Praise for Native Speaker
Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award
Winner of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation
Winner of the Oregon Book Award
Winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award
Winner of QPB’s New Voices Award for Best New Fiction
An ALA Notable Book for Adults
“A lyrical page-turner . . . his story still speaks[s] to the reader long after the book is closed.”
—Seattle Weekly
“Absorbing . . . Masterfully written . . . Ultimately, Native Speaker is a broad reflection on the fragility of society’s primal forces—marriage, blood, race, love. Lee writes with tremendous insight and respect for such forces, avoiding clichéd sentimentalism. And yet he leaves readers with a lingering hope, a faint smile, a new appreciation that there are native speakers from many countries, each with stories equally compelling . . . Rarely are such stories so wonderfully rendered.”
—USA Today
“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 novel of a newer, rawer immigrant experience.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A splendid first novel . . . exceptionally well-plotted and suspenseful . . . Lee’s novel, written with restraint and cunning, provokes a reader’s admiration and heartbreak.”
—GQ
“Native Speaker is that great rarity: an eloquent page-turner. Beautifully crafted, enlightening, and heart-wrenching, it is a brilliant debut and a tremendous contribution to Asian-American literature.”
—Gish Jen
“Thoughtful, elegant prose, rich in images and deep tugs of emotion.”
—San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Brilliantly conceived . . . highly recommended.”
—Asian Week
“Lyrical, mysterious, and nuanced, the poignant moodiness of this first novel by a 28-year-old Korean American lingers long after the final page is turned . . . Beautifully written and intriguingly plotted, the novel interweaves politics, love, family, and loss as Park starts to make sense of the rhythm of his life.”
—Booklist
“A work of tremendous grace and discomforting resonance.”
—Voice Literary Supplement
“An accomplished and thoughtful novel written with the confidence, rhythm, and insight of a man narrating a story he knew he had to tell.”
—Details
“A tender meditation on love, loss, and family.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Lee’s careful prose conveys an immigrant’s ability to observe without participating, and an outsider’s longing for place and identity. A serious, masterful, and wholly innovative twist on first-generation American fiction.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Splendid . . . elegant, highly wrought prose.”
—New York Newsday
“A first novel of impressive poetic and psychological accomplishment . . . At once reflective and suspenseful, Henry’s story pulls together the elusiveness of languages; the beauty and harm of Henry’s heritage; the bizarre, the unanticipatable death of his young son; and the constant dance of estrangement and love between Henry and his complicated American wife, Lelia . . . His story is a genuine page-turner. Warmly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“Native Speaker is, in many ways, a Korean-American reimagination of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.”
—A. Magazine
“From the wounded love of Asian Americans for their nation, from the lilt and hiss of our languages, Chang-rae Lee has composed a moving, edgy new blues. This music drives his suspenseful story of spies, politicians, and lovers in a novel of extraordinary beauty and pain. Mr. Lee’s talent, compassion, and wisdom light up these pages, which are nothing less than brilliant.”
—Frederick Busch
“The inspiring story of a Korean-American is contemporary New York . . . Lee [writes in] unforgettable, incandescent prose, which, in a first novel, is dauntingly assured, and writing at its most ‘creative.’”
—The Sunday Times (London)
Praise for A Gesture Life
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Literary Award
Winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award
Winner of the Asian-American Literary Award
Winner of the North Atlantic Independent Bookseller’s Association Book Award
Talk Magazine’s Best Book of 1999
An ALA Notable Book of the Year
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
An Esquire magazine Distinguished Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Top Forty Book of the Year
“A Gesture Life is the touching, multilayered rumination of an uneasy psyche. It is also a tragic, horrifying page-turner, whose evocation of wartime victims is unforgettable. . . . [Lee] enlists the reader’s full energies to interpret this enigmatic speaker, who saddens, baffles and infuriates us all at once.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Once again, this gifted young author has given us a beautifully tapestried story of seeking identity and acceptance in another culture while remaining separate from the tug of it.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“Hata is a fine, full-blooded creation, the kind of man who exists everywhere but far too seldom in literature. . . . The accretion of wisdom in Lee’s novel is stunning. He expertly evokes the collision of unacceptable truth with the illusion of workaday serenity.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Quietly stunning . . . While the prose is measured and moves to the pace of Hata’s introspection, there is a rising tide of suspense that builds to two breathtaking climaxes. . . . This is a wise, humane, fully rounded story, deeply but unsentimentally moving, and permeated with insights about the nature of human relationships. If Lee’s first novel was an impressive debut, this one marks the solid establishment of a stellar literary career.”
