Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  “I’m not sure I’m the one,” I tell her.

  “What does that matter?” she cries, her eyes sparkling, dark. “You’ve become important to us. That Peruvian thing you handled like a pro. And then the immigration mess with the six Haitians. You made it possible for John to help. Everyone he talks to in the office gives you a good report. Even Jenkins.”

  She suddenly turns quiet, inches closer. Touches my shoulder as she talks. I don’t move.

  “You know, now with Eduardo gone you’ll have to do more. I know you’re some kind of freelancer, but we’re thinking about putting you on, full-time, if you need it that way. You relate well to strangers and constituents. People immediately trust you. You seem to understand what they need. That’s a valuable asset in our work. You could work with me and John more closely. He likes the idea. We talked about you last week.”

  “What about Janice?”

  “I already spoke to her,” Sherrie says intently. “You’re being wasted with her. She really only needs bodies, bulk. Let’s face it, that’s not you. This would be a great opportunity. You’re not twenty-five anymore.”

  “You mean like you and Janice.”

  “Ha, ha,” she groans, showing her straight teeth. Just now I can hear the scantest inflection of her Chinese, that rampant hyawr sound.

  “Janice might be. I’m almost thirty-five. Ancient. God, I can’t even imagine kids. I’m just saying, you don’t seem to have a career you desperately love. I don’t know how much you can make with your work writing bit articles.”

  I tell her, “I’m already past the time I should have left.”

  Sherrie frowns. “So what? One article you’ve got. Big deal. If we can get over this, John’s going to be around for a long, long time. I don’t have to tell you, you’re smart, you think about it. We can all go right to the top. Even two Koreans and a Chinese. See what John says. And you better tell me soon if you’re going to leave.”

  “I will.”

  “Good,” she says, stepping away. “Don’t make a mistake with your life, Henry Park.”

  I leave the house late in the evening. John hasn’t made a statement yet and he’s threatened to fire anyone who makes one for him. Outside the house a few reporters are still lingering. I walk quickly down the street before they can catch up to me, and flag a cab to take me to the subway station. The car stops and before the driver unlocks the doors he leans over and checks me. Yesterday a few Asian men were arrested for cabbie murders in Queens. Through the window glass I tell him the subway station at 45th Road but he shakes his head at me and so I say Manhattan instead. He nods. As I get in I notice a snub-nosed revolver shoved next to him in the seat. On any night someone in this city could put a bullet in his head for $30. So he drives with a gun, though I think he must know no weapon can save him. Maybe the pictures of his children on the dash can, maybe God can. The scent infuser is gushing lavender and bougainvillea, so heavily that I can almost see the flow, and on the radio someone is speaking a kind of French, though more grandly Latinesque, the beat honeyed and calyptic; this is a Haitian ship. The driver checks me in the rearview mirror and I hold up my hands so he can see. He laughs big and turns up the music, half relieved, half embarrassed, and I think with him, One less good fare to get tonight.

  He takes us west at an amazing speed. We almost clip everything, hurtling by a hundred near-disasters. Somehow I think I’m safe in this vessel, though I wouldn’t mind actually hitting something, as if that might confirm the real dangers in the world. All evening I’ve been locked inside myself, playing these hypothetical games of confidence and chance, thinking of the firebomb and why it happened and who could have left the scene with a light burning in his hand. There are always untenable events, freak happenings like someone recognizing you, or at worst, the trouble results from a foolish and negligent spy, like my time with Luzan.

  But here a bomb goes off, crude as it is. A bomb means that there’s too much care involved, even if you mean to kill. Jack himself always said that when you make a bomb you are also constructing a statement, employing a more complicated grammar than is required. It’s the way civilized man now encumbers his territory, not with great walls or stretches of wire but with a single well-placed device, a neat bundling with the workings of a mind. It reads time, speaks volumes. Long after the flash, the concussive burn, it will speak to you again, at your fine desk, in your fine bed. Saying these are your certain ruins.

