Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  “You’re a Democrat,” Janice told him.

  “I’m a Democrat like John Kwang is a Democrat.”

  “Which means one who’s going to win everything,” she said. “You’re the only real thing, Eddy,” she answered. She looked at me. “Henry and I, we were secretly Reagan Democrats. Selfish cowards. Admit it, I will. I know you Koreans.”

  “Never,” I said.

  “See?” Janice told him. “You’re the best thing we have. Our party loves you, Eduardo. To death.”

  “I love the party,” he answered, tepidly. “I love the party.”

  The heavy rains suddenly stopped. Janice was already up at the cash register paying the check. She pointed outside. “Let’s do it, guys,” she called to us.

  We spent the rest of the morning choreographing steps around fire hydrants and mailboxes. At Janice’s request I played John Kwang. Eduardo cleared the way. We must have looked like a small troupe of performance artists staging an imaginary event. People on the sidewalk stepped back into doorways to watch us, not knowing what they were looking at. Mostly they were focused on me, whispering, nodding, conjecturing on who I was. Someone important, maybe. Known. Powerful. I was unaccustomed to this scope of attention. With Janice and Eduardo orbiting me like flitting moons I felt like the emperor of a secret world. I put myself in the onlookers’ places and considered the scene: here is an Asian man in his early thirties. He could pass for twenty-four. He’s pleasant of face, not so much handsome as he is gentle-looking, and pink of cheek; he only shaves in spots. His gait is casual and patient and straight. He’s not looking at anything in particular, his gaze too fair. Too fair all around, as though he couldn’t offend anybody. So he looks friendly, he looks like he’d be willing to talk to you, but really because of the way his gaze circles about you, gets at your outline instead of your live center, you think he’s really stepping back as he approaches, stepping back inside and back away from you so nothing can get around or behind him.

  People gathered in the street around us. Janice simply ignored them, directing us instead, figuring in her head the positions of the preachers, the crowd, Kwang, paletting their various skin tones into an ambient mix for the media. She asked that I remind her to bring along a young blonde who temped at the office to be in the throng the next day. “It’s like flower arranging,” she said to me. “You’ve got to be careful. Too much color and it begins looking crass.”

  After Eduardo left for other work at the office, Janice and I drove around Queens. She had me at the wheel. The clouds were clearing, and it was getting warm in her old Datsun. The vinyl seats smelled stale and moldering and were littered with bits of caramel popcorn and skeins of hair and dried-up splatters of soda. The backseat was crammed with cardboard file boxes full of papers and documents and photographs. This was her rolling, touring office. We were taking a local route through the neighborhoods of south Queens so that she could scout appearance locations for John Kwang. She was drink-ing from a plastic liter bottle of mineral water.

  “You never really said anything about what you Koreans believe in,” she said.

  “Staying out of trouble,” I said.

  “I can see that,” she replied. She penciled some notes on the next day’s schedule. “John’s been fantastic at that. Everyone seems to love him. He can draw hordes, you know. He has that gift. Not all politicians do. Most have to learn how to do it. Anyway, I want you to expect a lot of media. Another grocer boycott started in the Bronx.”

  “That must make about six so far this year,” I said.

  Janice nodded. “It’s not so awful, actually. They’ve been making all his meetings with black groups newsworthy. I’m not being cynical. John’s a genuine peacemaker. He does good work and influential people trust him. I think the electorate is really beginning to understand that about him.”

  “Eduardo admires him,” I said. “Maybe loves him.”

  “I love him,” answered Janice. “We all love him. He’s genuinely kind. You know he’s sexy.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Definitely,” said Janice. “It’s his skin.”

  I asked, “His skin where?”

  “Just his skin,” she said, smirking at me. “Anyway, there’s such a beautiful glow to it. It looks soft. Like a woman’s skin.”

  “So that’s it?” I asked.

  “I think so. He has a nice color.”

  “Pale yellow like silk or pale green like jade?” I said to her.

