Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  I watch them eat. Grace twists her noodles around the chopsticks and then lifts them stiffly to her mouth. Pete makes fun of her, tells her she eats like a white woman. Grace says she is a white woman. She lets the thick tendrils of rice noodle hang for a moment before slurping them up. She sips spoons of broth in between. Pete shovels back the noodles as fast as he can bear their heat. All the while Grace nudges him to slow down. They bicker and flirt and handle each other. They even kiss.

  I make sure to be careful. Though always routine and uneventful, these meetings tend to follow a certain thespian formality. I could always drive up and deliver the material in person, but Dennis doesn’t want it that way. And he doesn’t trust the mails. We are serious in the spook play, playing as we are. So he sends a courier or two. They’ll display an edge, some suspicion. Sometimes I don’t even recognize the people who come (they’ll simply say, “Dennis”). Sometimes we won’t even speak.

  “We’re shocking him, Pete, we better stop this silliness.”

  “Harry doesn’t care,” he answers her. “He likes it. Look, he’s getting misty.”

  “Go on and eat,” I say. “Grope if you like. I’ll talk.”

  “What about?” Pete asks, about to slurp his broth.

  “What I’m paid to talk about.”

  “Then don’t bother. I’m bored with work.”

  Grace says, “Go ahead, we’re listening. Tell us something we don’t know. Tell us about the big guy. Mr. Kwang.”

  Pete breaks in. “What’s to tell? He’s in it this high,” he says, his hand at his chin.

  “Just like us,” I say.

  Pete says, “Speak for yourself.”

  “We’re all trying,” I tell him.

  Grace says, “I thought we were going to have a few laughs tonight.”

  “So we will.”

  Pete offers me a toothpick. “You know, Harry, Dennis wants you to know he thinks you’re doing a beautiful job this time.”

  “Fuck you, too, Pete.”

  Grace says, “I heard him myself, Harry.”

  “Of course you did,” I say. I push my bowl to the side. The woman comes around to take my plates and refill our water glasses but Pete waves her off. Catching my eye, she looks a little scared for me. I say “gaen-cha-nah,” it’s all right, but she doesn’t seem to hear me, as if not understanding, and she goes.

  Pete stares at me and says in the most even voice: “You brought what you were supposed to?”

  I nod.

  Grace quietly finishes her soup. We are friends again, after a fashion. She and Pete will enjoy my company, and I will enjoy theirs. We are friends in the way people in an unprovisioned lifeboat are, chance consorts who are sure that they’ll be picked up soon, any day now, but not exactly how or when.

  Pete pays the check and leaves a big tip. The waitress smiles at him. He and Grace climb into his German coupe, my manila envelope safely in the back. They will drive across the Whitestone Bridge to his condo in Stamford. Before they go Pete describes the islands where they’ve been, the snorkeling he did under the glassy water, showing with his hands how his body knifed through the pools of coral inlets, Grace looking on from the shore.

  They pull away. Grace waves. She is too young, even for us. She must be only twenty-five, and I remember Dennis bragging about how he recruited her outside a downtown temp agency with the promise of working in a multinational business. He had his choice of a dozen Ivy Leaguers, but he wanted her, he said, for her “Iron Curtain look,” the angular temples and jaw, the heady alto speaking voice. She was obviously smart and trainable.

  And as I flag a taxi to go back home, I wonder what any of our parents would think, if they knew the whole truth. And would they even disapprove? If anything, I think my father would choose to see my deceptions in a rigidly practical light, as if they were similar to that daily survival he came to endure, the need to adapt, assume an advantageous shape.

  My ugly immigrant’s truth, as was his, is that I have exploited my own, and those others who can be exploited. This forever is my burden to bear. But I and my kind possess another dimension. We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous. You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears. This is your own history. We are your most perilous and dutiful brethren, the song of our hearts at once furious and sad. For only you could grant me these lyrical modes. I call them back to you. Here is the sole talent I ever dared nurture. Here is all of my American education.

