Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  “I’m not going up there again.”

  “Fine. You could make a gesture, however. For example, he said he has heard nothing from you about what happened at the church. He is very agitated, you know. Patiently he has been waiting. What do you have to say about this?”

  “I’ve been processing it,” I told him.

  “What is there to process?” he cried. “It should be so simple. You see it and you write it down. A prank by schoolboys!”

  “You know what those boys’ lawyers are saying.”

  “Ah!” he groaned. “They will say anything. Do you really believe somebody would trust two eleven-year-olds to disrupt an event? With smoke bombs, no less? Sheer insanity. Who would pay fifty dollars, or five dollars, to little boys to do a man’s job?”

  “I know a man who might.”

  “Ah!” He threw up his hands. “You are becoming a very fine neurotic, my friend.”

  “I have good training.”

  “Perhaps,” Jack said, his feet and hands restless. “Dennis might not agree at this point. He is agitated. I should tell you he looks ill. He is saying the firm is not getting enough business lately. He wants all our present work to get done by the numbers. No more playing around. He is serious. He made a speech to us.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it.”

  “I mean it. For your sake you should know. You know how he wears his anxiety on his sleeve. You can see how terrible he would be out in the field. And he has been privately lecturing the others. Reminding them about the great investment he has made in the business. He passed out a listing of all that he has given up for them. Of course he hates being a technocrat. Pete and the others are so bored with him. They joke and whisper old fart Lear behind his back. I haven’t asked them yet what this means.”

  “It means we’re headed for family trouble,” I said. “The meanest kind.”

  Jack answered, “Not necessarily.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  Jack snorted. “I am too old. I am tired. I just wanted to see your face. If that is a crime. What Dennis wants I won’t quarrel with. You know how I felt at the start of this business. You were not in the right state of mind anymore. Luzan made certain things difficult for you.”

  “Luzan, Luzan.”

  “No jokes. I want to be serious now. Let me be serious with you.” He took a last sip of his tea. “Listen to me. Be quiet and listen. You should have left us then but you started this thing. I suppose it cannot matter now. You are on the assignment. So now I say, see it through. Present your man Kwang. Give Dennis what he is paying you for. Find something he can use. What about these rumors of a money operation? People sending him money. That Spanish kid you name, corner him.”

  “No angle there,” I said. “He’s just a good kid. He’s a mascot. There isn’t anything.” So far Kwang was clean, as far as I knew. There was the street money, certainly, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. And the constant rumors about massive secret contributions to Kwang were nothing I could see.

  “Then perhaps you should go straight home,” Jack said. “Go home to your wife if there is nothing.”

  I said, “Help me, Jack.”

  He waited, opening his arms.

  I asked him, “I want to know if he can be put in danger.”

  “You sound like a rookie,” he said. “This is a rookie interest.”

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  He frowned a little, his melancholic Jack-face. “What can I say? He is a very public figure. Luzan was not. This is not to say I know anything. This is not a nuance. But people think of John Kwang. He is in the language now. The buildings and streets there are written with him. In this sense he exists.”

  I said, “It ought to mean something.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t seem convinced.”

  He looked away from me. “Well, then perhaps you should operate as if he is in danger.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “You know as well as anyone that we are not an answer business.”

  “Jack.”

  “What are you going to do, Parky, hold me down and pummel me?”

  “I may. You have seventy-five pounds on me but I may.”

  Suddenly he looked hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  “I have been tortured before,” he said gravely. “By more persuasive people. Not a sweetheart like you. And they got nothing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it,” he said, but I knew his quick answer, if anything, was just an American convention, an easy idiom. He got up to put on his raincoat but I asked him to stay a little longer. There must have been something desperate or pitiable in my voice, for he slung his coat back over the partition. He said while he was here I might as well go over a few things. Show him the protocol.

  I was supposed to come here every few nights and write out the daily register. As trained, I would follow the journalistic method, naming the who, the what, the where, when, and then very briefly interpret it, offer the how and why of what Kwang did or said. I would then by modem transmit my pages directly to the main-office computer, from which only Hoagland could download files with his password. Jack, being my assignment operator, my wing, was seeing whatever Hoagland let him, which was likely everything. Jack probably knew that the registers I’d been sending were useless. And even they had been growing infrequent. My coverage wasn’t daily anymore, as it had been for the first few weeks. It was more like every other day, or every third, that I sent something.

  I could probably assume that there was the onset of a worry again, concern at the office about good Henry, good Harry, Parky. All my good names. Hoagland had always let everyone there know how good I was at writing the daily register. I wasn’t slick Pete with the subjects, or Jimmy Baptiste when things got rough, or Grace with her nose for the potential mistake or breakdown. I simply wrote textbook examples of our workaday narrative, veritable style sheets that Hoagland even used to remind the other analysts of how it ought to be done. He’d periodically tape them on the wall near the coffeemaker and I’d see graffiti markered across the pages in Pete’s or Jimmy’s laughing hand: Teacher’s pet, and Korean geek, and Oh what talent.

  For a brief time, I even harbored a little pride.

