Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  I say, “What if evidence comes forth? What if you have to?”

  “There is no good evidence. You were there with Sherrie, yes? And even if there is I won’t let myself be their fire. This should strictly be a criminal investigation. What they want from me is a statement about color. Whatever I say they’ll make into a matter of race. Yellow man speaks out.”

  “Or yellow man stays quiet,” I say.

  “Perhaps. But the more racial strife they can report, the more the public questions what good any of this diversity brings. The underlying sense of what’s presented these days is that this country has difference that ails rather than strengthens and enriches. You can see what can happen from this, how the public may begin viewing anything outside mainstream experience and culture to be threatening or dangerous. There is a closing going, Henry, slowly but steadily, a narrowing of who can rightfully live here and be counted.”

  He moves to the window shaded by venetian blinds, pulls the cord to open the slats. Almost twilight. He looks out. I hear shouts rise from the street, peppering the house. White camera light jumps up through the slats. They are trained on us. More shouts, and the window brightens further. Now it is the media keeping a vigil. They will stay all night, drinking hot coffee in the street, joking bitterly, working the video and microphones in shifts. This is their kind of hope, a Kwang Watch.

  John peers down into the lights, unflinching.

  “What is the mood downstairs, Henry, I mean, of our people?”

  “Nothing bad,” I tell him. “They’re expectant, too, like the whole city. Haven’t you talked with Sherrie?”

  “Yes. But I want to know what you see. I believe I can trust you,” he says, smiling easily, the manner still casual. “You seem already to move well among us,” he tells me. “You’ve made everyone forget your reason for being here, the article, whatnot. At times I’ve forgotten, too, and I think you’re here because you believe in what we’re doing. I hope that’s a little true.”

  I grunt in assent, sipping the liquor. I can’t offer anything more. It is in these moments that I wish for John Kwang to start speaking the other tongue we know; somehow our English can’t touch what I want to say. I want to call the simple Korean back to him the way I once could when I was Peter’s age, our comely language of distance and bows, by which real secrets may be slowly courted, slowly unveiled.

  “Sherrie,” he says, sitting down now at his desk, “she’s the best at many things, but I know people tend to hold their tongues around her. She’s so intelligent and attractive. Most people don’t handle that package well. Even some reporters cower a little with her. They get awed and start asking questions they think she’d like to answer.”

  “They do the same with you,” I say.

  “I believe that ended as of last week.”

  “Don’t worry about our people,” I offer. “We’re just wondering like everyone else why this happened. Everyone is devastated. We can’t see any good reasons.”

  John laughs bitterly, his head in his hands. “What are the bad ones, my friend?”

  After a moment of quiet he pulls the bottom drawer and retrieves a folded green-and-white computer printout markered in Eduardo’s hand. I take it in my hands. Somehow it’s been retrieved from the fire, though I notice that it doesn’t at all smell of smoke. He pushes it to me. It is a listing of names and addresses, names and ages of children, occupation, name and address of business or businesses, estimated yearly income, nationality, year-to-date dollar figures, percentage changes. Then, to the far right, double-underlined, the dollar amounts.

  “What Eduardo was working on,” John says softly, his voice lower, honorific. “What I ask you to do for us now. Before you look too much you must say yes or no. Say yes, my friend. Say yes to me tonight.”

  I tell them cash is acceptable. Please nothing else. Checks, lottery tickets, diamond stud earrings, cases of fruit, VSOP cognac, tubs of fresh tofu, and all other wares will be returned or donated or else thrown away. The money comes in weekly, some of them giving as much as $250 and $500, others as little as $10. Most give fifty. We welcome them all. Ten dollars a week is what it takes to start, ten dollars for the right of knowing a someone in the city for you who are yet nobody. But then no one, no matter the amount, has his ear over another. It matters only that you give what you can. You give with honor and indomitable spirit. You remain loyal. True. These are the simple rules of his house.