  They have flash pictures of him leaving a downtown precinct house after his bail is posted. It’s all in time for the morning edition. They have him in the bricked alley behind the building, the shots dark and grainy. They have him walking away in half-profile, from the back, from the side, his suit jacket unfurled, suggesting flight. No one is with him. His tie is unknotted and his hair is dampened and mussed and he has a gauze patch taped above his left temple where his head glanced the ceiling of his sedan when it crashed. His body must have popped up when he hit the concrete divider of the bridge on-ramp, his suit shoulder become caught and torn on some window trim. The white batting is fluffed out, exposed, the whole effect of him vapid and dislodged. His left eye is black, closed almost to a squint by the swelling. The right one, mulish, untouched, stares back dead at the lens.

  The shots are nearly criminal.

  The accompanying text reads as if it is compiled rather than written. There seem to be several points of view embedded within the article, though each of them is indignant and righteous in tone. The words merely serve the pictures of the subject in question, employing the facts for the tabloid polemic of how a city should be run, justice served.

  Evidently, he had an airbag. The girl didn’t. They don’t yet have pictures of her. Maybe tomorrow. She still lies in the ICU at Beth Israel Hospital with the tube of an air pump taped inside her mouth to make her lungs work. She is still in a coma. Her skull hit the windshield and jerked her neck to the side with a freak snap. They say her face is hardly even scratched, just a small bruise on the side of her cheek, one mark on the pretty sleeper. Councilman Kwang tells the officers on the scene—who arrive at the accident immediately and then in swarms—that he wasn’t even traveling very fast, maybe thirty-five miles per hour. The police verify this by the crumple pattern and damage to the divider and where the car comes to rest. There are no skid marks. They also verify his blood alcohol level, which is still above the legal limit two hours after the crash.

  The police don’t know the identity of the girl right away because no one can read the ID card in her purse; they send a copy of it to a language department at Columbia. Her name comes back as Chun Ji-yun. It’s difficult for the police because no one where she works wants to talk, and everyone’s English is poor. They know she is sixteen years old, born in Seoul. She shares an apartment with some other girls who work at the bar. The police believe that she is a “hospitality girl,” which the newspaper says is a type of Asian prostitute. They quote the police quoting the councilman as admitting to meeting her at the midtown club, drinking a little, agreeing to drive her home. He tells the police the two of them were alone the whole time.

  Janice is going crazy. We are at her apartment in Astoria because no one is at his house, where both of us headed when we learned the news. She’s cursing now, wringing her hands, stomping her feet. This is it, she keeps saying, this is it. It’s over now, it’s fucking over. We’re done.

  I was thinking the same when I rushed over to Woodside in the morning. We were done. The whole thing, literally out of my hands. And yet, on seeing his face, his spelled-out name, I immediately began to get ready to go. Lelia had already left the apartment for a freelance job, though she’d clipped a note to the front page of the paper: You don’t have to go. We both knew that with the list in Hoagland’s care I had been finally taken off, that there was no off
icial prerogative anymore, no high man or custom to heed. I felt alone, alarmingly so. And washing the sleep from my face, I remembered how for a time in my boyhood I would often awake before dawn and step outside on the front porch. It was always perfectly quiet and dark, as if the land were completely unpeopled save for me. No Korean father or mother, no taunting boys or girls, no teachers showing me how to say my American name. I’d then run back inside and look in the mirror, desperately hoping in that solitary moment to catch a glimpse of who I truly was; but looking back at me was just the same boy again, no clearer than before, unshakably lodged in that difficult face.

  No one has seen John since he was released late last night, four or five hours after the crash. The night before that, he and I and Sherrie were at the bar. He must have gone back, or stayed a whole day longer with the girl. But he has disappeared. The print and TV people already seem to know this because they’ve assigned skeleton crews to wait around at the house. Janice calls Sherrie but no one answers. She’s turned off her machine. Janice finally reaches Jenkins, but he tells her he can’t come meet us. He says he needs some time and can’t talk and hangs up.