  She smiled with surprise. “Henry, are you giving me shit?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Good,” she answered. “You wouldn’t have the right. There were so many Asians at Berkeley. In fact all of my friends were Asian. There wasn’t anyone else. All my three boyfriends in college. Actually, they were, in a row, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.”

  “What were their names?”

  “God! Wait, there was Bobby Feng. Ken Nakajima. And John Kim.”

  “So which one did you like best?”

  “How come every Asian man I mention this to has to ask that?”

  “We’re competitive.”

  She beamed anyway. “I guess I liked them all. I liked John a hell of a lot. He was the last one. He was an art student. He made collages from magazine pictures and then painted over them. He had long coarse hair.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “We broke up just before graduation. My parents wanted me back in Chicago before starting law school. They have a pastry shop and bakery. They even said he could come back with me. John didn’t want to live in our house and decided to go back to Los Angeles. We had a huge fight. Actually, I mostly yelled at him. He wouldn’t say anything back. I called him later from Chicago but he wasn’t home and his mother answered. She had no idea who I was. She never knew I existed. He never told them.”

  “Maybe it only seemed like she didn’t recognize your name. Korean parents don’t say too much.”

  “Oh, she did. I told her I was his girlfriend for the last year and a half. She said very politely that I shouldn’t call back. Then I told her I was white and Polish. She started shrieking for her husband, I think.”

  “Probably just shrieking,” I said.

  Janice frowned. “So I hung up,” she said. “I haven’t spoken to him since before that. I never understood how he could just drop me like that. Is it a Korean thing? I mean, what kind of person does that? Except for the very end, everything was great between us. We had great sex, too, and that doesn’t happen a lot in college. But now I have to think none of it was very good. It was like he’d done his time with me, with a white girl, and then it was over. I almost still hate him. Asshole.”

  We drove for the next two hours in stops and starts through tight car-jammed streets lined with old row houses. Archie Bunkers. Janice stopped us every now and then and got out and surveyed a corner or a building with her arms crossed tight. We were at an elementary school. She wasn’t talking much anymore. I didn’t mention to her that I had known at least six John Kims in my life. Kim is a prevalent Korean surname, and the name John is still popular among immigrant parents because they think it’s very American, although of course it was more popular twenty-five or thirty years ago, after the wars. I knew I could have tried to comfort her, perhaps telling her how John Kim was probably just as hurt as she was and that his silence was more complicated than she presently understood. That perhaps the ways of his mother and his father had occupied whole regions of his heart. I know this. We perhaps depend too often on the faulty honor of silence, use it too liberally and for gaining advantage. I showed Lelia how this was done, sometimes brutally, my face a peerless mask, the bluntest instrument. And Janice’s John Kim, exquisitely silent, was like some fault-ridden patch of ground that shakes and threatens a violence but then just falls in upon itself, cascading softly and evenly down its own private fissure u
ntil tightly filled up again.

  I watched Janice head away from the car to talk to some people loitering outside the school building. I remembered a day when I visited a Korean friend’s house in New Jersey. It was during a winter break from college. We entered Albert’s house from the garage and the sweet scents of broiled beef short ribs and spicy codfish soup and sesame-fried zucchini made me think of my own house before my mother died. Then Albert’s mother called happily to him in Korean, “Now you’ve come home!” and although her accent was different, too breathy, nearly Japanese, the inflection of the words was just that of my mother’s, so much so that I nearly dropped my duffel and went to the strange-faced woman standing there in the busy kitchen in her soy-sauce-and-oil-splattered apron. And while sitting at dinner listening to her and Albert’s father asking their son questions about school, his health, worrying as they were in the very words, in the very tone and gesture of my own growing up, a familiarity arose that should have been impossible but wasn’t and made me feel a little sick inside. It wasn’t that Albert and I were similar; we weren’t, our parents weren’t. It was something else. That night, lying in the short bunk bed above snoring Albert, I wondered if anything would have turned out differently had a careless nurse switched the two of us in a hospital nursery, whether his family would be significantly changed, whether mine would have been, whether any of us Koreans, raised as we were, would sense the barest tinge of a loss or estrangement. If I-as-Albert in the bottom bunk were listening to Albert-snoring-as-Henry, would I know the huge wrong that had passed upon our lives?