  He knows all the givers. He continually memorizes and re-memorizes the entire listing of contributors, every one of the nearly two thousand, the feat itself awesome, and then he learns the names of newcomers every Monday morning, so that if just one of them were to bump into him at a dumpling cart or street festival he’d know something about them, that they own a wholesale fabric store or a wig shop, that they have a boy and a girl and a brand-new baby, that they are doing well, better probably than they hoped, just a little better every year.

  The Korean money funnels in mostly through the dozens of churches across the metropolitan area. We have connections to most of them, not just from Queens and the other boroughs but from Nassau and Westchester and Bergen counties. The network isn’t so good yet in Connecticut. Maybe Connecticut Koreans are too distant, perhaps they think they have more money or class than other Koreans. They send their kids to private day schools and drive expensive 4X4s and they belong to country clubs that have no blacks and no Jews. They’re too far away from the city, the grimy little shops, the sweat merchants they used to be and know. They think they’ve escaped. They think they don’t need John Kwang.

  The church money arrives in bundled manila envelopes from Christian congregations called Presbyterian Glory, Heaven on Earth, Korean Fellowship of Devotion, Building Up The Christ, from Korean Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Evangelicals, even Lutherans. The only missing variety is Episcopalian, the C of E never reaching us, or else never trying. They will never know the devotion they missed.

  The rest of the money comes addressed directly to me, to a name of my choosing. Eduardo used his own name, but John wants me to have an alias. So I decide they should write care of a Mr. Dennis. I receive hundreds of small white envelopes each week, some delivered by hand, and there is extra money inside them lately, money for Mr. Fermin. Rest in peace, Eduardo, a handwritten note reads, a five-dollar bill stapled to it. Other bills clipped, bills taped, money falling out to the floor. The writing is in pidgin English and Spanish and Mandarin and then languages I have never seen. I collect this and other monies to bring to his mother, who asked at the funeral that they receive no more from us. She feels funny, she tells me. I will take it to her anyway, jam the money under their steel door.

  I use Eduardo’s spreadsheets on the notebook computer John bought him last Christmas. I work alone in the Kwangs’ basement late at night. I black out the basement windows with thick muslin. I leave on one dull light in the corner. I work mostly in silence. The one bug silence. Then the hum of the machine. The phone rings and I stop everything. I pick it up and it’s Janice. She wonders how I’ve been. No one sees me anymore. Have I gone up and died?

  I do the same thing every night. I enter the giving in vertical rows. I have the machine sort the figures into two dozen categories. Every way it comes out I add it up, recompiling every bit of information we have to date. I have steadily become a compiler of lives. I am writing a new book of the land.

  Like John Kwang, I am remembering every last piece of them. Whether I wish it or not, I possess them, their spouses and children, their jobs and money and life. And the more I see and remember, the more their story is the same. The story is mine. How I come by plane, come by boat. Come climbing over a fence. When I get here, I work. I work for the day I will finally work for myself. I work so hard that one day I end up forgetting the person I am. I forget my wife, my son. Now, too, I have lost my old mother tongue. And I forget the ancestral graves I have left on a hillside of a
faraway land, the loneliest stones that each year go unblessed.

  Near morning, I print out what I have done in one long continuous sheet, the way he prefers to read the thick stack of names. He says it doesn’t seem right all broken up. This is a family, he reminds me, grasping it with both hands.

  He models our program on the ggeh. A Korean money club. Small ggeh, like the one my father had, work because the members all know each other, trust one another not to run off or drop out after their turn comes up. Reputation is always worth more than money. In this sense we are all related. The larger ggeh depend solely on this notion, that the lessons of the culture will be stronger than a momentary lack, can subdue any individual weakness or want. This the power lovely and terrible, what we try to engender in Kwang’s giant money club, our huge ggeh for all. What John says it is about.

  My father would have thought him crazy to run a ggeh with people other than just our own. Spanish people? Indians? Vietnamese? How could you trust them? Then even if you could, why would you? If my father had possessed the words, he would have said the whole enterprise was bad hubris. But in his own language, the one of fruit stand and cash register, he’d simply make his face of disbelief, then throw up his hands and try hard not to think of it again, the idea that someone as smart as Kwang would so waste his time.

