Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  When the printing was done I folded the sheaf in half so it would fit inside his briefcase. He took it graciously. He said nothing as I helped him with his light overcoat. I was ready for him to ask me what my interest in the printout was but instead he said if I wasn’t busy he would like me to come have drink and good food with him. That was how he said it, drink and good food. Certain things he still expressed with a foreigner’s simplicity. May and the boys were upstate for the week at their house on Cayuga Lake, and he said he wasn’t in the mood to eat by himself. It was a strange thing to hear from a Korean man, and I wondered what circumstance would have had to arise for my father to profess openly a feeling like that.

  “Learning the business, I see,” John finally said, affably. We were walking outside. “In past times, a person’s education was a matter of what he could remember. It still is in Korea and Japan. I must assume in China as well. Americans like to believe this is the great failing of Asia. Why the Japanese are good at copying and not inventing, which is no longer really true, if it ever was. I had a teacher who made us memorize scores of classical Chinese and Korean poems. We had to recite any one of them on command. He was hoping to give us knowledge, but what he actually impressed upon us was a legacy. He would smack the top of your head if you hadn’t perfectly prepared the assignment, but then later in the class he could be overcome after reading a poem aloud.”

  He stopped to unlock the door for me. He drove a new Lincoln Continental. I noticed that he drove several different cars as well, and then only American models; a politician, especially an Asian American one, doesn’t have a choice in the matter. He had interests in car dealerships and a local chain of electronics stores, in addition to his core business of selling high-end dry-cleaning equipment.

  “Young Master Lim,” he said. “He was becoming a respected writer when the war broke out. We later heard that he was killed in the fighting. Sometime before the school was closed he said it was our solemn duty to act as vessels for our country and civilization, that we must give ourselves over to what had come before us, as much to literature as we did to our parents and ancestors. You look like him, I think. Around the eyes. Thick lidded.”

  “My mother’s,” I said.

  “Ah. You know, Henry, why they’re so? They’re thick to keep the spirit warm and contented.”

  “I don’t know if my mother would have said they worked,” I told him.

  “How about for you?” he asked.

  I laughed a little bit and said, “They work perfectly.”

  We joked a little more, I thought like regular American men, faking, dipping, juking. I found myself listening to us. For despite how well he spoke, how perfectly he moved through the sounds of his words, I kept listening for the errant tone, the flag, the minor mistake that would tell of his original race. Although I had seen hours of him on videotape, there was something that I still couldn’t abide in his speech. I couldn’t help but think there was a mysterious dubbing going on, the very idea I wouldn’t give quarter to when I would speak to strangers, the checkout girl, the mechanic, the professor, their faces dully awaiting my real speech, my truer talk and voice. When I was young I’d look in the mirror and address it, as if daring the boy there; I would say something dead and normal, like, “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” and I could barely convince myself that it was I who was talking.

  We hit the Friday night street traffic on 39th Avenue going west toward Corona. The restaurant was a dozen or so blocks farther than that, near Elmhurst, a new Korean barbecue house. He talked steadily through the stop and go, freely using his hands to punctuate his speech, the movements subtle but stylized, what I recognized as Anglo. The boycotts of Korean grocers were spreading from Brooklyn to other parts of the city, to black neighborhoods in the Bronx and even in his home borough, in the Williamsburg section, and then also in upper Manhattan. Though he wasn’t having trouble in his own neighborhoods, he was being hounded by the media for statements and opinions on the mayor’s handling of them, particularly the first riot in Brownsville, where a mostly black crowd, watched over by a handful of police, looted and arsoned a Korean-owned grocery.

  “De Roos has positioned himself in the situation very skillfully,” he said. “He denounces the violence but has Chillingsworth nearby to take the heat for letting things get out of hand. He has his lieutenants leak his concern about Chillingsworth’s decision making but then in public says he stands behind ‘the commissioner’s expertise and judgment.’”

  Roy Chillingsworth was the police commissioner. He’d worked in New Orleans and Dade County, Florida, before being hired by De Roos early in the present term. He was a prosecuting attorney by training. He had a reputation for being tough on drug dealers and gangs and illegal immigrants. And he was black.

  “No one ultimately faults the commissioner,” Kwang said. “There weren’t any deaths or injuries. Given that, it’s almost acceptable that he didn’t order in more police to arrest his own people. The mayor himself didn’t lose any black confidence or votes. Perhaps he even gained some. All along, he offered himself as a model of liberal reaction, which is initially fascination and disdain, but then relief. It’s a race war everyone can live with. Blacks and Koreans somehow seem meant for trouble in America. It was long coming. In some ways we never had a chance. But then, Henry, I imagine that you know these difficulties firsthand.”

  He knew my father had run vegetable stores in the city. I knew that Kwang might hear of this when I told Eduardo, given how close they seemed to be. I wasn’t overly concerned in the beginning—nor were Dennis and Jack, for that matter—that I was employing my own life as material for my alter identity. Though to a much lesser extent, a certain borrowing is always required in our work. But this assignment made it, in fact, quite necessary to allow for more than the usual trade. When the line between identities is fine (and the situation is not dangerous), it’s preferable not to build up a whole other, nearly parallel legend.