  Janice pranced back to the car all smiles. She pulled in her door with a slam.

  “Drive, man, drive,” she told me. I accelerated. She’d come upon some information about Mayor De Roos. She said that apparently the tabloid rumors of his extramarital affair with a young black woman were true. The woman worked for the Transit Authority. De Roos was supposed to have seen her at a news conference last year on subway crime, held down inside the station where she sold tokens. Her name was Kiki and she had grown up and still lived in the neighborhood. The people hanging out in front of the school knew her and said she was flashing new clothes and jewelry around the neighborhood, and that a call car could be seen at all hours of the night in front of her apartment building.

  Janice sat quietly, spinning doom inside her head. I drove on without direction from her, weaving the noisy four-speed through the nameless streets.

  “What are you going to do?” I then said.

  “I don’t know yet,” she answered softly, almost reverently, as if in awe of an angle she might now have. “But you’ve got to swear, damn it, that you don’t know anything about this. I only told you because I had to tell somebody. I trust you, anyway. I might not even tell Sherrie.”

  “Okay. But why not Sherrie?”

  “Sherrie doesn’t need to know this. Believe me. I’m protecting her. She’ll thank me later. I’m protecting everybody.”

  She didn’t say anything more than that. She flipped to a new page on her legal pad and began scribbling half-sentences. She quickly filled two sheets. I thought at first that she might be trying to hide something from me, bending over the page so, to use somehow the hard fact for her own direct gain. But then she straightened and what I could read glancing over at her notes made it clear that she was plotting for John Kwang alone. She was being a good soldier. She was brainstorming ideas on how to leak something that wasn’t hers in the first place. The ideas ranged wildly in practicality and sensibility: call a television news station or a newspaper with a tip; hire a photographer to take pictures of them together; take the pictures yourself; offer the girl money to talk; get some neighborhood kids to slash his call car’s tires; trip the fire alarm in her building when he’s there; set a real fire; get her arrested; tell De Roos straight out that we have dirt on him and will use it if he ever plays rough.

  I figured, too, that what she meant by protection was to put up what staffers called a “Chinese wall” between a release of the information and anyone else high up in the Kwang office, Sherrie Chin-Watt or Jenkins. John Kwang, without mention, would never know of it. I would soon learn that this was typical, that any political life was made up of minor battles and skirmishes, opportunities on the edge of the front discovered or sometimes created by people like Janice Pawlowsky. John Kwang, evidently, had come to trust her judgment and loyalty and willingness to sacrifice herself. It was only later that I fully understood the depth of his trust in the people working under him. I, finally, would prove his trust wrong. And that was the strangeness for me, that someone like Janice, with all her attendant cynicism and ambition, could believe in another person so singularly, that she could shelter her candidate, her man for office, and step in front of angry bullets shot from his opponents or the press.

  We kept on scouting neighborhoods for homeless shelters, community centers, training schools, drug rehabilitation clinics, halfway houses. Sites where he might be seen in the coming months. Photo ops. She made me stop several more times. Our last stop, toward dusk, was an abandoned tenement building beside an elevated ramp of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. She had me get out and stand on the crumbling steps. Then she rambled across the street and peered back at me through her palm-sized director’s viewfinder.

  “Hold your hand out, like you’re shaking with somebody!”

  I extended both, like Kwang in our file photos at the office.

  “Good! Now go inside the archway and come out!”

  I stepped back into the entrance. The walls of the lobby were badly damaged, unsheathed layers of wire and wood and corrugated paper hanging out of gouges in the plaster. The tiled floor was mostly shattered and broken through in places down past the joists. I could see into the basement where mangled parts of children’s bicycles lay in dusty heaps.