  In our ggeh, if you give a few dollars you can expect to receive a few hundred. The more you give, the more you can ask for; everyone comes to learn what’s a fair amount. You send a letter. Then you come at night and you make your request. You spoke with Eduardo, who in the beginning spoke to John. Now you will simply speak to me. Bring an interpreter or phrase book. Everything is in private, we deal like family, among ourselves, without chits or contracts. This is why I must see your face, hear your voice, make certain that you live how you say. It doesn’t matter what your color is, whether your breath reeks of garlic or pork fat or chilis. Just bring your wife or your husband, bring your children. If you want a down payment on a store, bring the owner of the store you work in now. Bring your daughter who wants to attend Columbia, bring her transcripts and civics essay and have her bring her violin. Bring X-rays of your mother who needs a new hip. I want to see the fleshed shape of the need, I want to know the blood you’ve lost, or that someone has stolen, or tricked from you, the blood you desperately want back from the world.

  * * *

  Now I spend my days helping Lelia with her speech kids, then nap for a few hours after an early dinner until I leave at nine for the nightly work with John Kwang. Lelia seems to understand. Before I leave she makes certain to pull on my arms, pull on my ears like she used to do to Mitt before he would go outside. I take her tugs as little warnings, reminders that she is here, staying in our life, and choosing to let me go to his house in Woodside. Sometimes, she’ll crawl up next to me on the sofa after dinner, interrupt my brief sleep with a garlicky mouth pressed down around my nose. Throttling my breath. Then I’ll struggle, she’ll lean into me with all her weight, press her flesh, and then somehow the clothes start coming off. The world skips into rhythm.

  My strange hours are somehow revamping our sexual life. We hit-and-run each other at odd junctures, off hours. There is a sense of our stalking each other through the day and the night, each of us waiting for the other to fall asleep, to step out of the shower, hold a hot pan at the range, not expecting a touch. It’s the first second of contact that sets her off, that almost criminal moment. For me, it’s the idea that she’s been considering us through her day, circling the notion of an act, picturing something while I’ve been away sorting through Kwang’s papers, filing, adding figures. At home I turn the corner and suddenly there she is, lurking in some old crepe de chine. Here, she will say, a little story complete in her head, are you ready. So please let’s go.

  At other times we’re on the move. It seems to us right now that if we stop moving, we die. We take the subway to parts of the city we’ve never been to and walk the neighborhoods for hours, combing through the sidewalk clearance bins for important pieces, amulets, future totems of the city. What we cherish most are the specialty items from far away, what the people have brought with them or are bringing in now, to sell to the natives: Honduran back scratchers, Polish mothballs, flip-flops from every nation in the Pacific Rim, Statuettes of Liberty (earrings and pendants), made in Mexico City.

  Yesterday we’re in Ozone Park. We’re talking the whole way on the train, talky talk, chattering at each other across the aisle of the swaying car like edgy ball players. At a deli we buy stuffed grape leaves and hot wings and Burmese beer and eat quickly with our hands on someone’s overheated stoop. Half the time venturing down the streets is dangerous, certifiable behavior, and at least once each day I wish for the gun I always thought I should buy for living here; but there’s something about the two of us that puts off the hoodlums and muggers. We’re too unlikely a sight to be harmless, pluckable; it’s Lelia’s deadly-looking elbows and knees, it’s my special street face (learned working with my father) looking already cheated and intolerant, and in a pinch we do instant run-throughs of her speech lessons, the most bending diphthongs, to ward off the especially hostile and brave.

  Lelia grabs my hand and we run.

  From Ozone Park we head to Flushing. She wants to go back to the places we used to explore, with Mitt on one of our backs or swinging between us like a monkey, back to certain streets where you can look down the block and see nothing but Koreans working the storefronts, speaking their language like it’s the only one in the world. Lelia used to say that this must be like the old country, this is how it must be there, but one day in front of his store my father explained to her how if she looked carefully at the people she’d see the extra spring in their steps, the little boost everyone had, just by the idea of where they were. “Look, look,” he implored her, crouched, slapping the pavement with both hands. “This is an American street.”

