Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  But respect is often altered or lost in translation. Here on 39th Avenue of old Queens, in the mixed lot of peoples, respect (and honor and kindness) is a matter of margins, what you can clear on a $13.99 quartz watch, or how much selling it takes to recover when you give one away. I knew that Mr. Baeh would stay open late tonight, maybe for no more of a chance than to catch the dance club overflow a full five hours later, drunk and high kids who might blow a few bucks on one of his gun-metal rings or satin scarves or T-shirts. The other merchants on the block would do the same. The Vietnamese deli, the West Indian takeout. Stay open. Keep the eyes open. You are your cheapest labor. Here is the great secret, the great mystery to an immigrant’s success, the dwindle of irredeemable hours beneath the cheap tube lights. Pass them like a machine. Believe only in chronology. This will be your coin-small salvation.

  The Korean restaurant had two floors. The main floor was for casual diners, lone businessmen and couples and families. The upstairs was reserved for quieter meals and private parties. The tables were all large enough for a small metal hollow to be fitted in their centers. When you order kalbi or bulgogi, a man brings a tin of red-hot coals to set inside the pit of the table. He then places over it a cast-iron grill. The waitress brings a platter of the marinated meat and starts cooking it. She leaves and then comes back with a huge tray of side plates, prepared vegetables and shellfish and seaweed and four or five kinds of kimchee. A basket of fresh lettuce, hot bean paste. Covered metal bowls of rice. She brings Korean beer. A bubbling stone crock of fish stew. She brings more plates, none larger than a hand, and soon the table is completely covered. There must be almost twenty plates. The Korean table is a lesson in plates. You finish the grilling yourself, the way you like it, and then wrap the sweetened meat with rice and paste in leaf lettuce, and eat quickly with your hands.

  The hostess appeared from the coatroom and greeted us with bows. She took our coats. John Kwang walked a few steps with her and said something I couldn’t hear, but she nodded and then led us to an upstairs room.

  She was very lovely. Beautifully colored, if this can be said, the blackness of her hair, the faint blush of her cheek, her lips. And there was a serenity to her expression which I could not decide on, whether it was the face of someone simply a little tired or quelling a sadness. It must be the obvious keeping of secrets that I find so attractive. I watched her as she ascended. Her hair was pulled back and held in a tight bun. She wore a traditional Korean costume, the shortened brocade vest and billowing long skirt in bright yellow and red silk and rainbow bands around the oversized sleeves. It wasn’t an outfit for working, by any means, though the woman moved easily in it.

  The hostess pushed open a wood-and-paper sliding screen to the private room, and inside there was a low Korean-style table and sitting mats and a central ceiling vent for the grill smoke. She bowed again and took away our shoes. I realized she had not spoken a word to us.

  Soon afterward a man wearing a suit came in, speaking effusively in Korean. He carried a tray of porcelain shot glasses and a small bottle of soju, clear liquor made from potatoes. The man, who I realized was the manager and owner, was saying how honored he was for Master Kwang to have come in to his fledgling establishment. He wanted the Master and his protégé to be special guests of his tonight, and hoped the house cuisine would be to our taste.

  Kwang tried to protest but the manager insisted by pouring out two glasses of soju for us. Kwang then leaned forward to offer one to him, but I interceded and poured a third shot from the bottle. We toasted each other and drank. We made several more toasts and it wasn’t until the arrival of the first course of gochoo pajun (hot pepper and scallion fritters) that the manager rose to leave.

  Master Kwang, he said before sliding shut the screen, may your presence here be a blessing to this house as you have been a blessing to our brethren in New York. He bowed several times and backed out and shut the screen.

  Kwang seemed relieved to have him go. He must have had two dozen conversations a day like this. He loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves to eat.

  “You have a family, yes?” Kwang asked, placing a strip of pajun on my dish with his chopsticks.

  “I have a wife.”

