Native Speaker | 
 enlarge | Author: Chang-rae Lee
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  73 reviews
Sales Rank: 17043
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 349
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 1573225312
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781573225311
ASIN: 1573225312
Publication Date: March 1, 1996
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Amazon.com
Korean-American Henry Park is "surreptitious, B+ student of life, illegal alien, emotional alien, Yellow peril: neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy ..." or so says his wife, in the list she writes upon leaving him. Henry is forever uncertain of his place, a perpetual outsider looking at American culture from a distance. As a man of two worlds, he is beginning to fear that he has betrayed both -- and belongs to neither.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 68 more reviews...
 A Missed Opportunity August 16, 2008
This book is a missed opportunity. Everything about the Korean-American lifestyle is touching and often moving. The main character's father and mother, the ahjumma, and his Caucasian wife are all vivid characters. The problem I have with this book is that the spy aspect of the novel simply doesn't fit in. Lee does a good job trying to work the spy stuff into the book, but I think he ultimately fails in the end in this particular aspect. There are many excellent, poetic sentences in this book that choked me up, but there's also some lazy writing towards the end of the novel, in which there are many incomplete sentences and quotes are not accompanied by quotation marks. This type of writing is very common nowadays, but shouldn't be; it really takes away from the overall beauty of the English language and is not grammatical, either. If you want to learn about Korean-Americans, there are probably much better books out there, but this is by no means a bad read. I simply think that if the spy element were eliminated, the book would have been much more believable, though, Jack, a great character, would have to be placed in the novel in some other fashion. I bought this book at Incheon International Airport in South Korea for roughly twenty dollars, before flying back to America.
 Transcends genres August 5, 2008
I suppose I bought this book because I had heard the author's name and it had won a lot of prizes, but I really didn't know anything about it. As I started to read, I began to dread what was coming: another sad story of immigrant displacement and alienation. And it is (though perhaps not so sad as anticipated), but Native Speaker is also a love story and a thriller, and succeeds rather well at its multiple genres.
Lee is a fine writer. I look forward to reading more of him.
 Hum Drum and Ho Hum July 27, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I hope the author is now over his psychological hangups because he could probably write a very nice book if he is. But this "Native Speaker" is a soggy loaf of white bread: a potentially good plot that's foiled, spoiled and soiled by lots of sad little culs de sac.
You know right from the beginning the books is going to be boring when the protagonist, a Korean-American male, meets up with a Caucasian female at a cocktail party, and when they sneak off to kiss they both can't get into it because of the racial difference. Come on! If you're not turned on by someone, don't try putting out.
Forget the kiss, forget the minor and major poignancies, forget this book. Read something truly exciting and multi-cultural, like "Tailor of Panama" by John le Carre. There's a plot that moves.
A Novel of Immigrant Experience December 17, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Chang-Rae Lee wrote his first novel, "Native Speaker", which describes the experience of a young Korean man in New York City at the age of 28. The protagonist, Henry Park, is the son of immigrants. His mother died while Henry was young and Henry's father has risen to wealth through difficult work in the ownership of small groceries in the poorer sections of New York City. The family is Christian but of a Confucian background. Henry throughout has much more difficulty expressing emotions and feelings than most Westerners. Henry marries a well-to-do and beautiful white woman, Leila. They have a son, Mitt, who tragically dies. Henry and Leila have difficulty in their marriage arising from, among other things, different cultural expectations, Henry's job, and the death of their son.
Henry, the prototypical outsider, works as a spy for a private investigative agency whose clients or missions are never fully defined in the novel. Henry seems to get over-involved with the people whose lives he infiltrates. He became close to a Phillipino psychiatrist who offered Henry, through friendship and therapy, insights into Henry's life. But most of the novel involves Henry's relationship with another individual on whom he spies: a Korean New York City politician named John Kwang who has aspirations to run for mayor.
The book describes the life of Korean immigrants and the difficult culture shock of living in a new land. Lee also describes well the vibrant and continuously varied life of New York City, with its diversity, as seen by his protagonist. I thought the overriding metaphor of the book, the immigrant as outsider and spy, was pat and unconvincing. It was too deriviative of Elison's "Invisible Man" and Lee never convincingly explains how Henry becomes a spy or why his experience as a spy should, somehow, be regarded as representative of the Korean immigrant experience. The book includes some lovely lyrically written passages, some perceptive scenes (those involving the psychiatrist, for example) and some chilling scenes of the modus operandi of the spying operation. But much of this novel is padded and written in a routine prose. I frequently grew impatient with it.
The book aptly describes the travails of immigrants new to the United States, particularly those from Korea. But the immigrant experience has, in general, been described more convincingly in many other novels. In some ways the book seemed to me a not fully successful amalgamation of Ellison's "Invisible Man" as it described the African-American experience and Henry Roth's "Call it Sleep" as itlyrically described the early Jewish immigrant experience through the eyes of a young boy.
Henry Park has a torn, ambivalent attitude towards the United States based upon the difficulties of his life. What stayed with me in the book was the speaker's love for this country, frequently expressed lyrically. For example:
"Americans, one of them would say, are a wonderful and exuberant people. They dance, they play-fight, they puff up their lips and blow out their chests. they enjoy using their hands. They seem to live always at a football match". p. 340
"Still I love it here. I love these streets lined with big American sedans and livery cars and vans. I love the early morning storefronts opening up one by one, shopkeepers talking as they crank their awnings down. ... I follow the strolling Saturday families of brightly wrapped Hindus and then the black-clad Hasidim, and step into all the old churches that were once German and then Korean and are now Vietnamese. And I love the brief Queens sunlight at the end of the day, the warm lamp always reaching though the westward tops of that magnificent city." p.346
"Native Speaker" is a good book. It takes a hard look at the difficulties young Asians may face in the United States. The most moving and compelling part of the story remains, for me, the hope and love it expresses for our country and its promise.
Robin Friedman
Auspicious Literary Debut by a Great American Writer of Fiction December 10, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
For a long time I have resisted reading Chang Rae Lee's "Native Speaker", even though it's been recommended to me by others on numerous occasions. I suppose that resistance is due to my reluctance to embrace fully the work of Asian-American writers, when I see myself as someone who is an American who just happens to be of East Asian descent, and thus, interested in reading what I believe is great American literature. Happily, I have read finally "Native Speaker", which I regard as an auspicious literary debut by a great American writer of fiction. Without question this was among the most memorable novels published by an American author in the 1990s, worthy of comparison to Richard Wright's "Native Speaker" and Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy".
Chang Rae Lee uses the metaphor of espionage to explore the emotional and intellectual complexity of his protagonist Henry Park. We meet Park as he is struggling to cope with his dissolving marriage to an attractive young White American woman, and his rather stoic reaction to the recent unexpected, tragic death of their young son. He finds solace by undertaking undercover work on behalf of a shadowy organization, infiltrating the staff of a popular Korean-American New York City councilman from Queens. Soon he finds himself completely immersed in the politician's corrupt, almost Byzantine, political universe, becoming an active participant in the politician's relationship with his Korean-American community. Lee accomplishes his admirable literary feat of fine writing with a crisp ear for dialogue and splendid, almost lyrical, prose, creating compelling characters like Henry Park and his estranged wife.
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