  And sometimes I will write them out now, again, though for myself, those old strokes, unofficial versions of any newcomer I see in the street or on the bus or in the demi-shops of the city, the need in me still to undo the cipherlike faces scrawled with hard work, and no work, and all trouble. The faces of my father and his workers, and Ahjuhma, and the ever-dimming one of my mother. I will write out the face of the young girl I saw only yesterday wearily unloading small sacks of basmati in front of her family’s store, a baby wrapped tightly to her back with a sheet of raw cloth, the very sheet being her shirt, the warm hump now her back, her brother or sister the same thing as her weight.

  Jack and I talked a little while longer before he left. I mentioned how much I had been encountering Kwang. Jack didn’t seem too interested or concerned. He just asked if I liked him. The question struck me as strange, but he spoke in a tone that said it would be natural if I did. I told him as far as I could tell. He brought up nothing else specific. In the sudden quiet I showed him the electronic way I sent in the reports. How we printed them out. He nodded. He clapped my shoulder with fondness and lightly boxed my ear. Perhaps if I had grown up with a father like him I would be a more physical person today. I would have made my answer with a nudge. The smallest pitch of my weight. I would have assured him as I truly wanted, made the necessary offering.

  But I did not. I celebrate every order of silence borne of the tongue and the heart and the mind. I am a linguist of the field. You, too, may know the troubling, expert power. It finds hard expression in the faces of those who would love you most. Lo
ok there now. All you see will someday fade away. To what chill of you remains.

  I steadily entrenched myself in the routines of Kwang’s office. When I wasn’t out working with Janice, I was the willing guy Friday. I let the staffers know through painstaking displays of competence and efficiency that I was serious about the work however menial and clerical, and that I was ready to do what anyone of authority required. I was just the person they were looking for. I answered phones and made plasticene overheads and picked up dry cleaning and kids from day care. I had to show the staff that I possessed native intelligence but not so great a one or of a certain kind that it impeded my sense of duty.

  This is never easy; you must be at once convincing and unremarkable. It takes long training and practice, an understanding of one’s self-control and self-proportion: you must know your effective size in a given situation, the tenor at which you might best speak. Hoagland would talk for hours on the subject. He bemoaned the fact that Americans generally made the worst spies. Mostly he meant whites. Even with methodical training they were inclined to run off at the mouth, make unnecessary displays of themselves, unconsciously slip in the tiniest flourish that could scare off a nervous contact. An off-color anecdote, a laugh in the wrong place. They felt this subcutaneous aching to let everyone know they were a spook, they couldn’t help it, it was like some charge or vanity of the culture, a la James Bond and Maxwell Smart.

  “If I were running a big house like the CIA,” Hoagland said to me once, “I’d breed agents by raising white kids in your standard Asian household. Discipline farms.”

  His Boys from Bushido.

  I told him go ahead. Incubate. See what he got. He’d have platoons of guys like Pete Ichibata deployed about the globe, each too brilliant for his own good, whose primary modes were sorrow and parody. Then, too, regret. Pete makes a good spook but a good spook 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. He’s brought himself forth, self-cesarean. If I see him at all it is the picture of him silently whittling down fruit-wood dowels into the most refined sets of chopsticks, the used-up squares of finishing sandpaper petaling about his desk amid the other detritus of peanut shells and wood shavings and peels of tangerine, the skins of everything he touches compulsively mined, strip-searched.

  His friendly advice on how to handle Luzan was that I actively seek out his weaknesses, expose and use them to take him apart, limb from limb, cell by cell. Pete was a kind of anti-therapist, a professional who steadily ruined you session by session. He was a one-man crisis of faith. He was skilled enough in our work that he didn’t simply listen, watch, wait; he poked and denuded and uncovered secrets while still remaining unextraordinary to the subject, making the subjects dismantle themselves through his care and guidance without their ever realizing it.

  As part of my initial training I watched him work a Chinese graduate student at Columbia. The student was starting a doctorate in electrical engineering. He also organized rallies against the hard-liners in Beijing in the flag plaza of the UN.

  Pete and I were supposedly working with a Japanese daily, the something something Shimbun, Pete the reporter and me in tow taking pictures. Wen Zhou, our subject, his face fleshy like a boy’s, sat quietly for us in his tiny, orderly studio apartment in Morningside Heights. As my rented Nikkormat clicked and whirred, Pete plied him with the expected questions but then in a filial tone smattered with perfect Mandarin asked after his family and his studies and the long way he must feel from home. Pete then smoked a cigarette with him. I kept working the shutter, getting angles we didn’t need, even though I’d long run out of film. The two of them joked about American girls. Pete tried to get me involved but I just grunted when he asked what I thought. Wen shyly said he didn’t know any well but wouldn’t mind meeting one. A date would be fun. He confessed to a fancy for those with reddish hair. Pete laughed and told him he knew a few and they ought to go drinking together and have a fun time, and then he asked Wen if he wasn’t concerned for the safety of his loved ones back in China, with his face and name in the news. Wen said no one immediate, they were all living in Kowloon now, or some other place, but that yes there was one person, a young woman he’d befriended at the national university, a bright and ambitious girl from the southern provinces. He said he had stopped writing to her, so she wouldn’t have any trouble.