  “Is she Korean?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Ah, any children?” he asked, sounding hopeful, like my father once had.

  I shook my head. Then I said, “Once.”

  He looked at me gravely. “I’m sorry, Henry. I don’t mean to pry. You ought to tell me if I am.”

  “You’re not,” I said.

  “Well, I won’t ruin your meal. I didn’t invite you for that.” He poured me more soju. “I just wanted to meet you. Janice gave me a copy of your résumé. You must be smart to have gone to such a good school. I hope the same for my sons. You were born where?”

  “Here.”

  “Yes. As you’ve seen, there aren’t many Koreans working for me aside from the students from CUNY. No adults, as it were, except for you.”

  “I guess I should be an investment banker or lawyer.”

  Kwang laughed. “I’m happy you’re not! Ah, I know that is what all the young Korean Americans are doing. Some in medicine, engineering. Good for them. We need them all to succeed. My wife’s niece, Sara, is already a vice president in mergers and acquistions. She’s only twenty-eight. Whenever I see her she asks if I’m thinking of selling my business. ‘Is there a buyer?’ I asked her last time. ‘Give me eighteen hours,’ she said so seriously. I had to tear away her cellular phone. All she’d have to do is talk half a minute with my accountant to know there’s nothing to interest her. She thinks I’m much bigger than I am. Much bigger. She says if I run for mayor she wants to be comptroller, of all things.”

  “Is she electable?”

  “Eminently,” he answered, smiling. “She’s dynamite.”

  I took the obvious opening. “The real question,” I said to him, “is whether you’re going to run.”

  He replied without looking up from his dish. “The papers seem to think so.”

  This was true. I had read numerous editorials in the last few months that had questioned De Roos’ interest in genuinely improving the city, suggesting that he had grown comfortable and cynical and out of touch with his job, being now in his second term. Assuming a third. But the feeling was that the city was beginning to buckle under its burdens. Businesses were relocating to New Jersey because of high taxes and crime. There was a string of deadly subway accidents. Some schools were spending more on metal detectors than on lab equipment. There were no neighborhoods—even on the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan—that were safe. De Roos, suddenly, was looking as if he had been asleep at the wheel. The editorialists suggested John Kwang, among others, as someone who could bring a fresh face to confront the city’s ills, a politician who could better understand the needs of the rapidly changing populace.

  Mostly, it was the season’s language. Kwang, it was easy to see, was already running into his first real troubles. The press was having a field day. They had multiple boycotts to cover. Vandalism. Street-filling crowds of chanting blacks. Heavily armed Koreans. Fires in the night. The pictures were the easiest 11 P.M. drama. Nothing John Kwang could say or do would win him praise. His sympathy for either side was a bias for one. He couldn’t even speak out against the obvious violence and destruction, after black groups had insisted they were “demonstrations” against the callousness of Korean merchants and the unjust acquittal of the Korean storeowner who’d shot and killed Saranda Harlans. The papers and television stations were starting to go back and forth with “information” and “statements.” Reporters talked to anyone on the street. What I was noticing most was the liberty they took with the Koreans. A reporter cornered some grocer in an apron, or a woman in the door of her shop, both of them looking drawn and weary. The lighting was too harsh. The Koreans stood there, uneasy, trying to explain diff
icult notions in a broken English. Spliced into the news stories, sound-bited, they always came off as brutal, heartless. Like human walls.

  “Sometimes I have serious thoughts about running,” he said, pausing now from the eating. He leaned forward on the table with his forearms. “But I’m suspicious. It’s usually after some round of clamor. That’s not a good sign, obviously. I find myself getting caught up. When others construct and model you favorably, it’s easy to let them keep at it, even if they start going off in ways that aren’t immediately comfortable or right. This is the challenge for us Asians in America. How do you say no to what seems like a compliment? From the very start we don’t wish to be rude or inconsiderate. So we stay silent in our guises. We misapply what our parents taught us. I’m as guilty as anyone. For instance, this talk that I’m the one to revitalize the Democratic party in New York.”

