Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  I thought it would be the two of us, like that, forever.

  But one day my father called from one of his vegetable stores in the Bronx and said he was going to JFK and would be late coming home. I didn’t think much of it. He often went to the airport, to the international terminal, to pick up a friend or a parcel from Korea. After my mother’s death he had a steady flow of old friends visiting us, hardly any relatives, and it was my responsibility to make up the bed in the guest room and prepare a tray of sliced fruit and corn tea or liquor for their arrival.

  My mother had always done this for guests; although I was a boy, I was the only child and there was no one else to peel the oranges and apples and set out nuts and spicy crackers and glasses of beer or a bottle of Johnnie Walker for my father and his friends. They used to sit on the carpeted floor around the lacquered Korean table with their legs crossed and laugh deeply and utterly together as if they had been holding themselves in for a long time, and I’d greedily pick at the snacks from the perch of my father’s sturdy lap, pinching my throat in just such a way that I might rumble and shake, too. My mother would smile and talk to them, but she sat on a chair just outside the circle of men and politely covered her mouth whenever one of them made her laugh or offered compliments on her still-fresh beauty and youth.

  The night my father phoned I went to the cabinet where he kept the whiskey and nuts and took out a bottle for their arrival. An ashtray, of course, because the men always smoked. The men—it was always only men—were mostly friends of his from college now come to the States on matters of business. Import-export. They seemed exotic to me then. They wore shiny, textured gray-blue suits and wide ties and sported long sideburns and slightly too large brown-tinted polarizing glasses. It was 1971. They dragged into the house huge square plastic suitcases on wheels, stuffed full of samples of their wares, knock-off perfumes and colognes, gaudy women’s handkerchiefs, plastic AM radios cast in the shapes of footballs and automobiles, leatherette handbags, purses, belts, tinny watches and cuff links, half-crushed boxes of Oriental rice crackers and leathery sheets of dried squid, and bags upon bags of sickly-sweet sucking candy whose transparent wrappers were edible and dissolved on the tongue.

  In the foyer these men had to struggle to pull off the tight black shoes from their swollen feet, and the sour, ammoniac smell of sweat-sopped wool and cheap leather reached me where I stood overlooking them from the raised living room of our split-level house, that nose-stinging smell of sixteen hours of sleepless cramped flight from Seoul to Anchorage to New York shot so full of their ranks, hopeful of good commerce here in America.

  My father opened the door at ten o’clock, hauling into the house two huge, battered suitcases. I had just set out a tray of fruits and rice cakes to go along with the liquor on the low table in the living room and went down to help him. He waved me off and nodded toward the driveway.

  “Go help,” he said, immediately bearing the suitcases upstairs.

  I walked outside. A dim figure of a woman stood unmoving in the darkness next to my father’s Chevrolet. It was late winter, still cold and miserable, and she was bundled up in a long woolen coat that nearly reached the ground. Beside her were two small bags and a cardboard box messily bound with twine. When I got closer to her she lifted both bags and so I picked up the box; it was very heavy, full of glass jars and tins of pickled vegetables and meats. I realized she had transported homemade food thousands of miles, all the way from Korea, and the stench of overripe kimchee shot up through the cardboard flaps and I nearly dropped the whole thing.

  The woman mumbled something in an unusual accent about my not knowing what kimchee was, but I didn’t answer. I thought she was a very distant relative. She didn’t look at all like us, nothing like my mother, whose broad, serene face was the smoothest mask. This woman, I could see, had deep pockmarks stippling her high, fleshy cheeks, like the scarring from a mistreated bout of chicken pox or smallpox, and she stood much shorter than I first thought, barely five feet in her heeled shoes. Her ankles and wrists were as thick as posts. She waited for me to turn and start for the house before she followed several steps behind me. I was surprised that my father wasn’t waiting in the doorway, to greet her or hold the door, and as I walked up the carpeted steps leading to the kitchen I saw that the food and drink I had prepared had been cleared away.

  “Please come this way,” he said to her stiffly in Korean, appearing from the hallway to the bedrooms. “Please come this way.”

  He ushered her into the guest room and shut the door behind them. After a few minutes he came back out and sat down in the kitchen with me. He hadn’t changed out of his work clothes, and his shirt and the knees and cuffs of his pants were stained with the slick juice of spoiled vegetables. I was eating apple quarters off the tray. My father picked one, bit into it, and then put it back. This was a habit of his, perhaps because he worked with fruits and vegetables all day, randomly sampling them for freshness and flavor.

  He started speaking, but in English. Sometimes, when he wanted to hide or not outright lie, he chose to speak in English. He used to break into it when he argued with my mother, and it drove her crazy when he did and she would just plead, “No, no!” as though he had suddenly introduced a switchblade into a clean fistfight. Once, when he was having some money problems with a store, he started berating her with some awful stream of nonsensical street talk, shouting “my hot mama shit ass tight cock sucka,” and “slant-eye spic-and-span motha-fucka” (he had picked it up, no doubt, from his customers). I broke into their argument and started yelling at him, making sure I was speaking in complete sentences about his cowardice and unfairness, shooting back at him his own medicine, until he slammed both palms on the table and demanded, “You shut up! You shut up!”