  * * *

  The next day the older boy, Peter, is upstairs in the office. He sits at his father’s desk, scrawling away importantly on the office stationery with a fat black fountain pen. I stay in the doorway.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Hello,” Peter replies, still writing, not looking up. The young man of the people. He says, “Please feel free to sit down, anywhere you want. Is the councilman expecting you?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “Very good.”

  He finally finishes his work and sighs. Looks up, Kwang-style, the face wholly open, as if he’s about to smile, but he sees me and bounces up from the seat. He bows his head sharply and fumbles out, “ Me-yahn-ney-oh, ah-juh-shih.” I’m very sorry, sir.

  “Gaen-cha-nah,” I mutter, chuckling, telling him it’s okay. I put out my hand. “Yuh-gi ahn-juh.” Come here and sit.

  He comes around the desk and sits upright in the wing chair beside mine. His straight black hair is bowl-cut. The bridge of his nose hasn’t yet pushed out. The arms at attention, the eyes ever lowered, a venerating bend to his head. He waits for me to address him. From his earliest moments he knows to be like this before an elder.

  He is so much like me when I was ten, so unlike our Mitt, whom Lelia and my father and I let raucously trample over all our custom and ceremony. Our Mitt, untethered. He’d tug at my father’s pant legs during church sermons, roam the shadows of restaurant tables, publicly address his mother by her given name: all these spoils of our American life. And despite Lelia’s insistence that he go to Korean school on the weekends, I knew our son would never learn the old language, this was never in question, and my hope was that he would grow up with a singular sense of his world, a life univocal, which might have offered him the authority and confidence that his broad half-yellow face could not. Of course, this is assimilist sentiment, part of my own ugly and half-blind romance with the land.

  Peter and I possess a similar command of Korean, though perhaps his grasp is slightly better, his bah-rham or accent, or, literally, “breeze,” is more authentic, still deeply redolent of the old country. Perhaps in twenty years his Korean words will creep out like mine, the notes uncertain, tentative. When I step into a Korean dry cleaner, or a candy shop, I always feel I’m an audience member asked to stand up and sing with the diva, that I know every pitch and note but can no longer call them forth.

  We talk baseball, the opening of the new season. The Yankees finally have some pitching. The Mets are sliding fast. We hate, hate Boston and St. Louis. Out of respect he tries to speak as much Korean as he can, and I don’t let him know his rapid speech is variously lost on me. I listen and keep nodding, and ask in English what position he likes to play. He says he plays second base. What do you want to play, is the question. He curls one foot behind the other, bites his lip, and whispers: shortstop.

  “Ah,” I say, “why don’t you play it then? Someone isn’t better at it?”

  “No way!” he answers stridently. “Dad wanted me to play second this year. The coach wanted me to be the shortstop but Dad said I had to learn how to play second base first. Next year I’ll be at shortstop.” His eyes concentrating. “You must learn how to be a good corporal before you can be a great general.”

  “Sounds like good advice,” I say.

  “Sure,” Peter says. “This season, I’m paying my dues.” He stands up.

  I stand up with him. John walks in. He addresses his son by his Ko
rean name and the boy leaps up and hugs him. His father kisses him on the temple and deep in the hair and says he wants him to fetch us some drink, some food. Mother will know. Peter turns but then stops and quickly bows to me before running downstairs.

  He motions to my chair and we both sit. He wears a pressed white oxford shirt, new blue jeans, loafers. His hair is still wet from the shower, the silvery gray shining brightly through the black strands. His cheeks brushed red by steam and water. But he looks much older with his hair flat and matted, his head an orb more dully drawn, as if diminished. I see his posture as somehow broken, there’s not his familiar pliancy and spring at a public appearance, his steely poise among the crowds, the drive pooled up in his fists, the huge voice, the miracle forcefulness. I have witnessed him shake fifteen hundred hands in the space of a city block, Q & A for five hours with an assembly of greedy malcontents, kneel whole mornings in Reverend Cho’s cavernous church praying for a rookie cop shot up in Hunt’s Point. In the afternoons, when Eduardo and I escorted him from the office to the subway, which he sometimes liked to ride home, we heard him greet his citizens in Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, Thai, Portuguese, him lilting forth with a perfection unborrowed and unstudied: Keep on, keep faith, we know how you feel, you are not alone.