  “That’s the mayor’s secret mission,” I replied. De Roos had been pushing this angle since the last campaign. He had an idea to remake the image of the local party machinery. He himself had mentioned John Kwang as a part of that vanguard, though his implication was then cast only in terms of succession. “But people think that the shoe fits better on you.”

  “In theory,” John said, “all in theory.” By the tone of his voice I thought he was going to drop the subject, but he downed his soju and filled both our cups again. His voice cracked with the fume of the liquor. “But the fact is, Henry, that it’s a one-party system. We only need one party.”

  “What party is that?”

  “It’s the party of jobs and safe streets and education. These are the issues. Are you for them or against them? Please nod. Good. Of course you are. Every politician in this city wants the same things. And the people know very well any one politician can only do so much. So what’s left is that we set out to capture their imagination. We let them think that change will come to their lives. How many politicians have walked through the Carver housing projects in the last twenty-five years? How many rallies and speeches have been made there? How many words of hope have been spoken? And what does it still look like? Would you live there for any price? Generations have been lost in those buildings. Thousands of people. A black mayor couldn’t change that. What can a Korean do for them?”

  “Still, black groups should be supporting you,” I said. “I can’t think of any other prominent officials who are minorities.”

  “Some of the organizations do,” he answered. “The church community seems open to talking. That’s why I’m going to meet them next week, and not with more political groups. The NAACP has invited me to certain forums but I feel token there. Everybody is hesitant, cautious. They study me carefully. I can see they’re not sure if I’ll promote an agenda that suits them. I can support social programs, school lunches, homeless housing, free clinics, but if I mention the first thing about special enterprise zones or more openness toward immigrants I’m suddenly off limits. Or worse, I’m whitey’s boy. It’s a grave reaction. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”

  “It’s still a black-and-white world.”

  “It seems so, Henry, doesn’t it? Thirty years ago it certainly was. I remember walking these very streets as a young man, watching the crowds and demonstrations. I felt welcomed by the parades of young black men and women. A man pulled me right out from the sidewalk and said I should join them. I did. I went along. I tried to feel what they were feeling. How could I know? I had visited Louisiana and Texas and I sat where I wished on buses, I drank from whatever fountain was nearest. No one ever said anything. One day I was coming out of a public bathroom in Fort Worth and a pretty white woman stopped me and pointed and said that the Colored in the sign meant black and Mexican. She smiled very kindly and told me I was very light-skinned. ‘Orientals’ were okay in those parts, except maybe the kind from the Philippines. I remember saying thank you and bowing. She gave me a mint from her purse and welcomed me to the United States. What did I know? I didn’t speak English very well, and like anyone who doesn’t I mostly listened. But back here, the black power on the streets! Their songs and chants! I thought this is America! They were so young and awesome, so truly powerful, if only in themselves, no matter what anybody said.”

  I told him how I was too young to understand any of it. How my father never bothered with what was happening. He got passionate only once, when he got angry that a young teacher let us out early the day they arrested Bobby Seale. My father was like Mr. Beah. So focused on his own life. He couldn’t understand anything about rights. “What a big noise,” he’d mutter at the television. Egoh joem ba, tihgee seki-nohm mehnnal nahwandah. Look at this, every day these black sons of bitches show up. He’d shake his head slowly, as if to say, Useless. The sole right he wanted was to be left alone, unmolested by the IRS and corrupt city inspectors and street criminals, so he could just run his stores.

  Kwang nodded, beckoning me to eat and drink. I noticed that his gestures were becoming tighter than before, that somehow he appeared more calm and ordered, which seemed to me unusual, given how we were drinking.

  “Who can blame him?” he said loudly. “Your father’s world was you and your mother. He didn’t have time for the troubles of white and black people. It was their problem. None of it was his doing. He was new to the situation. The rights people could say to him, ‘We’re helping you, too, raising you up with us,’ but how did he ever see that in practice?”