  May and the boys are on their way down from upstate. Janice has already asked her where he might have gone. She doesn’t know. We have to find him to know what we can say and do, if anything. I can see that Janice senses it’s all her ship, but the waterline is rising and she needs to make decisions. The question isn’t damage control. It’s no longer about containment or what we can spin. He can’t hide now, he’s not a victim of some bombing anymore; he’s a player, a principal. We need to find him and just survive.

  If she wanted, she could start trying for distance like Jenkins or maybe Sherrie, to get away from him now before it’s too late. A figure in scandal is like a heavy metal, the closer and longer you stay near, the more lasting the effects. Janice tells me this, thinking she’s warning me about a career I might want in politics.

  She herself keeps calling the precinct house, the lawyers, the hospital, she will say anything to get information on the chances for the girl, what we should expect. She even puts me on the line to pretend I am a cousin. I have to speak choppy English to talk to a doctor but he keeps asking who I am and when I’ll come see her. I don’t have the heart and hang up.

  I help her make calls into the evening. She has every bike messenger and private driver she knows looking for him. We phone the airlines and the buses. We know it’s useless. He’s probably in a soup monger’s somewhere in Flushing, sipping corn tea. Now we’re just waiting for the late news. In the meantime Janice is attempting to spirit him back. She lights blunt red sticks of Korean incense he gave her for Christmas and paces in circles, cutting slow butterflies in the smoke with her arms. She’s joking some, of course. But I can tell she is a little jumpy, she can’t hide all of her anxiousness. She doesn’t seem to realize how she keeps touching me, grabbing onto my forearm and my shoulder. She walks through her apartment inspecting things, picking up the same framed photographs of her family. She watches the wall clock.

  She doesn’t want it to end. Not this one. It’s the job that showed her she could have a vocation. She grew up with him, found out how her eye could quickly level on a scene, instantly figure the possibilities, aggressively fight and broker the way they’d want to shoot him. She is a natural at being an anti-director, an anti-producer. Without her John would never have been safe.

  She’s nervous so she wants to eat. She wants to order Chinese but her place can’t deliver tonight. She thinks they are saying that a few of their delivery boys have caught something and didn’t come in.

  “I’d better just go,” she says. “I’ve got to go down there to order. He didn’t speak enough English. It’s ten blocks. I’ve got to burn something off before I eat anyway.”

  “You’ve been burning all day.”

  “You don’t know how many moo shus I can eat.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “Someone should stay near the phone.”

  I tell her again that he’s not going to call.

  “Come on, then, hurry,” she says, pulling on a light jacket. “I’m ravenous. The woman said it’s crazy down there tonight. There’s a huge line.”

  We walk the night streets of Queens. It does not seem strange that we go hand in hand. Nothing meant. She takes my hand as we step out of her building and I leave it there because I know there is a true feeling of loneliness that comes from waiting together. It’s like two people still standing at a bus terminal after all the passengers have been met, the instant shared feeling almost enough to make them intimates.

  We pass by newsstands. He is papering their displays, their walls. I wonder if he has seen his own face in the papers. Will the people see just another politician in trouble, just another scandal? Will they see an American there? I think of him wandering somewhere in the streets of this city. I know he hasn’t left. Where would he go? He is somewhere in Queens, I want to believe, lodged safely among any of those strangers whose names so people his mind. He’ll knock on a door and they will see him and cry out. Hustle him in. They will seat him at the head of their table. Listen as he blesses their children and their health.

  But can you really make a family of thousands? One that will last? I know he never sought to be an ethnic politician. He didn’t want them to vote for him solely because he was colored or Asian. He knew he’d never win anything that way. There aren’t enough of our own. So you make them into a part of you. You remember every one of their names. You are the model by which they will work and live. You are their hope. And all this because you are such a natural American, first thing and last, if something other in between.

