Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  Lelia is working again, but now only freelancing. I’m at home two days during the week, working the weekends because Kwang and Janice Pawlowsky need me for the trips, for the talks and luncheons, for meeting the press. If Lelia’s busy in the studio with a student I’ll answer phones for her and schedule appointments and make lunches of soup and sandwiches for all of us.

  Children visit us daily. They’re young, ages three and up, and on the whole they’re funny in the face, not so much in proportion as in use. Or ill use. The little chins, the lips, the eyes, they’re tentative organs on these kids, almost as if they’re optional equipment. Lelia greets them at the door and they shuffle in on the legs of their mothers, and then they quickly walk to the speech studio Lelia’s set up at the alley end of the loft, where there’s a soundproofed sliding wall to push back.

  Lelia decorates the studio with colored butcher paper and animal posters and cutouts her students make. You see her hand-drawn illustrations of the human mouth, the tongue, the upper and lower palates, the uvula. Her strokes are broad and gentle, the colors muted; Lelia says anatomically correct pictures give the kids nightmares.

  Maws, I say. She says don’t let them hear you joke and pinches me, but she knows my own history with speech therapists. She knows how I was raised by language experts, saved from the wild.

  Lelia has cookies and juice ready for the kids and coffee for the adults, who usually leave after five minutes. They’ll return in an hour and a half. The children remain. Sometimes, when the door shuts, I hear some of them cry. They can all do that.

  Presently three of her dozen or so students are Asian. One has a problem with her ears. Her words come out all blunted, edgeless. She sounds as if she’s speaking behind a wall of water. Mahler, she will say, meaning something else we can’t figure out.

  The other two are Laotian boys who as far as anyone can tell are perfectly fine. They come today, their fathers bringing them this time. The public school has to farm them out to Lelia because it doesn’t have enough staff. The boys seem happy. They keep slapping each other about the head, pinching noses, pulling ears and eyebrows. They speak a rudimentary English—milk, pee-pee, cookie—but have trouble with words like onion and union. They don’t seem to care. They want to play. Lelia recognizes this, too, and they all gallop on broomsticks while they recite an old nursery rhyme. Maybe this will work, Lelia says to me, hopping in her turn. Sing, she tells them, let’s all sing the song.

  Will they remember the verse? I still know the one that ancient chalk-white woman taught me with a polished fruitwood stick. Mrs. Albrecht was her name, her bony hands smelling of diapers.

  “Henry Park,” her voice would quiver. “Please recite our favorite verse.” I’d choke, stumble inside myself. And this was her therapy, struck in sublime meter on my palms and the backs of my calves:

  Till, like one in slumber bound,

  Borne to ocean, I float down, around,

  Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound . . .

  Peanut Butter Shelley, I’d murmur beneath my breath, unable to remember all the poet’s womanly names. It was my first year of school, my first days away from the private realm of our house and tongue. I thought English would be simply a version of our Korean. Like another kind of coat you could wear. I didn’t know what a difference in language meant then. Or how my tongue would tie in the initial attempts, stiffen so, struggle like an animal booby-trapped and dying inside my head. Native speakers may not fully know this, but English is a scabrous mouthful. In Korean, there are no separate sounds for L and R, the sound is singular and without a baroque Spanish trill or roll. There is no B and V for us, no P and F. I always thought someone must have invented certain words to torture us. Frivolous. Barbarian. I remember my father saying, Your eyes all led, staring at me after I’d smoked pot the first time, and I went to my room and laughed until I wept.

  I will always make bad errors of speech. I remind myself of my mother and father, fumbling in front of strangers. Lelia says there are certain mental pathways of speaking that can never be unlearned. Sometimes I’ll still say riddle for little, or bent for vent, though without any accent and so whoever’s present just thinks I’ve momentarily lost my train of thought. But I always hear myself displacing the two languages, conflating them—maybe conflagrating them—for there’s so much rubbing and friction, a fire always threatens to blow up between the tongues. Friction, affliction. In kindergarten, kids would call me “Marble Mouth” because I spoke in a garbled voice, my bound tongue wrenching itself to move in the right ways.