  This, Jack had once told me, was the source of my troubles with Emile Luzan. Inconsistencies began to arise in crucial details, all of which I inexplicably confused and alternated. From the soft stuffed chair of his office I told the kind brown-faced doctor that my son had suffocated while playing alone with a plastic garbage bag, or that my American girlfriend was conducting extended research in Europe, or that my father had recently taken a second wife; and then in another session, in another week, I might tell him another set of near-truths, forget my conflations and hidings and offer him whatever lay immediately within my grasp.

  Luzan himself was afraid I was unraveling. He held my hand to comfort me. He eventually recommended a course of medication. But for me it was simply loose, terrible business. The kind of display my father would not have tolerated in any member of his family. It would have sickened him.

  Nobody give two damn about your problem or pain, he might say. You just take care yourself. Keep it quiet.

  I didn’t have to tell John Kwang the first thing about my father and our life, at least in relation to what he was talking about. I told him what my ah-boh-jee had done for work. Simply, it felt good not having to explain any further. To others you need to explain so much to get across anything worthwhile. It’s not like a flavor that you can offer and have someone simply taste. The problem, you realize, is that while you have been raised to speak quietly and little, the notions of where you come from and who you are need a maximal approach. I used to wish that I were more like my Jewish and Italian friends, or even the black kids who hung out in front of my father’s stores; I was envious of how they’d speak so confidently, so jubilantly celebrate the fact with their hands and hips and tongues, letting it all hang out (though of course in different ways) for anybody who’d look and listen.

  As we passed the rows of Korean stores on the boulevard, John could tell me the names of the owners and previous owners. Mr. Kim, before him Park, Hong, then Cho, Im, Noh, Mrs. Yi. He hi
mself once ran a wholesale shop on this very row, long before all of it became Korean in the 1980s. He sold and leased dry-cleaning machines and commercial washers and dryers, only high-end equipment. He expanded quickly from the little neighborhood business, the street-front store, for he had mastered enough language to deal with non-Korean suppliers and distributors in other cities and Europe. Other Koreans depended on him to find good deals and transact them. Suddenly, he existed outside the intimate community of his family and church and the street where he conducted his commerce. He wasn’t bound to 600 square feet of ghetto retail space like my father, who more or less duplicated the same basic store in various parts of the city. Those five stores defined the outer limit of his ambition, the necessary end of what he could conceive for himself. I am not saying that my father was not a remarkable and clever man, though I know of others like him who have reached farther into the land and grabbed hold of every last advantage and opportunity. My father simply did his job. Better than most, perhaps.

  Kwang, though, kept pushing, adding to his wholesale stores by eventually leasing plants in North Carolina to assemble in part the machines he sold for the Italian and German manufacturers. He bought into car and electronics dealerships, too, though it was known that some of the businesses had been troubled in recent years, going without his full attention. The rumor was that he’d lost a few million at least. But he seemed to have plenty left. At the age of forty-one he started attending Fordham full-time for his law and business degrees. I have seen pictures of the graduation day hung about his house, Kwang and his wife, May, smiling in the bright afternoon light, bear-hugging each other. He passed the bar immediately, though I know he never intended to practice the law or big corporate business. He wanted the credentials. But that sounds too cynical of him, which would be all wrong. He wasn’t vulnerable to that kind of pettiness. He was old-fashioned enough that he believed he needed proper intellectual training and expertise before he could serve the public.

  “Henry,” he said, “over there, on the far corner.” There were two men talking and pointing at each other in the open street display of a wristwatch and handbag store. The lighted sign read H&J ENTERPRISES, with smaller Korean characters on the ends. He pulled us over and I followed him out.

  The owner recognized Kwang immediately, and stopped arguing with the other man and quickly bowed. The man was shaking a gold-toned watch: it had stopped working and he wanted his money back. The Korean explained to us that he only gave exchanges, no refunds, he seemed to say again for all, pointing continually at the sign that said so by the door. Besides, he told Kwang in Korean, this man bought the watch many months ago, during the winter, and he was being generous enough in offering him another one. He added, You know how these blacks are, always expecting special treatment.

  Kwang let the statement pass. He introduced himself to the man, telling him he was a councilman. He asked the man if he had bought other things at the store.

  “I stop here every couple weeks,” the man answered. “Maybe pick out something for my wife.”

  “One time a muhnt!” the Korean insisted.

  The man shook his head and mouthed, “Bullshit.” He explained he’d originally come to get an exchange, but the owner was so rude and hard to understand (intentionally, he thought) that he decided to demand a full refund instead. He wasn’t going to leave until he got one. He showed us the receipt. Kwang nodded and then gestured for the storekeeper to speak with him inside the store. I waited outside with the customer. I remember him particularly well because his name, Henry, was embossed on a tag clipped to his shirt pocket. When I told him my name he smiled weakly and looked in the store for Kwang. I didn’t say anything else and he coughed and adjusted his glasses and said he was tired and frustrated and just wanted his money or an exchange so he could get on home. He was a salesman at the big discount office furniture store off 108th Street.