—Publishers Weekly (stared, boxed review)
“[Lee] spin[s] his tale with the kind of deceptive ease often aspired to but seldom achieved. . . . A luminous novel of love, loss, and longing.”
—People
“We are swept away by a prose thrilling in its icy, austere eloquence.”
—Newsday
“[Lee] has written a wise and humane novel that both amplifies the themes of identity and exile he addressed in Native Speaker, and creates awonderfully resonant portrait of a man caught between two cultures and two lives.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Beautifully realized . . . with an exquisite sense of mystery . . . a hugely affecting novel, both for what it delivers and for what it evokes, which is a kind of carpe diem cry against the sorrows of an empty landscape.”
—The Boston Globe
“One of the many rewards of reading A Gesture Life is its reticence. . . . Hata’s outward and inward lives are patterned like a trompe l’oeil, one of those tricky desig
ns in which images emerge or recede with changes of perspective.”
—Time
Books by Chang-rae Lee
Native Speaker
A Gesture Life
Aloft
The Surrendered
NATIVE SPEAKER
Chang-rae Lee
RIVERHEAD BOOKS, NEW YORK
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
Copyright © 1995 by Chang-rae Lee
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with all copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows:
Lee, Chang-rae.
Native Speaker /Chang-rae Lee
p. cm.
I. Title.
ISBN 1-57322-001-9
PS3562.F3347N38 1995 94-32241CIP
813’.54—dc20
First Riverhead hardcover edition: March 1995
First Riverhead trade paperback edition: March 1996
Riverhead trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-57322-531-1
Riverhead epub ISBN: 978-1-101-66003-4
Cover design © 1995 by Tom McKeveny
Insert photo on front cover courtesy of Sungman Cha
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Contents
Praise for Native Speaker
Praise for A Gesture Life
Books by Chang-rae Lee
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Native Speaker
About the Author
For my mother and my father
I turn but do not extricate myself,
Confused, a past-reading, another,
but with darkness yet.
—Walt Whitman
The day my wife left she gave me a list of who I was.
I didn’t know what she was handing me. She had been compiling it without my knowledge for the last year or so we were together. Eventually I would understand that she didn’t mean the list as exhaustive, something complete, in any way the sum of my character or nature. Lelia was the last person who would attempt anything even vaguely encyclopedic.
But then maybe she herself didn’t know what she was doing. She was drawing up idioms in the list, visions of me in the whitest raw light, instant snapshots of the difficult truths native to our time together.
The year before she left she often took trips. Mostly weekends somewhere. I stayed home. I never voiced any displeasure at this. I made sure to know where she was going, who’d likely be there, the particular milieu, whether dancing or a sauna might be involved, those kinds of angles. The destinations were harmless, really, like the farming cooperative upstate, where her college roommate made soft cheeses for the city street markets. Or she went to New Hampshire, to see her mother, who’d been more or less depressed and homebound for the last three years. Once or twice she went to Montreal, which worried me a little, because whenever she called to say she was fine I would hear the sound of French in the background, all breezy and guttural. She would fly westward on longer trips, to El Paso and the like, where we first met ten years ago. Then at last and every day, from our Manhattan apartment, she would take day trips to any part of New York City, which she loved and thought she would never leave.
One day Lelia came home from work and said she was burning out. She said she desperately needed time off. She worked as a speech therapist for children, mostly freelancing in the public schools and then part-time at a speech and hearing clinic downtown.
Sometimes she would have kids over at our place. The children she saw had all kinds of articulation problems, some because of physiological defects like cleft palates or tied tongues. Others had had laryngectomies, or else defective hearing, or learning disabilities, or for an unknown reason had begun speaking much later than was normal. And then others—the ones I always paid close attention to—came to her because they had entered the first grade speaking a home language other than English. They were nonnative speakers. All day she helped these children manipulate their tongues and their lips and their exhaling breath, guiding them through the difficult language.