  “Yo, China boy,” the older black kids would yell at me across the blacktop, “what you doin’ there, practicin’?”

  Of course I was. I would rewhisper all the words and sounds I had messed up earlier that morning, trying to invoke how the one girl who always wore a baby-blue cardigan would speak.

  “Thus flies foul our fearless night owl,” she might say, the words forming so punctiliously on her lips, her head raised and neck straight and her eyes fixed on our teacher. Alice Eckles. I adored and despised her height and beauty and the oniony sheen of her skin. I knew she looked just like her parents—lanky, washed-out, lipless—and that when she spoke to them they answered her in the same even, lowing rhythm of ennui and supremacy she lorded over us.

  Alice used to sneer at me when I left our class for my special daily period upstairs. The class was Remedial Speech, and I accepted my own presence there if only because of the very trouble I had pronouncing it. The other students were misfits, they all seemed to have dirty hair and oversized mouths and shrunken foreheads and in my estimation were as dumb as the dead. By association, though, so was I. We were the school retards, the mentals, the losers who stuttered or could explode in rage or wet their pants or who just couldn’t say the words.

  In truth, the fact that you were in the class likely meant you came from a difficult background, homes where parents fought or took drugs or beat their kids or maybe spoke a foreign language. A few had genuine problems with their mouths or their ears, but the rest of us, we were sent there by the grace of either too much institutional frustration or goodwill.

  The teacher was a young woman in her early twenties, straight brown hair, freckles, with a name like Miss Haven or Havishaw. She never struck us like Mrs. Albrecht did, she was actually very quiet, seemingly shoeless, unmatronly, vigilant, gentle. She’d give each of us a small hand mirror so that we might examine our mouths as we spoke, and then she’d come around and practice with us. She would go from one student to the next, sit herself squarely before him or her, and say, Now put your hand on my throat. She wanted us to understand the vibration certain sounds required. If the kid wouldn’t do it—most of us would automatically reach for her neck—she’d take the hand and move it up there herself and say something deep and thrilling like vampire, and you thought, this is a teacher, a person who can show, her mottled milky skin still damp with the sweat of other palms, her breath sweet.

  The boys’ names are Ouboume and Bouhoaume. Such beautiful names. I think Laotian should be our Esperanto. After some more romping Lelia sits them down with picture books. They keep gazing over at me through the break in the wall, maybe thinking I’m next. Lelia never likes to close the sliding door and so she gives them headphones, and then puts one on herself. She waves me over anyway so they won’t stare off and I get up and join them. They listen to a tape of consonant sounds, and then practice what they hear for ten minutes. It sounds like a rookery. Lelia has them drill with their mouths like they’re playing scales on the piano. Finally she clicks off the tape. They remove the headgear.

  “Press your lips together,” she now tells them, squeezing her own between her fingers. “We’re going to do the sound for P again. This time so we can hear ourselves. Remember P. For P, blow through your lips, like a puff of smoke.”

  They repeat after her, as do I: Papa, pickle, paint, peep, pool.

  �
�Great. Let’s do F now.” She uses a rubberized half-section model of the mouth. She pushes the white upper teeth against the inside flesh of the lower lip.

  “Do it this way,” she says, helping Ouboume. I show Bouhoaume. She tells us: “Now push air through and say after me.”

  Father, finger, food, fun, fang.

  We sing the words in unison and then take our turns. Bouhoaume has trouble. He uses his fingers to make himself work like the model, and he tries so hard a slick of drool icicles from his mouth. Ouboume shrieks with delight. Lelia regards him crossly, and he gently pats Bouhoaume on the back. We all try again. We move on to V, which is similar to F, except that you hum a vibrato, which the boys enjoy.

  They eat their sandwiches without talking. Egg salad with diced celery. The Asian and Hispanic kids rarely complain about what we give them; the black kids and white kids often do, they act entitled, though in different ways. I don’t know what this means, maybe something about the force of fathers, or the Catholic God.