  We now walk west. Always you end up going west. Janice picks up the pace. We’re on a broader street now, it runs straight into the distance, and you can see a few of the lights of Manhattan. There is a small crowd milling outside the Chinese takeout, which Janice says is the neighborhood’s best. People are waiting for their orders. It’s warm tonight, the warmest spring night so far, and no one seems to mind. Tomorrow’s Friday and work will stop. We go inside and give our order, get our slip. They’re out of scallops, also out of shrimp and squid, the girl at the register says. Some of their deliveries didn’t come today. We order twice-cooked pork and chow fun and steamed gailon, semi-bitter greens. I know I’m American because I order too much when I eat Chinese. We stand outside with everyone else, the crowd mixed, Jews and Hispanics, Asians and blacks. Everyone gets along. There’s cross-talking and joking. Easy laughs. It’s something enough, I suppose, when you know you will soon eat the same food.

  It’s almost ten o’clock, and we’re one of the last orders they take. They actually have to send a cook to one of their stores a few miles away for ingredients. They say to customers sorry it’s so early, but they have to close sooner tonight. They didn’t get their cooking oil delivered either, other things as well. No more ginger, no more scallion. Very please you come back tomorrow. Thank you very much.

  A brief rain pours down and the few of us still waiting come inside. There are a few chairs along the walls, the space not ten feet square. The kitchen is tiny. An old color TV is set high in a corner opposite the register. Everyone quiets for the final story of a weekly magazine show. They’re interviewing several of the men from the cargo ship that ran aground in Far Rockaway. The young men are in their twenties, rice-water skinny, unshaven. They wear light blue coveralls that the detention center has provided them. They have very white, bad teeth. They describe the conditions on the ship, the lack of plumbing, how some of the passengers died during the 12,000 mile voyage and were wrapped in plastic and cast into the ocean. They try to keep smiling and downplay the hardship.

  I listen closely to what they say. Or at least, how they are translated by a woman who sounds Chinese American, her tones over-round and bulky like Sherrie’s. She imparts a formality and respect to their statements, and they seem
to be interviewing for a position rather than telling their story, unceasingly nodding and bowing and grinning exuberantly with the joy of their good fortune. They keep repeating the words America and new life.

  Luck, like most everything else, must be a Chinese invention. We Koreans have reinvented the idea of luck as mostly bad, and try to do everything we can to prevent it. We fear leaving anything to chance. So with John Kwang, in whatever he did. But how will he come back to the world now? A part of me doesn’t want him to show up again. Not only for the television, for the public, but for me and Janice and the rest. Whoever is left. It is not that I don’t wish to face him. I think we can both bear that burden. What I dread most is the feeling that might come out in him on his return, the expression of self-loss and self-doubt on a face that I have known as almost unblemished, resolute, magically unweathered by strife and time. For so long he was effortlessly Korean, effortlessly American. Now I don’t want him ever to lower his eyes. I don’t want to witness the submissive dip of his brow or the bend of his knee before me or anyone else. I didn’t—or don’t now—come to him for the occasion of looking upon this. I am here for the hope of his identity, which may also be mine, who he has been on a public scale when the rest of us wanted only security in the tiny dollar shops and churches of our lives.

  We get our cartons of food but now the 10 P.M. news comes on. Mostly they report the same facts and allegations as earlier in the day, trying to talk to girls who work at the club, hounding its owner as he gets into a car. They show the outside of the hospital where a reporter files her story. They run old footage of John Kwang from various points during his career, almost a retrospective as though he has died, and as the reporter conjectures on what effect this accident will have on his council seat they splice in frames of the salon room where we sat, the interior of his sedan, the spidery crack on her side of the windshield. The mayor refuses to comment but his commissioner of police is suddenly everywhere talking tough about equal justice under the law. The commissioner promises that his force will conduct a full and zealous investigation, and that the district attorney has accorded this case his highest priority.