So I told her fine, she could take it easy with work, that I could handle the finances, we were solid that way. This is when she professed a desire to travel—she hadn’t yet said alone—and then in the next breath admitted she’d told the school people not to call for a while. She said she felt like maybe writing again, getting back to her essays and poems. She had published a few pieces in small, serious literary magazines early in our marriage, written some book reviews, articles, but nothing, she said harshly, that wasn’t half-embarrassing.
She handed the list to me at the Alitalia counter at Kennedy, before her flight to Rome and then on to Naples and, finally, Sicily and Corsica. This was the way she had worked it out. Her intention was to spend November and December shuttling between the Italian islands, in some off-season rental, completely alone.
She was traveling heavy. This wasn’t a trip of escape, in that normal sense. She was taking with her what seemed to be hundreds of books and notepapers. Also pads, brushes, tiny pastel-tinted sponges. Too many hats, I thought, which she wore like some dead and famed flyer. A signal white scarf of silk.
Nothing I had given her.
And maps. Here was a woman of maps. She had dozens of them, in various scales. Topographic, touristical, some schematic—these last handmade. Through the nights she stood like a field general over the kitchen counter, hands perched on those jutting hip bones, smoking with agitation, assessing points of entry and encampment and escape. Her routes, stenciled in thick deep blue, embarked inward, toward an uncharted grave center. A messy bruise of ink. She had already marked out a score of crosses that seemed to say You Are Here. Then, there were indications she was misreading the actual size of the islands. Her lines would have her trek the same patches of rocky earth many times over. Overrunning the land. I thought I could see her kicking at the bleached, known stones; the hard southern light surrendering to her boyish straightness; those clear green eyes, leveling on the rim of the arched sea.
Inside the international terminal I couldn’t help her. She took to bearing the heaviest of her bags. But at some point I panicked and embraced her clumsily.
“Maybe I’ll come with you this time,” I said.
She tried to smile.
“You’re just trading islands,” I said, unhelpful as usual.
I asked if she had enough money. She said her savings would take care of her. I thought they were our savings, but the notion didn’t seem to matter at the moment. Her answer was also, of course, a means of renunciation, itself a denial of everything else I wasn’t offering.
When they started the call for boarding she gave me the list, squeezing it tight between our hands.
“This doesn’t mean what you’ll think,” she said, getting up.
“That’s okay.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She bit her lip. In a steely voice she told me to read it when I got back to the car. I put it away. I walked with her to the entrance. Her cheek stiffened when I leaned to kiss her. She walked backward for several steps, her movement inertial, tipsy, and then disappeared down the telescoping tunnel.
I read through the list twice sitting in our car in the terminal garage. Later I would make three photocopies, one to reside permanently next to my body, in my wallet, as a kind of personal asterisk, I thought, in case of accidental death. Another I saved to show her again sometime, if I wanted pity or else needed some easy ammunition. The last, to historicize, I sealed in an envelope and mailed to myself.
The original I destroyed. I prefer versions of things, copies that aren’t so precious. I remember its hand, definitely Lelia’s, considerable, vertical, architectural, but gone awry in parts, scrawling and windbent, in unschemed colors of ink and graphite and Crayola. I could tell the page had been crumpled up and flattened out. Folded and unfolded. It looked weathered, beaten about her purse and pockets. There were smudges of olive oil. Maybe chocolate. I imagined her scribbling something down in the middle of a recipe.
My first impression was that it was a love poem. An amnesty. Dulcet verse.
But I was wrong. It said, variously:
You are surreptitious
B+ student of life
first thing hummer of Wagner and Strauss
illegal alien
emotional alien
genre bug
Yellow peril: neo-American
great in bed
overrated
poppa’s boy
sentimentalist
anti-romantic
——analyst (you fill in)
stranger
follower
traitor
spy
For a long time I was able to resist the idea of considering the list as a cheap parting shot, a last-ditch lob between our spoiling trenches. I took it instead as one long message, broken into parts, terse communiqués from her moments of despair. For this reason, I never considered the thing mean. In fact, I even appreciated its count, the clean cadence. And just as I was nearly ready to forget the whole idea of it, maybe even forgive it completely, like the Christ that my mother and father always wished I would know, I found a scrap of paper beneath our bed while I was cleaning. Her signature, again: False speaker of language.
Native Speaker Page 1