  “He’s not like his younger brother, you know,” he says, his head resting in the seam of the high chair-back. “Peter’s never been too aggressive. Not Johnny’s way. Johnny already gets into scuffles in nursery school, you know, he has trouble, he doesn’t talk too much yet. He prefers contact. For example, he loves those Ninjas.”

  “Peter’s very thoughtful,” I say.

  “Yes, very much,” he answers, almost beaming. His color seems to come back. “For some time I felt somewhat disappointed by this. I couldn’t understand why. The boy is sensitive and intelligent. Clearly there’s deep warmth in his heart, a deep compassion, even at his age. I watched him once in front of his school, his mother and I were waiting in the car to pick him up. Some older boys were calling him names, a fairy, whatever, and also making fun of me, saying his father wasn’t a ‘real chink’ like he was. Peter was quiet. I could tell this approach of theirs confused him a little. He had so much to respond to, and in different ways. He kept staring at them, though without malice. May wanted me to go and stop it but I admit I couldn’t. I didn’t want to. Sometimes you want to see what will happen with a boy on his own. I feared for him but I did nothing. Sometimes you must wait and see.”

  “What happened?”

  He remains hunched over. Now he closes his eyes to remember; it’s a habit of his, he’ll often shut them for three, four seconds, as he gathers what he’ll say.

  “Suddenly, Peter punched the loud boy in the mouth. He knew tae kwon do. His blow drew blood right away, and the boy fell down. The others scattered and the boy was left there, below Peter, holding his bleeding lip. You could see he was a tough kid, or that he considered himself tough. He got up and swung wildly at Peter but kept missing. Peter would wait, he was well trained, and then strike out when there was an opening. It happened in a matter of seconds. May was getting very angry at me and I had to hold her elbow to keep her inside the car. Peter kept landing blows, and the boy, he must have been all of ten or eleven, finally fell down again and then completely broke. He wailed like his age. He was afraid. I went for them then. As I approached I watched Peter bend down on his knees and put his face in front of the boy’s. I heard him say, ‘Hit me back.’ But the boy couldn’t, or wouldn’t. He thought Peter was just baiting him. The teachers arrived and helped the boy get up. When we got back to the car May was silent, and then Peter began to cry. He didn’t stop for an hour. He wouldn’t look us in the face. He was sick in bed for two days afterwards. I let him stay sick, I understood this reaction, I accepted it.”

  We hear patters ascending the steps. It’s John Jr., carrying in a tray of rice crackers wrapped in roasted nori, salted nuts, strips of dried squid. Peter follows him in with another, a bottle of Chivas and a small tin pail of ice. His father greets them heartily and takes the tray from Peter, who knows to retrieve glasses from the low shelf beneath the window. John Jr.’s got a crew cut, the thickest little hands. His head is still too big for him. He slaps his hands up and down to say he’s finished his work. He stares up at me and says to his father in Korean, What did uncle bring us?

  Peter tells his little brother to be quiet. John Jr. asks again and I say I left the present at home and will bring it tomorrow, which I will. Peter grabs him by the back of the neck and veers him toward the door. John Kwang calls them to come to him first; he kisses them both, and smacks John Jr. hard on the rear, which makes the boy shriek with happiness.

  He tells them in a low Korean as they stand like soldiers before him, You two behave tonight while I’m out. Be good to your mother. She has perished many times for you. Honor her with your obedience.

  Yes, Papa, they answer. They bow low before us, John Jr. checking so he can bow lower than Peter, who bends as if alone in prayer, his eyes shut tight.

  John pours the whiskey and I find myself holding my glass to the bottle in the formal manner, the way I held the envelope for Mrs. Fermin. Then I pour for him, again with two hands. By custom with an elder, I look away while I sip. John doesn’t seem to notice. For a long time I disliked this etiquette. When I was with my father and his friends I wouldn’t drink, simply so I could avoid it. I understood only that my father enjoyed my practicing the motions, that it was an exercise of my servitude to him, the posture he desired. But I never fathomed the need of the culture even for the smallest acts.