  Lelia said that she did see. I thought she was just romancing him, kindly playing to his mostly self-promoting immigrant lore, but later she’d showed Mitt, too, kneeling down beside him to watch the men and women busy in the street. They’re just like you, she’d whisper.

  Now I realize we’re near the burned-out office. In a past day I might say anything to steer us in the other direction, but I walk us by the ruined building. There’s fresh litter in the entrance, cola cups and newspaper. The metal frame of the once-lighted sign of his name has melted, and it sags down limply over where the big front windows used to be. We stand in the street, as close as the police tape lets us.

  “Where did you work?” she asks.

  “In back, by the alley.”

  “I think I need to see.”

  We duck under the tape and walk around to the side door. The opening has been boarded up with a piece of plywood, but someone has already kicked it in; in this city, every fire means a shelter. We step through the debris of charred cabinets and chair legs used as firewood, and move through the offices skylighted by gaping holes punched through the ceiling and roof by the firefighters. The major beams have all held, but whole walls have crumbled. We can still reach the war room, which is stripped but mostly intact. I walk to the small, windowless office where Eduardo and Helda were found, half expecting to see the ashen outline of their bodies, but nothing is there. Lelia calls and asks me who I am here and I don’t understand.

  “Your name,” she says, not ironical. “Who do they think you are?”

  I’m not sure how to answer. Then I say a man named Henry Park.

  “What else do they know about him?” she says.

  “He has a wife named Lelia,” I tell her. “They once had a beautiful boy.”

  She is quiet, her arms snugly crossed. “Are they still happy?”

  “Yes,” I say. “But not as much as they want.”

  She turns around and stands before the blackboard, examining what’s left. It’s still somehow scribbled with ta
rget numbers and dates, Janice’s writing, Sherrie’s. For a moment I think Lelia is trying to map out for herself what might have gone on here, to imagine a version of me and what I would do on a particular day, and I begin to think this is a terrible mistake, a horrible conflation. Now, with a piece of chalk, Lelia starts writing out my name, over and over, as if she’s kept herself after school to work a lesson into her head. She starts in the corner and writes steadily across, my name and my name traversing everything else.

  At home, she makes other signs. For the last week now I’ve been taking the green-colored pills again, honoring our longtime agreement that when she is on the Pill, I will take the fourth week of placebos, out of fair play and sympathy for her and womankind. I forget to take a pill one morning and she peppers me with comments about my preternatural plotting to burden our life. These days, trading places is our necessary mode. Then I wonder aloud that perhaps I shouldn’t take the pills anymore, and Lelia knows I mean another thing entirely. She doesn’t jump, she doesn’t stop. Later, at dinner, she laments the fact that she’ll be thirty-five in a couple of months. She says her hair is drying out, her skin and nails, she shows me all over how she’s dying on the vine.

  Implications, again.

  There’s some desperation, of course. Worry and fear. Would we be trying to fill myriad holes in our life? Was that our attempt the first time? No, I think, but even if it were, it turned out to be Mitt, some wondrous thing, who will forever annul any of our regret. But he is gone, I have to keep telling myself. Eternally lost.

  Lately I keep seeing him in Lelia’s arms, the way he looked so different from her when he was just born, the shock of his black hair, the delicate slips of his eyes. His face would change soon enough, but he looked so fully Korean then (if nothing like me), and Lelia, dead exhausted and only casually speaking, wondered aloud how she could pass him so little of herself. Of course it didn’t concern her further. Though I kept quiet, I was deeply hurting inside, angry with the idea that she wished he was more white. The truth of my feeling, exposed and ugly to me now, is that I was the one who was hoping whiteness for Mitt, being fearful of what I might have bestowed on him: all that too-ready devotion and honoring, and the chilly pitch of my blood, and then all that burning language that I once presumed useless, never uttered and never lived.