  “He wouldn’t have looked if they had,” I said.

  “Don’t be so hard on your father,” he quickly answered. He cleared his throat. “Likely, I know, you are right. But I understand his feeling more than I ever have. Everyone can see the landscape is changing. Soon there will be more brown and yellow than black and white. And yet the politics, especially minority politics, remain cast in terms that barely acknowledge us. It’s an old syntax. People still vote for what they think they want; they’re calling on a bright memory of a time that has gone, rather than voting for and demanding what they need for their children. They’re still living in the glow of civil rights furor. There’s valuable light there, but little heat. And if I don’t receive the blessing of African Americans, am I still a minority politician? Who is the heavy now? I’m afraid that the world isn’t governed by fiends and saints but by ten thousand dim souls in between. I am one of them. Lately I’ve been feeling like the great enemy of the oppressed. You look knowledgeable for your years, Henry. You have a kind face. You should know, how there must be a way to speak truthfully and not be demonized or made a traitor.”

  “Very softly,” I said to him, offering the steady answer of my life. “And to yourself.”

  Steadily the other dishes were brought in, a half dozen or so of them, one varied and progressive course. Koreans like to taste everything at once, have it all out on the table, flagrantly mixing the flavors. Sashimi, spicy soup, the grilled meat, fried fish. More soju. He poured as I grilled. He obviously wasn’t a drinker, I mean a drinker in the way I’d seen real drinkers, which is to say the liquor was beginning to affect him in a manner I couldn’t predict or call. Old Stew might rant, he might take you by the collar, become belligerent, even stumble on the stairs when going to sleep, but none of it was a surprise. A man like that was eminently navigable. From the first glass you could see the whole dark trip of his evenings, every black jetty, every cove.

  But John Kwang was affecting me. A good rule of thumb when you drink with a subject is that you keep yourself twice as sober as he is. Jack calls it the Taxi Rule. This means that you can get drunk, for the sake of building ambience and camaraderie (and for your own taut nerves), but still keep in mind that you haven’t done right if you don’t eventually bear him home. Call a taxi and tuck him in. Tonight I was working unscrupulously. I usually abstained completely on the job, much less matched a subject shot for shot. But soon I found myself pouring the drinks, too, joking with him for no other reason but to share a simple pleasure. We flirted with our tw
o waitresses, making them stay a moment and have a drink with us. I rapped on the table when one of them downed three quick shots in a row. I thought I saw Kwang nip the other waitress’s ankle with his finger and thumb. She sat next to him on the floormat and drank with him. After a while they both scolded us and thanked us and curtsied before they left, laughing. Somehow we got on to the idea of making a toast to our absent wives.

  “To Lee,” I said first, clinking Kwang’s cup too hard. “The person who taught me how to curse out loud. And mean it.”

  “To my perfect May,” he responded. “Who has never cursed or sworn, even in her mind.”

  We grew quiet then. There is always the slenderest remorse after any fanfare. We ate the food in near silence, the Korean family way, bent over the steaming crocks and dishes like scribing monks.

  I can see this only now, reinvent it in this present time, for in some moments then, I don’t know how long, exactly, I forgot the entirety of what I was doing. I lost—or better, misplaced—the very reason why I was there, in that papered room, sharing food with him. I could look at him and see little save his movements, expressions, the mundane sounds of his eating. The unburnished, happy surface of a man. Unmysterious. There was nothing to report, certainly, nothing worth commentary. But Hoagland would have wanted me to continue pushing him, to extend the evening’s narrative to its logical and fitting end. I know where and how a story should go, for I have been educated and trained at the greatest expense; though even a novice could see that John Kwang was in a vulnerable position, the way Wen had been for Pete. It’s as simple as picking a ten-dollar bill off the street. Act like it’s yours. Now propel him toward the finish.