.” Even then, Park has to qualify the term. He’s not the spy “you naturally thought or even hoped existed.” He’s not a patriot. His corporation “pledged allegienace to no government.” Most of all, he is an anti-hero. He knows nothing of “weaponry, torture, psychological warfare, extortion, electronics, supercomputers, explosives.”

Lee’s protagonist prefers invisibility and acting as someone he is not. Even some of the least heroic detectives, such as Jake Gittes from Chinatown, were paid to watch someone due to the belief that they had perpetrated some sort of crime. Park spies for no other reason than because he is paid to. The reason Henry is paid to spy on Korean-American political candidate John Kwang is unknown even to him. Although Henry continues to grow closer to John Kwang, the object of observation for most of the novel, he goes off the fear of repeating his experience with Luzan, a psychoanalyst that, although Henry spied on at length, never ended up knowing any incriminating information. Yet, his observations does not enfranchise Park with power. Instead, after Park learns of Kwang’s most dramatic misdeeds, he is left with violence, assaulting Kwang in a mob of other faceless, nameless, nearly invisible people. Yet, this facet of the plot, despite taking up what is presumably the focus of the novel and the climax that the spy genre demands, only presents a superficial response to the emotional stakes underpinning the novel and does more to mask the psychological conflict than to clarify it. The emotional conflict introduced earlier on does not revolve around the spy genre elements, but instead around coping with the death of Henry’s son, Mitt, reconciling himself with his wife, Lelia, and understanding his role as a partially invisible American subject. These conflicts, Lee does not, and perhaps can not, completely resolve.

Perhaps the strongest microcosm for the relationship between visibility, invisibility, and ontological secrecy was not necessarilly intended by Lee, that being the role of the title of Park’s spy company. When Park first introduces the name, he admits that his company worked, “under the name of Glimmer & Co.” implying that “Glimmer & Co.” was in fact a false name they used for those they didn’t want questioning their presence in the office building they inhabit. Yet, having never given another name for the company, when Park must continuously address the corporation he works for, it becomes unequivocally the name of the company. When Henry describes his reports to Hoagland, he claims that, “it was likely that Glimmer & Company itself was involved in the manufacturing of happenings.” With the need for repetition and reproduction, the false title describing the company becomes its actual title in the novel. Secret or invisible titles mirror the titles individuals give themselves, titles that, as Henry emphasizes, are self-given. In example, when Henry believes he is penetrating deeper into John Kwang’s identity, Henry “believed I [Henry] had a grasp of his [John Kwang’s] identity, not only the many things he was to the public and to his family… but who he was to himself, the man he beheld in his own private mirror.” Yet, when secret identities are not performed, repeated, or reconstructed, they allow the visible, or the public identity to become the identity that is performed or categorized even when described in the space of a man’s interior mind, as we are given in Park’s reproduction of the text. In doing so, it allows what one regards as their real identity to become hidden even from themselves, or obliterated altogether.

The problem of naming and describing phenomenon takes center stage in the conflict Park has with his wife in describing the source of their son’s death. Lelia, Henry’s wife, thinks that they caused the death of their son through some sort of metaphysical crime:

“Maybe you’ve talked all this time with Jack about him, maybe you say his name in your sleep, but we’ve never really talked about it, we haven’t really come right out together and said it, really named what happened for what it was.”
“What was it?” I said softly.
“It was the worst thing that ever happened to us… the worst thing we ever did together.”
“It was a terrible accident.”
“An accident?” she cried. “…can’t you see, when your baby dies it’s never an accident… Sometimes I think it’s more like some long turning karma that finally came back for us.” [italics mine]