  “You know, I never drank before I became a councilman. Never thirty-dollar scotch. But it’s amazing, Henry, how much people want to give to you and share with you. I must have received over a hundred bottles of liquor and champagne already this year. How many neckties does a man need? How many boxes of fruit? At dinners, they want to share a drink or two, and I always oblige. This one,” he says, checking a chit taped to the neck of the bottle, “was from Kim Young-Ju last Christmas. He owns several convenience stores near Crown Heights. One of them was burned down last week.”

  “I know,” I answer. “I sent him a note from the office. His merchants’ association and the churches have been helping him.”

  “Good. Which church does he attend?”

  “Port Washington Glory. Reverend Lee.”

  “Will you send something from us, too?”

  “I’m not quite sure how to do that.”

  “Speak to Sherrie. Tell her that we spoke about you handling that from now on. She’ll help you get started and introduce you around. Perhaps she’s already spoken to you about staying on with us.”

  I drink at this. “I never considered staying in politics.”

  “Who says your work with us is in the realm of politics?” he says, throwing back his head. His face reddens slightly with the alcohol. “That’s not what you’ve been doing, Henry. That’s not what we’re doing. Everyone speaks of politics as if it’s some kind of sentence. This is a fundamental misunderstanding.”

  He points out the window.

  “Down there, all those people from the media, those people snooping around for the mayor, that’s what they believe we’re all doing. Politics! We’re ‘politicians.’ So we cut deals and make compromises and hope our constituents will look favorably on us. We act appropriately outraged and righteous. We are champions of causes. We are concessionists. We are public servants. This is how we are marketed and so this is how we end up marketing ourselves.”

  “No one says those things cynically of you.”

  “They all do,” he says, clicking his glass on the side table. “I have been every one of those politicians. But it makes no matter, finally. Not to us. That’s not why we’re here. That’s not why I’m here.”

  He delicately brushes his hair with his hand, as if it were strands of ash. All over he looks fragile, the m
odel of someone grieving. I am conscious of how right he appears to me, how perfect, every one of his tones and gestures dead on, not simply what I expect but what I want desperately to see.

  He says low, “Eduardo’s family. You saw them?”

  “Yes.”

  “When is the funeral?”

  “The day after tomorrow.”

  “Will you go for me?”

  “You’re not?” I say.

  He is silent. “He was easy to be with,” John whispers. “He was so bright-eyed, ambitious in the good way, for his mother and father, for his family who had given him the chance. They sacrifice for him and he returns their gift as best he can. What else is there? When I see a boy like Eduardo, working so hard for those behind him, I want to weep. For me, there is nothing else, our life is made only of hope and melancholy. I asked him to watch the boys a few times so they could be with him and learn. Imagine, I wanted them to learn from him. He had a natural will, a genuine confidence you rarely see in anyone.”

  “I thought it was the boxing,” I say.

  “No way,” John cries, reminding me of how my father would say the words, he thought, like an American. “He could box because he had the confidence. I know. You can’t let someone pound on your bare skull unless you have a very clear and strong sense of self. Everything begins with that. Everything. No matter what happens, you crouch down, protect yourself as best you can, and you concentrate on what got you there.”

  “Even with bombs?”

  “I don’t give a damn about bombs! God Almighty! Do you really care about bombs, Park Byong-ho shih?”

  I stop. I always freeze for a second on hearing my Korean name.

  He yells, “Do you really care about who did this to us? That’s what everyone out there wants to know.”

  I say, “They want to know what you believe.”

  “That’s right,” he answers. He rises and walks behind the desk, taking hold of the back of his chair. “They want me to make a statement. They want me to respond to their theories of who’s responsible, whether it’s blacks, whites, the Asian gang leaders I’ve been trying to negotiate with, they want me to shade my suspicion toward one party or another.”