  As I look at the boys I keep thinking of Romulus and Remus, wayward children, what they might say now about their magnificent city of Rome and its citizenry. At their height, the Romans lived among all their conquered, the outer peoples brought to the city as ambassadors, lovers, soldiers, slaves. And these carried with them their native spice and fabric, rites, contagion. Then language. Ancient Rome was the first true Babel. New York City must be the second. No doubt the last will be Los Angeles. Still, to enter this resplendent place, the new ones must learn the primary Latin. Quell the old tongue, loosen the lips. Listen, the hawk and cry of the American city.

  The boys are first cousins by way of their fathers, who run a dry-goods business from the back of a beat-up Ford van. When they return to pick up their children, they enter and remove their mesh baseball caps. They are bearing gifts for us. Lelia gets a miniature wooden rack for earrings and rings; a striped silk tie for me. Lelia gets the boys ready to leave. I ask if this is their business and they somehow understand and gesture for me to come down and take a look. Ouboume’s father unlocks the back doors and shows me their rolling stock. They sell off-brand cassette tapes and ladies’ scarves and 99¢ hardcover books and a dozen other items. They keep trying to give me whatever I look at, and finally I accept a celebrity cookbook. The boys are jostling for a seat inside. When I take out my wallet the two men start hollering excitedly in some dialect and push my money away.

  As he shuts the van doors Ouboume’s father takes a long look at me.

  “Japan? Japan?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Korea? Korea?”

  I nod. He smiles wide and gives me two thumbs-up.

  “I like Korea,” he says, I think meaning Koreans. “Tough tough. Hard work.” He points upstairs. “You wife?”

  “Yes,” I answer.

  “No Korea!”

  “No Korea!” I say.

  “Ha!”

  My answer seems to confirm something for him. Bouhoaume’s father calls him from the front seat.

  “You like Kwan?” he says, moving around to the front.

  “What?”

  “Kwan, Kwan.”

  “Kwan,” I say.

  He stands erect, as if stepping into a stature. “Big man, Kwan. Big man, big man!”

  “Yes,” I tell him. “Big man. I like Kwan.”

  He hops in shotgun and flips thumbs-up again. The boys do the same from the back. They lean against a gross of cigarette cartons. Winstons, Marlboros. Gray-market goods. They’ll drive around the city—there won’t be any more schooling today—and search the ordered blocks for a good spot in the stream of people, and then set up for a few hours, or until an inspector asks to see their license to sell. One of the fathers will stall in broken English while the others hastily pack the merchandise into the van. No trouble, no trouble, he’ll say, shouting it, bowing, shaking his hands, seeming to beg, and as the van starts rolling away he’ll slip in the passenger door and all four of them will call it, breathing it out like a necessary song: No trouble. The boys know it, too, they’ve learned this well, and they’ll all wave goodbye with it, stridently, strong-armed, father-son, with the bombast of Americans, not yet knowing that this is the last language they will share.

  * * *

  Upstairs Lelia is cleaning the mess the boys leave in her studio. No speech until Monday. I restack picture books and place the toys back in wooden bins while she sweeps for cookie crumbs, egg splots, cracklings of hard candy.

  “Little-boy droppings,” she says, examining whatever is stuck to her broom.

  As she kneels with the dustpan, I can already see the coil in her back that says she is her mother’s daughter. The waiting rheumatism. The soft bones. I have to remind her to drink more milk. I can see now, too, how she used to pick up after Mitt, the way the day’s weariness would fold upon her body, how she’d almost collapse on her legs to pull off his socks or wipe his chin. Then he’d jump up again, bare-assed and wild, and shout, “Come on, Mom!” and off they’d go across the apartment, chugging like locomotives, never any stops.