  “Come on out! Slowly, slowly.”

  I walked out in the light of breaking clouds. I lifted my face to the sky, as commanded. She told me to raise my arms in victory. So I did.

  “Freeze,” she said. “Awesome.”

  Our boy, Mitt, was exactly seven years old when he died, just around the age when you start really worrying about your kid. Then, you look long at his tender arms and calves and you wish you could keep him inside the house for the next ten years, buckled up and helmeted. But all of a sudden, more than you know, he’s outside somewhere, sometimes even alone, crossing the streets, scaling rocks, wrestling with dogs, swimming in pits, getting into everything mechanical and combustible and toxic. You suddenly notice that all of his friends are wild, bad kids, the kind that hold lighted firecrackers until the very last second, or torment the neighborhood animals. Mitt, the clean and bright one—somehow, miraculously, ours—runs off with them anyway, shouting the praises of his perfect life.

  From the time he was four we spent whole summers up at my father’s house in Ardsley, mostly so Mitt could troop about on the grass and earth and bugs—the city offering only broken swings and dry swimming pools—and Lelia and I seemed to share an understanding of what would be safest and most healthful for him.

  My father would call me each year a few days before Memorial Day and say as if he didn’t really care, Ya, oh-noon-guh-ya? and I would answer him and say yes, we were coming again this summer, and he could get things ready for us.

  The city, of course, seemed too dangerous. Especially during the summer, the streets so dog mad with heat, untempered, literally steaming with possibilities, none of them good. People got meaner, stuck beneath all that hard light and stone. They worked through it by talking, speaking, shouting and screaming, in every language on earth. And the cursing: in New York City, summer is the season of bad language. It shouts at you from propped-up windows, it hangs on gold chains out of cars, it lingers at phone booths, peep booths, in every standing line for movies and museums and methadone.

  And then there were the heat waves, the crime waves. The clouds of soot an
d dust. In the evening it all descended unseen, an invisible ash of distant fires, soiling us everywhere.

  So escape. Rent a car, pack it up, drive right into the heart of dreamland. Here, it went by names like Bronxville, Scarsdale, Chappaqua, Ardsley. The local all-stars.

  We wanted our boy to know a cooler, softer ground. On the expansive property of my father’s house stood high poplar, oak, the few elm not yet fallen with disease. They didn’t appear much different to me than they did twenty years before; they looked just as tall, as venerable, the capital of my father’s life. And there would wend Mitt, the child of ceaseless movement, leafy stick in hand, poking beneath the shady skirts of the trees for the smallest signs of life.

  Lelia and I would watch him from the back patio. My father slept in the sun with a neon-orange golf cap pulled down over his eyes. Sometimes he spoke from beneath it, his weary Korean mumbling, and I could only read the embroidery of the word Titleist in place of actually understanding him. Mitt would shout for us from the trees, holding up something too small to see. My father would groan in acknowledgment, lowing the refrain of my youth. Yahhh. Mitt, unconcerned, hopped a little dance, his patented jig, waving madly, legs pumping. We waved back. I shouted to him, too loud.

  He brought back rocks to us. Dead insects. Live slugs, green pennies, bits of faded magazines. Every kind and condition of bark. Stuff, he said. He arranged them carefully next to my father’s chaise like trinkets for barter, all the while recounting to himself in a small voice the catalogue of his suburban treasure. He offered the entire lot to my father.

  “I give you a dollar,” my father said to him.

  “Two!” Mitt cried.

  “Lucky silver dollar,” the old man countered, as if luck had meant anything in his life.

  “The one on your desk?”

  “You go get it now,” he said, pointing up to the top window of the house.

  Mitt liked to carry the coin with him. I knew because he would produce it wherever we were and start rubbing the face with his thumb. My father must have advised him so, told him some Bronze Age Korean mythology to go with it, the tale of a lost young prince whose magic coin is sole proof of his rightful seat and destiny.