  I kept at him anyway, using the biggest words I knew, whether they made sense or not, school words like “socioeconomic” and “intangible,” anything I could lift from my dizzy burning thoughts and hurl against him, until my mother, who’d been perfectly quiet the whole time, whacked me hard across the back of the head and shouted in Korean, Who do you think you are?

  Fair fight or not, she wasn’t going to let me dress down my father, not with language, not with anything.

  “Hen-ry,” he now said, accenting as always the second syllable, “you know, it’s difficult now. Your mommy dead and nobody at home. You too young for that. This nice lady, she come for you. Take care home, food. Nice dinner. Clean house. Better that way.”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “I better tell you before, I know, but I know you don’t like. So what I do? I go to store in morning and come home late, nine o’clock, ten. No good, no good. Nice lady, she fix that. And soon we move to nice neighborhood, over near Fern Pond, big house and yard. Very nice place.”

  “Fern Pond? I don’t want to move! And I don’t want to move there, all the rich kids live there.”

  “Ha!” he laughed. “You rich kid now, your daddy rich rich man. Big house, big tree, now even we got houselady. Nice big yard for you. I pay all cash.”

  “What? You bought a house already?”

  “Price very low for big house. Fix-her-upper. You thank me someday . . .”

  “I won’t. I won’t move. No way.”

  Byong-ho, he said firmly. His voice was already changing. He was shifting into Korean, getting his throat ready. Then he spoke as he rose to leave. Let’s not hear one more thing about it. The woman will come with us to the new house and take care of you. This is what I have decided. Our talk is past usefulness. There will be no other way.

  In the new house, the woman lived in the two small rooms behind the kitchen pantry. I decided early on that I would never venture in there or try to befriend her. Her manner unnerved me. She never laughed. She spoke only when it mattered, when a thing needed to be done, or requested, or acknowledged. Otherwise the sole sounds I heard from her were the sucking noises she would make throu
gh the spaces between her teeth after meals and in the mornings. Once I heard her humming a pretty melody in her room, some Korean folk song, but as I walked toward her doorway to hear it better she stopped immediately, and I never heard it again.

  She kept a clean and orderly house. Because she was the one who really moved us from the old house, she organized and ran the new one in a manner that suited her. In the old Korean tradition, my presence in the kitchen was unwelcome unless I was actually eating, or passing through the room. I understood that her two rooms, the tiny bathroom adjoining them, and the kitchen and pantry, constituted the sphere of her influence, and she was quick to deflect any interest on my part to look into the cabinets or closets. If she were present, I was to ask her for something I wanted, even if it was in the refrigerator, and then she would get it for me. She became annoyed if I lingered too long, and I quickly learned to remove myself immediately after any eating or drinking. Only when a friend of mine was over, after school or sports, would she mysteriously recede from the kitchen. My tall, talkative white friends made her nervous. Then she would wait noiselessly in her back room until we had gone.

  She smelled strongly of fried fish and sesame oil and garlic. Though I didn’t like it, my friends called her “Aunt Scallion,” and made faces behind her back.

  Sometimes I thought she was some kind of zombie. When she wasn’t cleaning or cooking or folding clothes she was barely present; she never whistled or hummed or made any noise, and it seemed to me as if she only partly possessed her own body, and preferred it that way. When she sat in the living room or outside on the patio she never read or listened to music. She didn’t have a hobby, as far as I could see. She never exercised. She sometimes watched the soap operas on television (I found this out when I stayed home sick from school), but she always turned them off after a few minutes.

  She never called her family in Korea, and they never called her. I imagined that something deeply horrible had happened to her when she was young, some nameless pain, something brutal, that a malicious man had taught her fear and sadness and she had had to leave her life and family because of it.

  * * *

  Years later, when the three of us came on Memorial Day for the summer-long stay with my father, he had the houselady prepare the apartment above the garage for us. Whenever we first opened its door at the top of the creaky narrow stairs we smelled the fresh veneers of pine oil and bleach and lemon balm. The pine floors were shimmering and dangerously slick. Mitt would dash past us to the king-sized mattress in the center of the open space and tumble on the neatly sheeted bed. The bed was my parents’ old one; my father bought himself a twin the first year we moved into the new house. The rest of the stuff in the apartment had come with the property: there was an old leather sofa; a chest of drawers; a metal office desk; my first stereo, the all-in-one kind, still working; and someone’s nod to a kitchen, thrown together next to the bathroom in the far corner, featuring a dorm-style refrigerator, a half-sized two-burner stove, and the single cabinet above it.

  Mitt and Lelia loved that place. Lelia especially liked the tiny secret room that was tucked behind a false panel in the closet. The room, barely six by eight, featured a single-paned window in the shape of a face that swung out to a discreet view of my father’s exquisitely landscaped garden of cut stones and flowers. She wrote back in that room during the summer, slipping in at sunrise before I left for Purchase, and was able to complete a handful of workable poems by the time we departed on Labor Day, when she had to go back to teaching.