Racism, like conspiracy, is something that one cannot pin down. Racism lacks a body. Henry’s deferral of the question of who killed his son masks the fact that both of them know exactly who killed their son: white children, the same children whose parents Henry and Lelia confronted beforehand to discourage picking on him. Yet they cannot accuse the children, after all, as one white child keeps screaming, “It was just a stupid dog pile” [italics Lee’s]. As children, the murderers cannot be held accountable for their crime. Not only that, just like the woman who fills Park with rage after she calls him an “Oriental Jew” or the man that bumps into Ellison’s protagonist on the street, the subject charged with racism always lacks a name and lacks the very identity that the victim of racism accuses the racist of not respecting. Henry Park does not see the children who killed his son as having coherent identities and none of their parents are individually described. Yet, since Lelia and Henry are punished through the death of their son, there must be some agent perpetrating that punishment, taken up in Lelia’s abstract terms as “the world” or some other non-descript force. The problem Lelia and Henry face manifests itself as an ontological problem. They cannot name the actor that punishes them for the death of their son. Such is the case with all cases of violence that seems racially, but is in fact linguistically charged, throughout the novel.

Before the death of their son, Henry and Lelia’s central conflict arose over the problem of trying to call objects by their names. Once again, Lee hints at cultural or even racial differences. Conflict erupts between Park and his wife Lelia that Henry didn’t know the name of his father’s maid. As Park explains, “Americans live on a first-name basis. [Lelia] didn’t understand that there weren’t moments in our language—the rigorous, regimental one of family and servants—when the woman’s name could have naturally come out. Or why it wasn’t important.” Growing up in his father’s household, Park never heard his father speak the woman’s name—but then, he also never heard his father speak his mother’s name. The name they use for her, Ahjuma, is not a name, but is instead a form of address used for unrelated Korean women. This, the first of many conflicts between Park and his wife, erupts over Lelia’s desire to have Henry call Ahjuma by what Lelia regards as her real name. Or rather, the name she uses for herself. Although framed as a cultural or even racial difference between Korean-American culture and American culture, the problem manifests itself as a performative one.

Although Lee’s characters are hyphenated Americans, assuming that this facet was the largest determinant of their identity would mask the cause of Henry’s invisibility.
Henry became aware of his capacity for invisibility while working in his father’s stores. To spite his father, Henry speaks only Korean to the other workers in the store. In doing so, Henry “saw that if I just kept speaking the language of our work the customers didn’t seem to see me. I wasn’t there. They didn’t look at me… I could even catch a rich old woman whose tight stand of pearls pinched in the sags of her neck whispering to her friend right behind me, ‘Oriental Jews.’” Yet, unlike what Tina Chen or others might argue, this invisibility does not come from being Korean, but instead from speaking Korean. What gives Henry his symbolic invisibility, what causes people not to look at him, is the act of speaking another language.

Although some argue that the race of Native Speaker plays on the representations of Asian Americans in the spy genre, this only superficially encompasses the deconstruction Lee embarks on, or even masks it. Critic Tina Chen argues that, “the figure of the Asian American spy is itself a cultural convention. Stereotyped as sneaky and inscrutable, Asians and clandestinity have proven a particularly compelling combination” as a play on fictional Asian or Asian-American detective figures or villains from Charlie Chan to Dr. Fu Manchu. Yet Chang-rae Lee’s novel does not play on racial stereotypes of Korean-Americans unless the reader already has knowledge of those stereotypes. If the reader does, then it deconstructs those norms. When Park had to spend summers working in grocery stores with his father, he later finds out from his friends that they merely thought he was religious. They do not assume that because he is Korean that he works in a grocery store. Instead, Henry is more aware of the racial stereotypes, and how he falls into them, than the people he imagines would hold the stereotypes. Critic Anne Cheng argues that “the subject effects mimicry in order to lose, rather than save, itself and, in doing so, finds itself.” When Park pretends to be a non-English-speaking grocer, he is not being himself—but in doing so, he becomes aware that he is performing an identity, and becomes aware of what it means to to perform the identity of an English-speaking American. It is to know he holds the right to forsake the path of the immigrant he inherited.

