Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  “Yes, boss!”

  “Let’s see it then.”

  Eduardo stepped behind his desk and pulled a manila folder from a drawer. He laid it open on the conference table and he and Kwang went over it.

  I said John was my height. He was actually shorter than I was, two or three inches at least. Maybe it was the kind of light that emanated from him, or the way his figure bent the light to a crucial incidence, but from any distance at all he appeared to me as though he were ascending an invisible ramp that magically preceded him. His warm-hued face was square, owing its shape to the eminence of his angular jaw, which carved out two perfect hollows on either side of his chin. He still had those shadows of youth upon him. He was clean-shaven, as always.

  I think I will forever see him with that smooth face, almost aglow, almost pubescent, despite my memory of those final days of his shortened career, when his true age seemed to besiege him all over and at once.

  His neatly clipped black hair, silvery about the temples with scant patches of grayness, reminded me of my father’s head ten years before, those dense shines of hair. Though it ultimately wasn’t true, my father appeared to be the most vital of men. He seemed to understand that it was his hair which lent him his attractiveness and authority, and so it became, strangely enough, the one and only vanity of his life.

  He used to stand before the bathroom mirror, dabbing all sorts of conditioners and dressings on it in a time when there were only products like Vitalis and Brylcreem. Without any shame he would faithfully apply my mother’s sundry ointments each morning and each night, slowly working into his scalp the brightly tinted gobs without romance or fuss.

  I suppose I always envied that brush of his, how wavy it was. I remember how proud he was of it. He used to say to me when I was young that his gohpsul muh-rhee showed the great vigor of the blood running through him. Then he’d grab at my own skull, roll the fine straight strands of my hair between his fingers, and gravely shake his head.

  Look at this, he’d scoff, just like your mother’s.

  How worn and weak. He was forever there to let me know every disadvantage I would have to overcome. I knew I would never enjoy his stern constitution. I have my mother’s thin blood, the kind so easily forayed by a chilly draft, an unexpected rain. She and I were always sick with something. In certain periods my mother seemed to live from her bed, rising only to clean the tub or cook dinner for my father and me, which she would do in any condition. The climate was never quite suitable for her. In truth, she could only stand up to the harshness of people and their words, a native tenacity that I can only hope someday to uncover in myself.

  My self-conception was that I was frail. I would sometimes affect similar ailments to my mother’s and try to mimic her, stay in my room whole weekends with a pile of picture books or puzzles, never changing out of my pajamas. Or I would slip into her bed while she napped and fall asleep in the warm curve of her belly.

  My father might come in and stand before the bed with his arms crossed and savagely complain about us. He enjoyed ranting about how she and I were living lucky in this life, resounding his personal lore of how merciless and dangerous it was in this land and that he could only do so much to protect us. Certainly it was the emptiest of his threats, for he was nothing if not a provider and a bulwark. He was the kind of man who subscribed to that old-fashioned idea of nation as personal test—and by extension, a test of family—and not only because he was an immigrant. What kept him toiling and working through his years was that he bore that small man’s folly of sometimes seeing himself in terms historical, a necessary evil, as if each apple or turnip or six-pack he was selling would be the very one to catapult him toward a renown he could only with great difficulty imagine for himself. He watched too much television. I remember how he would make fun of Joe Namath in those old cologne commercials, remark that he was too ugly a man to have so many beautiful women surrounding him.

  What a nose! he’d cry in Korean at the television set. It looks like a big dried daikon.

  But then there it was, invariably, the little green bottle of musky potion that Joe also used, ready for him on my mother’s dresser. My father could splash it on blithely before he went to the city for work. He could leave the house with a fresh confidence. But when he came back late at night, the magic had all but abandoned his face and his step, the aura was gone, the lilt, and I could smell the animal of him as he walked past my bedroom door in the short hall, the stink of sweat and ruined vegetables and the ashen city penetrating me like an epochal sickness.

  He would have probably admired John Kwang—at least for his appearance. Though not openly, of course. That kind of admiration between men was either effeminate or disrespectful, and then a little shameful, if the object was a younger man. No, my father would likely never have approached him if he had come upon the chance. He was still alive when John Kwang first appeared on the city political scene, but the old man was at that point too ill and self-absorbed with his own decline to notice anything extramural, Korean American or not.

  John Kwang dressed like a power broker. His taste for colors and fabrics was impeccable. His wife, May, didn’t dress him or buy his clothes. Later, I would note that whenever he had the opportunity he’d duck into a clothier in Manhattan and buy a French-cuffed shirt and several ties. He had every kind of shoe for his occasions, brogans, oxfords, wing tips, loafers, patent-leather pumps, deep-treaded boots. With his suits he mostly stayed to the conservative, what the people expected of him, Paul Stuart and J. Press, the American executive look, but at more internationally flavored events and certain parties you could see him working the room in something silken and double-breasted, the lines rakishly cut down to hug his youthful waist. When he took meetings around the borough, he wore a wool flannel three-piece. The jacket of the dark charcoal suit fit him perfectly, as did his trousers, which must have been retailored from their lanky western proportion to flatter his short Korean legs. I know those limbs. I remember Mitt pointing at the gnarled trunks of my father’s tanned bowlegs bared beneath his shorts and saying, “Grandpa’s a bulldog.” I laughed, thinking how right Mitt didn’t yet know he was, and figured, too, that with so much of Lelia in him, with so much of her drawnness and length, Mitt would be a greyhound when he grew up, a wispy thing, gentler and more tender of step than we who would course through him like trickling old rivers.