  Pete kept on him, talking so gently and sweetly that he seemed all the more furious in his discipline, and I thought he had to be murdering himself inside to hold the line like that. We had been there nearly an hour. In the second hour Wen broke. He opened like the great gates of the Forbidden City. Pete led us inside the walls. We got whole scrolls of names, people both here and in China, and even names of contributors (all of them minor, not even the stuff of trivia) who helped the students by paying for flyers and banners and the renting of meeting halls.

  I was enjoying myself. I was thrilled with what we were doing, as with a discovery, like finding a new place you like, or a good book. I felt explicitly that secret living I’d known throughout my life, but now for the first time it took the form of a bizarre sanction being with Pete and even Wen. We laughed heartily together. We three thieves American. Wen was soon talking without prompts from Pete about his giant China, about the provinces, and poverty, the backwardness of people and leaders. It was both stony and nostalgic, the whole messy text of his homesickness. He liked New York City. The only other place he had been was West Lafayette, Indiana, doing a term of research at Purdue. “I guess I am a Boilermaker.”

  He spoke the sweetest, halting English. Caesurae abounding. He kept saying, “America and Japan strong, but China is the future place.” He retrieved an album from below his sofa bed and showed us pictures of a collective farm where his father grew up, a full page of his grandmother, a shrunken woman with three teeth and skin the color of chestnuts, his mother and father and sister in the middle of Hong Kong harbor on a tour junk, overdressed, looking sea-green. And I thought I heard Pete say to him, “And you’ll be back someday.”

  But then Wen said the name of the girl he loved. I knew immediately that she was doomed. I don’t remember her name, maybe I forgot it instantly when he volunteered the thing. Rather what I recall exactly was Pete’s face, which I caught reconfiguring, lamping up with the day’s first piece of truly useful information. There was a joy there, if oblique, left-handed, and Wen probably thought here was a man with whom he could share a longing. I noticed earlier that Pete hadn’t asked after her when Wen first brought her up. Of course he wasn’t missing anything. Not a step. It’s the simplest finesse, Dennis Hoagland lesson number one, and only effective with virginals like Wen, who would never imagine anything beyond a simple polarity to the world. Positive and negative. You couldn’t fault him, for why would an immense China ever need a third party to reach a person like him, the tiniest of the tiny, so easily forgotten, whom no one ever listened to anyway?

  * * *

  The Kwang job was different. Nobody in the office was a cherry. This was street-level urban politics, conducted house by house, block by block, the work sweaty and inglorious. You could get mugged or beaten up if you strayed down an alley, or knocked on the wrong door. Bravery didn’t matter. Nor raw smarts. You had to be tactical. Suspicious. Ready to admit your losses. Careful with the tongue.

  And as Hoagland always said, “Brave like the gazelle.”

  In truth the setup was perfect for me. I had to agree with Dennis on that one. I didn’t have to manufacture the circumstances in which I could ask questions that would get worthwhile answers. I didn’t have to push too hard. Each day brought scores of regular people and visitors through the offices, and with all the lesser meetings and speeches Kwang attended to weekly, the countless minor moments, I witnessed what ertswhile observers—ant
hropologists and pundits alike—might have called his natural state.

  His human clues. I’d sit in one corner of his office during the three hours on Wednesdays that he opened his door to speak with “walk-ins,” the sundry visitors and neighborhood groups. By noon they’d be lined up in skeins outside the building, all kinds of people, people holding bags and children, people in suits, in smocks.

  I sat in on the meetings with him and took notes. He wanted a record of each person and his or her concerns, and afterward I had to quickly interview them myself for their personal and biographical information. The office kept an electronic database of every voter and potential voter we encountered, and then those who it reached through regular mailers. With this body of files we could sift and sort through the population of the district by gender, race, ethnicity, party affiliation, occupation. We had names and birth dates of their children and relatives. Data on weekly income, what they paid in rent, in utilities, if they were on public assistance, how long. If they had been victims of crime. Their houses of worship. The languages they spoke, in rank of proficiency. The list always growing, profligate. Almost biblical.

  On Fridays, John Kwang took home a stack of double-wide green-and-white printouts to commit to memory. It was something you eventually learned when you worked here: John Kwang was a devotee of memory. I thought it strange, first on the obvious level of why a busy and ambitious politician would devote any amount of time to memorizing lists of people he’d never need to know. Then I wondered if he wasn’t simply odd, nervous. An uptight Korean man. What I eventually saw was that he never intended to know each live body in the district, his purpose wasn’t statistical mastery, although that certainly happened. The memorizing was more a discipline for him, like a serious craft or martial art, a chosen kind of suffering involving hours of practice and concentration by which you gradually came to know yourself.

  Late in the afternoon one Friday I was printing out the newest records in the war room. Kwang must have heard the whine of the machine and looked in. He caught me scanning the sheets. I was always good at memory games, and as a boy I annoyed my father by beating him if he slipped just once. But now, serene with Hoagland’s method, my memory is fantastic, near diabolic. It arrests whatever appears before my eyes. I don’t memorize anymore. I simply see.