  “I don’t know why I keep shopping here,” he said to me, searching the wares in the bins. “It’s mostly junk anyway. My wife kind of enjoys the jewelry, though, and it’s pretty inexpensive, I suppose. Buying a watch here was my mistake. I should know better. Thirteen ninety-nine. And I know I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  We laughed a little. Henry explained that it was easy to stop here on Fridays to buy something for his wife, a pair of earrings or a bracelet. “She works real hard all week and I like to give her a little present, to let her know I know what’s going on.” She was a registered nurse. He showed me a five-dollar set of silver earrings. “I was gonna buy these, but I don’t know, you don’t expect anybody to be nice anymore, but that man in there, he can be cold.”

  I didn’t try to explain the store owner to Henry, or otherwise defend him. I don’t know what stopped me. Maybe there was too much to say. Where to begin?

  Certainly my father ran his stores with an iron attitude. It was amazing how successful he still was. He generally saw his customers as adversaries. He disliked the petty complaints about the prices, especially from the customers in Manhattan. “Those millionaires is biggest trouble,” he often said when he got home. “They don’t like anybody else making good money.” He hated explaining to them why his prices were higher than at other stores, even the other Korean ones, though he always did. He would say without flinching that his produce was simply the best. The freshest. They should shop at other stores and see for themselves. He tried to put on a good face, but it irked him all the same.

  With blacks he just turned to stone. He never bothered to explain his prices to them. He didn’t follow them around the aisles like some storekeepers do, but he always let them know there wasn’t going to be any funny business here. When a young black man or woman came in—old people or those with children in tow didn’t seem to alarm him—he took his broom and started sweeping at the store entrance very slowly, deliberately, not looking at the floor. He wouldn’t make any attempt to hide what he was doing. At certain stores there were at least two or three incidents a day. Shoplifting, accusations of shoplifting, complaints and arguments. Always arguments.

  To hear those cries now: the scene a stand of oranges, a wall of canned ham. I see my father in his white apron, sleeves rolled up. A woman in a dirty coat. They lean in and let each other have it, though the giving is almost in turns. It’s like the most awful and sad opera, the strong music of his English, then her black English; her colorful, almost elevated, mocking of him, and his grim explosions. They fight like lovers, scarred, knowing. Their song circular and vicious. For she always comes back the next day, and so does he. It’s like they are here to torture each other. He can’t afford a store anywhere else but where she lives, and she has no other place to buy a good apple or a fresh loaf of bread.

  In the end, after all those years, he felt nothing for them. Not even pity. To him a black face meant inconvenience, or trouble, or the threat of death. He never met any blacks who measured up to his idea of decency; of course he’d never give a man like Henry half a chance. It was too risky. He personally knew several merchants who had been killed in their stores, all by blacks, and he knew of others who had shot or killed someone trying to rob them. He had that one close call himself, of which he never spoke.

  For a time, he tried not to hate them. I will say this. In one of his first stores, a half-wide fruit and vegetable shop on 173rd Street off Jerome in the Bronx, he hired a few black men to haul and clean the produce. I remember my mother looking worried when he told her. But none of them worked out. He said they either came to work late or never and when they did often passed off fruit and candy and six-packs of beer to their friends. Of course, he never let them work the register.

  Eventually, he replaced them with Puerto Ricans and Peruvians. The “Spanish” ones were harder working, he said, because they didn’t speak English too well, just like us. This became a kind of rule of thumb for him, to hire somebody if they couldn’t speak English, even blacks from Haiti or Ethiopia, because he figure
d they were new to the land and understood that no one would help them for nothing. The most important thing was that they hadn’t been in America too long.

  I asked Henry instead if he had known of Kwang before. He didn’t, not caring much for politics or politicians. “But you know,” he said, “he’s not like all the other Koreans around here, all tense and everything.”

  When they returned, the shop owner approached Henry and nodded very slightly, in the barest bow, and offered him another watch, this one boxed in clear plastic. “I give you betteh one!” he said, indicating the higher price on the sticker. “Puh-rease accept earring too. Pfor your wifuh. No chargeh!”

  Henry looked confused and was about to decline when John Kwang reached over and vigorously shook his hand, pinning the jewelry there. “This is a gift,” he said firmly. “Mr. Baeh would like you to accept it.”

  Henry shook our hands and left for home. As we waited for the traffic to pass so we could pull away from the curb, I saw Baeh inside his tiny store shaking his head as he quickly hung handbags. Every third or fourth one he banged hard against the plastic display grid. He wouldn’t look back out at us. Kwang saw him, too. We drove a few blocks before he said anything.

  “He knows what’s good for us is good for him,” Kwang said grimly. “He doesn’t have to like it. Right now, he doesn’t have any choice.”

  At the time I didn’t know what Kwang meant by that last notion, what kind of dominion or direct influence he had over people like Baeh. I only considered the fact of his position and stature in the community as what had persuaded the storekeeper to deal fairly with Henry. I assumed Baeh was honoring the traditional Confucian structure of community, where in each village a prominent elder man heard the townspeople’s grievances and arbitrated and ruled. Though in that world Baeh would have shown displeasure only in private. He would have acted as the dutiful younger until the wise man was far down the road.