  Kwang himself exhibited a different grace: he didn’t sport the brief choppy step of our number, but seemed instead to stride in luxurious borrowed lengths. He almost loped, not after the six-foot-three-inch bound of a Stew Boswell, but like a man who understood the true stamp and limit of his gait. As if he rode on those legs. A primed athlete among the unlimbered mass of men. And then there he was, on his way back out, holding Janice firmly by the shoulders in his customary way, as if he might lay a deep kiss upon her brow or warmly pull into his chest her solid cocksure body now offering up its last slack to his womanly hands. She was a little stunned with him. He glanced back at me once more and then moved on to the rest of the people in the room, spreading himself among them wide but never thin.

  This proved what appeared to me to be his great talent: his seeming resistance to dilution. This despite the fact that everyone he met, each one of us he encountered inside and outside his office and circle, even and perhaps especially strangers, the curious citizenry of the streets, Kwang made feel as though he were bequeathing a significant part of himself. And I thought that no matter what skin you were, no matter what your opinion of him, when you met him in person you somehow felt that you understood the subtle pressure of his grip, that it said or meant that you were the faintest brother to him, perhaps distantly removed by circumstance or blood but a brother nonetheless.

  I had ready connections to him, of course. He knew I was Korean, or Korean American, though perhaps not exactly the same way he was. We were of different stripes, like any two people, though taken together
you might say that one was an outlying version of the other. I think we both understood this from the very beginning, and insofar as it was evident I suppose you could call ours a kind of romance, though I don’t exactly know what he saw in me. Maybe a someone we Koreans were becoming, the latest brand of an American. That I was from the future.

  Kwang was certainly arresting to me. Not so much paternally, in that grim way my father always impressed himself on me, which eventually built up in my chest a resolve that told me I would never yield to him or surrender. I would come to share a different difficulty with John Kwang.

  I suppose it was a question of imagination. What I was able to see. Before I knew of him, I had never even conceived of someone like him. A Korean man, of his age, as part of the vernacular. Not just a respectable grocer or dry cleaner or doctor, but a larger public figure who was willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family. He displayed an ambition I didn’t recognize, or more, one I hadn’t yet envisioned as something a Korean man would find significant or worthy of energy and devotion; he didn’t seem afraid like my mother and father, who were always wary of those who would try to shame us or mistreat us. When Hoagland first mentioned Kwang’s name I only saw his ready image, what everyone else had at hand. In media photographs and video he appeared to me as an ambitious minority politician and what being one had always meant—the adjutant interest groups, the unwavering agenda, the stridency, the righteousness. A lover of the republic. An underdog champion. I thought I could peg him easily; were I an actor, I would have all the material I required for my beginning method. This is what Hoagland meant when he promised the assignment would be simple, that I’d just have to lurk close enough and witness the play of the story as we already knew it. For ours, finally, were just acts of verification. I would tick off each staging of the narrative, every known turn and counter-turn. The what and the what and the what.

  I would tell a familiar story. The ones we recite in our sleep. I remember how Mitt liked to have the same book read to him each night for two or three weeks, how he would sit rapt with the tale and eventually murmur the words along with me, though on the first reading he would hardly listen and climb all over the bed and my shoulders and laugh frantically at the suspenseful moments, which for him began with the first Once, long ago. There is something universally chilling about a new plot. And I could see how my boy needed time and space for a story to bloom in his mind, because at any age what comes before sight is a conjuring. A trope, which is just a way to believe.

  My necessary invention was John Kwang. This must sound funny, I know. He had always existed in his own right, and he lives at this very moment in a distant land that must seem to him like a great vessel of strangers. I do not know what he does now. I do not know the first or last iota of him. I do not know whether he has taken up a vocation or an art to pass the solemnity of the hours. I know only that I will never see him again, and that anything I can say or offer by way of his present life might well be taken as reductive and suspect. So be it. I intend no irony or special mode. The fact is I had him in my sights. I believed I had a grasp of his identity, not only the many things he was to the public and to his family and to his staff and to me, but who he was to himself, the man he beheld in his most private mirror.

  I will say again that none of this was my duty. My job, which I executed faithfully, was never to spy out those moments of his self-regard, it was not to peer through the crack of the door and watch as he bore off each successive visage. My appointed plan was just to give a good scratch to the surface, come away with some spice or flavor under my nails. As Hoagland would half-joke, whatever grit of an ethnicity. But then all that is a sham. Through events both arbitrary and conceived it so happened that one of his faces fell away, and then another, and another, until he revealed to me a final level that would not strip off. The last mask. And what I saw in him I had not thought to seek, but will search out now for the long remainder of my days.

