Just stay in the background. Be unapparent and flat. Speak enough so they can hear your voice and come to trust it, but no more, and no one will think twice about who you are. The key is to make them think just once. (44)
Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker Henry met Dennis Hoagland outside the career services office by chance.
Hoagland is the head of Glimmer and Company, a firm that shadows and investigates people. The company indeed provides Henry a good excuse to live with inauthentic identity. As Tina Chen comments, “Henry’s spying is a metaphor for his uneasy position as a Korean American trying to figure out his place in American society”
(638). Regardless of his American birth, Henry still hopes to make himself more American via assimilation, yet he is constantly bewildered by his Korean ethnicity, which leads to a sense of disorientation for his identity. Hoagland and his company miraculously appear on the horizon to relieve his inner hesitation and anxiety. As Henry narrates, “the firm had conveniently appeared at the right time, offering the perfect vocation for the person I was . . . I found a sanction from our work, for I thought I had finally found my truest place in the future” (Native Speaker 127). He feels destined to go into the spy business, for “he considers his marginal position in American culture as one that easily translates into the spy’s marginalized status as ‘the secret observer.’” (Chen 645). By means of the spook task, he can not only take advantage of his outsider status as a Korean American but also evade his identity problem for the time being. This is because the job trains him how to play multiple roles and, more importantly, how to neglect “how others perceive him and how he sees himself,” just through the effect of theatrical realism (Chen 638).
In her article, Chen points out the result of the potential situation of realism employed in any performances. She states,
In theatrical performance, realism has been decried as a dangerous practice, primarily because of its potential to interpellate an audience into a passive subject position. The potential of realism to imprison a spectator’s
imagination stems both from the vision of authenticity and authority that it presents to an audience as well as from the methods of representation it employs. Thus, critics have identified the dramatic conventions associated with realism as ones that subtly compel the spectator to occupy a viewing position that implicitly accepts the ‘truth’ of that which is presented.
(651-52).
Henry’s work in the company is to primarily investigate those who are ethnic Americans like him, focusing on Koreans and other Asians. Owing to the fact of his yellow appearance and minority identity, the people whom he investigates will easily believe in the roles he enacts, just like what he narrates—“I had always thought that I could be anyone, perhaps several anyones at once” (Native Speaker 127). However, the false truth he creates not only “command[s] the belief of his witnesses, witting[ly]
and unwitting[ly], [but] also manages to lose himself in his roles” (Chen 652). Here
“lose himself in his roles” is a pun. In order to have his assignment favorable and successful, Henry does nothing but well convince others of his impersonation, that is, he can melt into the life of each and every one character that he has created. What is more, living with a fake identity and a different name makes him ignore how others think about his Asian blood, which is mentioned by Tina Chen. She argues that
“Henry’s position as a minority subject compels his awareness of the ways in which his professional voyeurism shadows how he himself is observed and defined” (646).
In the meantime, living with an imaginary identity also gets him to overlook the query of his identity. Namely, he melts into his own identity, truly losing himself in the created roles. “[A] good spook,” according to his explanation, “has no brothers, no
sisters, no father or mother. He’s intentionally lost that huge baggage, those
encumbering remnants of blood and flesh, and because of this he carries no memory of a house, no memory of a land, he seems to have emerged from nowhere” (Native Speaker 173). Out of these words, he implicitly explicates that his Korean descent
seems to be an oppressive burden. It is only through the spy work that he can forget what he is and that he is liberated from the ambivalence of his “Korean” or
“American” identity.
After getting married to Lelia, he still keeps the job, and continues with his inauthentic life. Due to this marriage, nevertheless, he appears to integrate into the white mainstream more. Won Yong-Jin has mentioned that “[t]he increasing number of intermarriages between white Americans and Asian-Americans is applauded as an ultimate marker of whiteness” (59). When telling his father with regard to their marriage, Henry is so astonished by his father’s calm approval. This is because he always thinks that Henry should find a mate of their own race (Native Speaker 58).
Yet, his father changes his mind after he has encountered the language barriers, the bullies at his store, along with other acts of discrimination from other whites. He learns that it is better for their life to have relationship to a white society. This is because having a connection with whites symbolizes that they are indeed accepted by and melt into this white society. As a result, he is used to telling his friends proudly in English that Lelia is his daughter. And he likes to show her around at the store because she is white (Native Speaker 57-58). As far as their marriage is concerned, Henry’s father even reads it as a tactic for his smooth future life, which can be sensed from Henry’s narration—“I think he had come to view our union logically, practically, and perhaps he thought he saw through my intentions, the assumption being that Lelia and her family would help me make my way in the land” (Native Speaker 58). However, for Henry, the marriage seems to be a union simply for love, a connection between
two different races. The product of their love, Mitt, can be thought of as a bridge of the two nations, Korea and the US. Based on Ludwig’s interpretation, “[Mitt is] the living being who overcame ethnic, racial, cultural, and language barriers, the perfect synthesis that couldn’t be” (237). Aside from this, he can be considered a link between the older and the newer generations as well. Mitt gets along well with his grandfather. His grandfather also takes advantage of the chance to pass down Korean traditions so that he can know something about his father’s land.11 This would be viewed as a sort of acculturation to make sure that within American education some Korean traditions can be still kept in Mitt’s mind. However, the bridge topples after the demise of Mitt. At the same time, the bereavement causes Henry’s alienation as well (Ludwig 236). Mitt’s passing away seems to make Henry lose the future aim he needs to struggle for. After Mitt’s death, he still pays attention to his spy task and lives with false identity, without letting Lelia know what he does. His wife also feels
something wrong with his job, but he does not want to reveal anything to her at all.
Thus, she cannot endure anymore and chooses to leave him. “Lelia’s departure,” as Ludwig comments, “triggers a certain instability in Henry Park’s professional performance” (226). That is, Lelia can be comprehended as a significant factor for Henry’s Bildung. In addition to Lelia, Emile Luzan and John Kwang are also critical to the development of Henry’s awakening, which further pushes Henry to wonder if he should quit the spy job.