The novel I am going to analyze is “Native Speaker” by Chang-rae Lee. It was written approximately at the period of Golden Venture and released in 1995. The novel contains a variant of the incident at the “Native Speaker’s” urgent change moment. “Native Speaker” depicts the growth and drop of a mayoral candidate who is racially indicated as an immigrant in the stormy political sphere of New York of the middle 1990s.
How would you feel being a spy? Can anyone answer this question? I believe one of the main characters of the novel “Native Speaker” by Chang-rae Lee, Henry gives a full explanation to the issue of the cost of being a spy. The theme of double life and different transformations is vividly described in this novel. The image of Henry reveals all the hardship of being a spy, of being an undercover agent. Henry had certain job to do, but as he failed his previous mission, he had a new one.
His work consisted of spying on Kwang, a Korean American business owner and the member of the city council who takes part in a constant campaign for municipal chairman in his strive to become segment of the political life of the city. Thus Henry has to live a double life, one person when he is with Kwang, as he is on a mission; and another person when he is with his wife, he tries to be honest with Lelia, but conceals some information from her just to avoid her being in danger.
The main Henry’s features are listed by his wife Lelia in the very beginning of the novel “superstitious, B+ student of life, first thing hummer of Wagner and Strauss, illegal alien, genre bug, Yellow peril: neo-American, great in bed, overrated, poppa’s boy, sentimentalist, anti-romantic, stranger, traitor, spy”(Ellington 128). The novel “Native Speaker” represents to the readers a character of Korean American male representative, Henry Park, who is destroyed by the English language, and who parallels his own introduction with the foreign one, as a domestication, if not feebleness.
For Henry Park, nevertheless, being populated by a foreign body snatcher is restricted as the advance of likening; of becoming a subject who is speaking in the sphere of American people (Lee 1).Asian America is represented in the novel as one ethnicity in a range of representatives of the American ethnicity then depicted as ‘spy’ territory. “As Henry Park plunges ever deeper into Kwang’s life as a first ever public Korean American politician, the novel opens into anything but mere thriller or caper. Its subject indeed can be thought that of language itself, or at least the politics of language” (Lee A. 178).
The action of this crime novel takes place in modern New York City. The “Native Speaker” describes the life of the second-generation immigrant from Korea, Henry Park. The author depicts Henry as ‘amiable’ person who possesses liberal sympathies, and at the same moment involves him self pride of invisible strength elite; thus, he appears to know too much about the tense probabilities implied in this integration.
According to the theme of the novel, this disclosure is so strongly described because Park manages to betray Kwang not only demolishes any distrust that remained, but also impels hysteria of media of ‘negative’ sphere for Kwang and thereby carries out duplicated what Park and Kwang have fought so vigorously to arise; dread of diversity affecting the political situation and influencing upon the capability of non-white aliens to describe themselves. Later Park lives the political organization in order to save his marriage with Lelia; he chooses to help his wife in teaching non-English children.
Thereby, Park overcomes the transformation from a ‘false speaker of language’ at the very beginning of the novel into a person who can and does appreciate the difference existing in the cultural and visual image of New York and in the languages of children taught by Lelia, that are quite evocative (Pepper 169-173).
“Henry experiences ambivalence in vacillating between his feelings for Luzan and his allegiance to his firm. Henry must deny the doctor’s Asian immigrant ethnicity and the accompanying material conditions that would give historical meaning to such ethnicity” (Ty 33). Nevertheless Henry is not able to reject Luzan’s feelings. Failing to hold an inquiry and consequently destroy Luzan, the protagonist is offered an opportunity to reform his preceding mistakes at a firm. His mission is to spy on a Korean American alien who gained a great sum of money while having dry-cleaning business; John Kwang is craving for political power as a member of a city council competing to become a New York mayor. Henry mixes up his work and his private life.
Henry is fulfilling his assignment being undercover agent, he plays the role of a media team organization member; meanwhile he watches the postmodern marketing implications of election campaign. It is not easy for Henry to spy on Kwang as he has some contradictions about it, he feels certain emotional attachment to Kwang, though he follows the manipulations of the media with uneasiness and cynicism (Ty 33-35).Thus, there are two main characters in the novel, one of them is a businessman and the other is a spy. And Henry is full of contradictory feelings while being a spy. He feels some kind of compassion towards Kwang, but is not able to fail the mission; also he fells that his wife needs him.
Works Cited
Ellington, Elisabeth, and Jane Freimiller. A Year of Reading: a Month-by-Month Guide to Classics and Crowd-Pleasers for you and Your Book Group. Naperville: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2002.
Lee, A. Robert. Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2003.
Lee, C. Rachel. “Reading Contests and Contesting Reading: Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Ethnic New York”. MELUS 29 (2004): 1.
Pepper, Andrew. The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class. America in the 20th/21st Century Series. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Ty, Rose Eleanor, and Donald C. Goellnicht. Asian North American identities: beyond the hyphen. Indiana University Press, 2004.