  Every morning Eduardo tipped his head to me and said in a convincing accent, Ahn-young-ha-sae-yo. I greeted him back in Spanish, but his accent was much better than mine. John Kwang had taught him the words so that he could properly greet the large number of Korean constituents and visitors to our Flushing office. Most everyone on the staff seemed to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the language and customs, how to say hello and goodbye and please wait a moment, how to bow down low enough and speak in a tone of respect with eyes cast at a deferential angle. Sherrie and Janice conducted hit-and-run seminars on the practice, usually after a new crop of volunteers came on. We had to be careful not to speak Korean to every Asian person who arrived, and because I was Korean I was regularly stationed to work at the greeting desk.

  All of northern Queens seemed to pass through that door. Although Kwang’s power base was every last Korean vote in the district, and then most of the Chinese, he did exceedingly well with the newer immigrants, the Southeast Asians and Indians, the Central Americans, and blacks from the Caribbean and West Indies. Some Eastern Europeans. The native whites didn’t seem to pay much attention to him, either way. African Americans didn’t seem to trust him. He was a Democrat in name, in the party of Mayor De Roos, but he drew little from that machinery, the strong-arm cadres of unionized workers and tradespeople, white ethnic old New York.

  Instead, he had made his the party of livery drivers and nannies and wok cooks and seamstresses and delivery boys, and his wealthiest patrons were the armies of small-business owners through whose coffers passed all of Queens, by the nickel and dime.

  Before the last campaign he had voter-registered literally thousands. That’s all his staff still did, and it was why John Kwang retained so many volunteers and such a large staff for just a city councilman, why he paid extra for their salaries and their lunches and their late-night call cars. He gave cash bonuses for the top five people registering the most voters each month, bonuses for pledged future votes, bonuses for signing up immigrants for naturalization. It was like a church drive but at all hours, the whole body of us spread through the district, jammed into cars and sent out to find them.

  This his daily order: do the good duty, go out into the street, go into the stores, stop them in the alleyways. Just get in a word. In ten different languages you say Kwang is like you. You will be an American. You have a flyer with his fine picture and his life story beneath. Show them that. If you tell them the story of their lives they will listen. Peel a dollar from the stack that Jenkins gives each of us in the morning, the bill clipped to an envelope so they can send in their name and address and family and occupation. Have a dollar so we can help you.

  The mood in the office was messianic. We felt like his guerrillas. Some weekends we’d come in for extra work, stay out all day Saturday and then have a big dinner with him at an all-night Korean restaurant, ten or fifteen of us sitting on the floor with him at the head, pouring for each other from double-sized bottles of Korean ale. He’d teach us old songs in Korean, drinking songs, school songs, whatever we could learn. I was usually the only Korean in a room of young Jews and Chinese and Hispanics.

  Eduardo Fermin was his favorite. He would make him stand up and sing a Dominican island song, or a hymn. Eduardo would rise without a word. He’d sing beautifully, his high choirboy voice hitting every note like a bell. When he finished we’d all clap and hoot and then John would give him the business, all joking, bulling, asking if he’d ever learned anything from anyone besides the good Sisters of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  “What other schmaltz do you want me to sing?” Eduardo would yell back, and John would laugh and tell him the name of another song.

  I tried to sit at the far end of the table, so that if he were in one of his high, manic moods he wouldn’t pick me out in front of the group. This way, too, I could observe the entire table, the faces, take the run of the evenings.

  He seemed to understand this, and sometimes he would catch my eye from across the room
when other people were heatedly talking or arguing and nod affirmingly. Only afterward, on the way out or in the street, would he take me aside—almost without exception—and ask how I was doing with the office work, and if my other work as a magazine writer wasn’t being compromised. Rarely did he pursue me in front of the others, and then only if he were in the foulest humor, sometimes asking in a dramatic voice for me to speak on behalf of Koreans everywhere. If we were talking about some thorny issue like welfare reform or affirmative action he would say like a reporter both unctuous and angling, “Mr. Park, if you would tell us the Korean American position on this please.” He liked to linger on the hyphenation. Then he’d deliver some below-the-belt follow-up: “Do you think a single black mother with six kids should be rewarded for having any more?”

  I never had a good response, and neither did anyone else. In truth, I thought he couldn’t help but sometimes punish us with the same notions and language that daily confronted him. He might snap at you with a comment from the last press conference.

  Some problems were dogging him. For months he had been talking to Chinese and Korean gang leaders, in an effort to halt their street extortion and violence, negotiate some kind of settlement. But the dialogues ceased after a surprise arrest by police immediately following the last meeting at Reverend Cho’s church, several weeks before. An arrested Korean gang chief named Han had been publicly threatening him, spreading the word on the street that Kwang had betrayed them.

  With this first real trouble, I noticed that he was getting caught up in his moods. I began to see the whip of his temper. One afternoon I watched him shout at his wife, May, for what seemed ten straight minutes as they sat inside their white sedan. He was shaking his fist so close to her face, which had gone white. I was across the street in front of the office so I couldn’t hear him, but I was certain that he was yelling in both Korean and English. She sat perfectly still and took it all. Then he stepped from the car and spoke softly to her from the open door, shutting it gently before she drove off.