  Mitt liked the room, too, for its pitched ceiling that he could almost reach if he tippy-toed, and I could see he felt himself bigger in there as he stamped about in my father’s musty cordovans like some thundering giant, sweeping at the air, though he only ventured in during the late afternoons when enough light could angle inside and warmly lamp every crag and corner nook. He got locked in once for a few hours, the panel becoming stuck somehow, and we heard his wails all the way from the kitchen in the big house.

  “Spooky,” Mitt pronounced that night, fearful and unashamed as he lay between us in our bed, clutching his mother’s thigh.

  Mitt slept with us those summers until my father bought him his own canvas army cot. That’s what the boy wanted. He liked the camouflaging pattern of the thick fabric and sometimes tipped the thing on its side and shot rubber-tipped arrows at me and Lelia from behind its cover. We had to shoot them back before he would agree to go to bed.

  When he was an infant we waited until he was asleep and then delicately placed him atop our two pillows, which we arranged on the floor next to the bed. We lay still a few minutes until we could hear his breathing deepen and become rhythmic. That’s when we made love. It was warm up there in the summer and we didn’t have to strip or do anything sudden. We moved as mutely and as deftly as we could bear, muffling ourselves in one another’s hair and neck so as not to wake him, but then, too, of course, so we could hear the sound of his sleeping, his breathing, ours, that strange conspiring. Afterward, we lay quiet again, to make certain of his slumber, and then lifted him back between our hips into the bed, so heavy and alive with our mixed scent.

  “Hey,” Lelia whispered to me one night that first summer, “the woman, in the house, what do you think she does at night?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, stroking her arm, Mitt’s.

  “I mean, does she have any friends or relatives?”

  I didn’t know.

  She then said, “There’s no one else besides your father?”

  “I don’t think she has anyone here. They’re all in Korea.”

  “Has she ever gone back to visit?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she sends them money instead.”

  “God,” Lelia answered. “How awful.” She brushed back the damp downy hair from Mitt’s forehead. “She must be so lonely.”

  “Does she seem lonely?” I asked.

  She thought about it for a moment. “I guess not. She doesn’t seem like she’s anything. I keep looking for something, but even when she’s with your father there’s nothing in her face. She’s been here since you were young, right?”

  I nodded.

  “You think they’re friends?” she asked.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Lovers?”

  I had to answer, “Maybe.”

  “So what’s her name?” Lelia asked after a moment.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  I told her that I didn’t know. That I had never known.

  “What’s that you call her, then?” she said. “I thought that was her name. Your father calls her that, too.”

  “It’s not her name,” I told her. “It’s not her name. It’s just a form of address.”

  It was the truth. Lelia had great trouble accepting this stunning ignorance of mine. That summer, when it seemed she was thinking about it, she would stare in wonderment at me as if I had a gaping hole blown through my head. I couldn’t blame her. Americans live on a first-name basis. She 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. At breakfast and lunch and dinner my father and I called her “Ah-juh-ma,” literally aunt, but more akin to “ma’am,” the customary address to an unrelated Korean woman. But in our context the title bore much less deference. I never heard my father speak her name in all the years she was with us.

  But then he never even called my mother by her name, nor did she ever in my presence speak his. She was always and only “spouse” or “wife” or “Mother”; he was “husband” or “Father” or “Henry’s father.” And to this day, when someone asks what my parents’ names were, I have to pause for a moment, I have to rehear them not from the memory of my own voice, my own calling to them, but through the staticky vo
ices of their old friends phoning from the other end of the world.

  “I can’t believe this,” Lelia cried, her long Scottish face all screwed up in the moonlight. “You’ve known her since you were a kid! She practically raised you.”

  “I don’t know who raised me,” I said to her.

  “Well, she must have had something to do with it!” She nearly woke up Mitt.

  She whispered, “What do you think cooking and cleaning and ironing is? That’s what she does all day, if you haven’t noticed. Your father depends so much on her. I’m sure you did, too, when you were young.”

  “Of course I did,” I answered. “But what do you want, what do you want me to say?”

  “There’s nothing you have to say. I just wonder, that’s all. This woman has given twenty years of her life to you and your father and it still seems like she could be anyone to you. It doesn’t seem to matter who she is. Right? If your father switched her now with someone else, probably nothing would be different.”

  She paused. She brought up her knees so they were even with her hips. She pulled Mitt to her chest.

  “Careful,” I said. “You’ll wake him.”

  “It scares me,” she said. “I just think about you and me. What I am . . .”

  “Don’t be crazy,” I said.

  “I am not being crazy,” she replied carefully. Mitt started to whimper. I slung my arm over her belly. She didn’t move. This was the way, the very slow way, that our conversations were spoiling.

  “I’ll ask my father tomorrow,” I stupidly said.

  Lelia didn’t say anything to that. After a while she turned away, Mitt still tight against her belly.

  “Sweetie . . .”

  I whispered to her. I craned and licked the soft hair above her neck. She didn’t budge. “Let’s not make this something huge.”