Lee even seems to imply the attempt to latch on to a singular ethnic or political identity itself moves toward social invisibility. As an example, Lee opts for the case of John Kwang, his campaign, and its managers. The problem of becoming a hyphenated American does not occur in Kwang’s speeches, but instead of becoming wholly “American” he instead becomes wholly “Korean”. During Kwang’s meeting with “the black ministers,” in regard to the history of breakages in African-American communities, Kwang claims that, “We Koreans know something of this tragedy.” Kwang, as a political leader, avoids hyphens, but to address the problems of racial divide nevertheless opts to speak of different racial groups in non-hyphenated ways that emphasize difference rather than inclusion. Mirrored in Park’s narrative comes descriptions such as, “The crowd was much larger than we’d expected, an even mix of Koreans, blacks, Hispanics.” The choice not to capitalize “blacks,” despite perhaps being technically correct, nevertheless seems arbitrary. Further, the choice not to hyphenate any of them makes them seem as though, like Park himself, the people he address are not Americans—not patriots. To lose the hyphenation implies becoming, as Park is, a racial spy, a secret voyeur of American life. It is to, in Arendtian terms, do great violence to the American facet of racial minorities.

The structure of racial relations is further complicated by Janice, John Kwang’s Scheduling Manager. She claims that she “knows you Koreans” and as evidence says that she had Asian roommates in college at Berkeley. She, unlike Kwang, does not even reduce Park to a Korean. She reduces him to the even more vacuous term of “Asian,” and then later begins to oscillate between the two as though “Korean” and “Asian” were also synonymous. As their conversation progresses, she says that, “You [Henry] never really said anything about what you Koreans believe in” and she makes the synthesis that Henry, as a member of “you Koreans” also represents “you Koreans”. The ontological critique of racist reductions is that they imply that the category a member falls into represents an individual, and that an individual represents a category that includes other people as simultaneous equations. The enthymemes that might represent Janice’s remarks would be: Henry Park is a Korean therefore Henry Park represents all Koreans, and Henry Park is a Korean therefore all Koreans represent Henry Park. These two enthymemes both rely on the major premise that all Koreans are the same and interchangeable. When Janice defends her remarks against Henry’s criticisms that all of her friends were Asian, and that therefore he does not have the right to critique does not mean that her claims do not lead to the conclusion that all Asians are the same, instead her argument is that she has evidence for her claim, which is to say that after critically assessing her premise that all Asians are the same she came to a conclusion, with evidence, that they are. Henry, with his background being raised “to speak quietly and little,” although not afraid to gently poke fun at Janice’s absurd claims, nevertheless lacks the motivation to confront her masked racism. And yet, Janice is the planning manager for a man who seeks to represent the Korean-American community in New York. One might wonder if it was the views of Janice and others that really caused the downfall of John Kwang. After all, it was always the motive of Henry Park to “fuel the fire of [his object’s] most secret vanity” or so he claimed. Park, as a spy for Glimmer and Co., did not seek to confront Janice. In fact, he wanted to fan her racism. In her “most secret vanity,” she believed that she was justified in her own racial views, in her willingness to reduce people to categories.

Emphasizing the tropes of representation, however, in the case of John Kwang and his group nevertheless displaces the central conflict of the novel. The violence done to Henry’s son cannot be named. Although after abandoning his paid profession as a spy, Henry cannot completely reconcile himself with his wife. Instead, he is “always coming back inside. “We [Henry and Lelia] play this game in which I [Henry] am her long-term guest. Permanently visiting.” Instead of reconciling or resolving the conflict and space between them, the problem is eternally displaced by presenting the illusion of temporality. Even at the end, children must look at Henry’s face to make sure that his voice moves in time with his mouth. Finally, Henry’s body can be completely masked—he wears a green rubber hood in his role as the Speech Monster. One might argue that Henry embraces his invisibility, yet it nevertheless reflects the loss of power he has encountered throughout the novel. He has lost his well-paying job and put himself at the mercy of Lelia in terms of holding their home and his new job together. He abandons essentially all social relations except for his wife and his job with the children she teaches, and these do not seem to be meaningful relationships. The only catharsis Lee’s novel can offer comes through violence, through Park assaulting Kwang amidst a faceless mob. None of the emotional conflicts can be confronted, and instead of engaging with others more directly, Park instead distances himself even more dramatically from all his social friends, becoming alone except for Lelia, with whom he has an uncrossable and unspeakable distance. All is left displaced.