  Mitt always spoke beautifully, if I remember anything. Lelia read to him every night since he was a year old. She wanted me to read him stories, too, but I never felt comfortable reading aloud, even when I was in high school and college, and I didn’t want to fumble or clutter any words for the boy just as he was coming to the language. I feared I might handicap him, stunt the speech blooming in his brain, and that Lelia would provide the best example of how to speak. My silliness. I should have watched and listened. When Mitt played with my father their communication was somehow wholly untroubled, perfect in its way, and if there were questions between them the boy would simply repeat what the old man said, try to echo his pidgin, his story, learn that talk, too. I suppose they could build a bridge because they needed one. I was too close to the old man, we were always within striking distance of each other. We were intently inarticulate, competitively so. But I thought that Mitt was beginning to appreciate the differences in the three of us; he could mimic the finest gradations in our English and Korean, those notes of who we were, and perhaps he could imagine, if ever briefly, that this was our truest world, rich with disparate melodies.

  “Come on, Henry,” Lelia says, tossing the sponge into the bucket. “We’ve cleaned enough. Let’s go outside. Let’s go to the park. It’s too pretty a day to waste.”

  “Okay, but downtown. I’d rather ride the ferry.”

  “Fine. Anything. To Staten Island, then.” She was already changing, loose slacks and a blouse. Muted greens on muted greens. “Let’s just move.”

  The ferry, everyone knows, is the city’s cheapest vacation. For fifty cents you can escape Manhattan by boat, crossing the waters of the harbor and bay past all the famous islands, Governor’s, Liberty, Ellis. It used to be a quarter, before that a dime. Lelia and I must have taken the trip over fifty times, not once setting foot on Staten Island itself. We always stand against the railing, whatever the season, whatever the weather, making sure to get a good spot on the Manhattan side of the boat so we can watch the skyline both ways. How it looms, unlooms, looms again. In the daytime, most of the traffic is commuters, some school kids, always a few tourists, many more in the summer.

  But after eight or nine at night, it’s a different crowd. You hear the portable music, the boat is full of dressed-up kids, Italian and Irish kids, Hispanic kids, laced up in silk, all the youthful couples, the lovers. They are journeying to Manhattan to dance. To drink and maybe fight and make a little love. To act old. Play with their hard-earned money.

  We leave the big island with crowds of office workers going home early for the weekend. They’re weary. They stay inside where it’s warm and undrafty, where they can sit down and finally read the day’s paper. We’re in our spot next to the wide gangway, standing among the traders and workmen and a pack of youthful Japanese, everyone
waiting for the launch and the black billows of diesel. The sun is dipping below the rim of clouds, a sudden last brightness. Lelia pulls my hand around her and tucks it inside the lapel of her blazer. My palm is cold on her breast, and she jumps a little. Although it’s balmy, we’re not dressed for the sea wind, even the one of this harbor, which reeks of long-dead water. As we push off the dock, Lelia reminds me that whenever a boat departs the land a hundred hearts are broken.

  “That sounds like a saying of immigrants,” I say.

  “My mother told it to me,” she replies. “I think it’s for sailors and their girls.”

  “Was Stew a sailor?”

  “Double-u double-u two,” Lelia growls, turning into me. It’s funny how she can never just speak for her father. Certain voices you have to honor. They’re unassailable. “Backed the landing at I-wo Ji-ma,” she says, “and then Ko-RE-a.”

  “No kidding. He never mentioned that to me.”

  “I don’t think he likes to talk about it. I think some of his friends got killed.”

  I kiss the softness between her eyes. People watch us. “My father never talked about the war,” I say. “He tried once. I had to write a report for social studies. I got the bright idea to do something on the Korean War. I asked him what it was like. He almost smiled and started to talk as if it was no big deal but then he choked up and left the room.”

  “How did you do the report?”

  “I read my junior encyclopedia,” I tell her. “The entry didn’t mention any Koreans except for Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung, the Communist leader. Kim was a bad Korean. In the volume there was a picture of him wearing a Chinese jacket. He was fat-faced and maniacal. Bayonets were in the frame behind him. He looked like an evil robot.”