Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  We see flashing lights in the distance. Soon a line of six or seven squad cars turns the far corner and heads up the block toward us. The cars reach the edge of the throng and then slowly pull their way through the crowd, the lead car trying to move everyone to the sidewalks with sharp barks of its siren. It doesn’t work. People excitedly rush the vehicles, trying to see if he is inside one of them, checking all the back windows. From their motions you can tell he doesn’t seem to be there and this makes everyone even more anxious and edgy. People are beginning to shout at the squad cars, drum on the window glass and the trunks. The cars finally park and the cops angrily push their way out. There is some shoving, and finally they force people out of the way, using their nightsticks as blocking bars.

  With all the commotion, I find I can get closer to the house, right up against the blue barricades that bar the short driveway. I notice that none of the officers manning them seems too concerned when the squad cars pull up, which tells me he probably isn’t with them. The extra cops are now aligning themselves along two yellow tapes they string in the form of a corridor that leads from the street to the house just past where I am.

  The mass returns quickly, filling in the spaces on each side of the narrow cordon of police. I am hemmed in. The cameras are already pushing for the best angles, and the reporters are mostly ignoring the crowd, trying to get the officers to tell them what is going on; they complain that they need to know if they should be feeding live.

  Two maroon four-doors somehow pull up without attracting much notice. Men in dark suits get out of the first one and then the doors of the other car open. Now other men exit, squinting in the light. They all look in this direction. Then one of them leans down and nods into the cab. Says something.

  And then we see him. He steps from the car. In the distance of thirty yards, he looks small to me. Or maybe thinner. I half expect them to help him, but he pulls himself out, his hands free. He holds his suit jacket with one hand and shields his eyes with the other. He still has the bandage on his forehead, but the bruises around his left eye look almost healed.

  They walk him up from the middle of the street. The people who are angry with him are hollering and pointing at him, stretching the police tape as far as they can. They scream at him like he is a child. They are calling him every ugly Asian name I have ever heard. A woman leans out and spits on his shoulder. Some others try to touch him but the plainclothesmen push them away.

  I notice some others who are standing very still with their hands at their mouths. Most of these are Asian women. They look like the older women you see working in the alley behind a restaurant, pouring out buckets of dirty dishwater. They are tired, expressionless. But now they gaze at him as if he were their son, one maybe gone bad though now finally home, and the numbed speech on their faces seems to say how sad he must be and hurt enough and how he should be forgiven.

  He is moving too slowly. He seems to tempt the mass. The men walking him try to speed him up, but he stays his pace. He shrugs them off. Now, he even stops. The people are screaming. An arm’s length away from him they shout with everything they have. But nothing registers in his face. It is as if he is deaf. He seems to look only at a window of his house, but I look up and no one is there.

  He is already in another world.

  But some part of him will taste this last crowd. He is willing to suffer their angry medicine. Perhaps he sees something meaningful, how this might be a test and a recompense. If you must walk the white-hot stones, touch each one.

  I think that he wants to defy them, too, with this deliberation, each of his steps a careful word to break down the ready meter they have built, each halting a kind of instant deliverance.

  The people seem to sense this, that there is some part of him they’re not getting to, not even touching, that he isn’t there for them. They start heaving forward on the other side of the path and snap the tape on their side.

  Suddenly I can’t see him any longer. I can bear anything but I will not bear this. The bodies behind me respond and we push forward. I break the tape myself. I rush toward where he is and I see him at last. I fight my way. I can finally see him, three bodies deep, barely protected by the plainclothes cops, who are busy holding people and cameras back.

  People are grabbing his shoulders, his hair. His bandage is torn from his head. Everyone is shouting. A hundred mouths shouting for him.

  And when I reach him I strike at them. I strike at everything that shouts and calls. Everything but his face. But with every blow I land I feel another equal to it ring my own ears, my neck, the back of my head. I half welcome them. And at the very moment I fall back for good he glimpses who I am, and I see him crouch down, like a broken child, shielding from me his wide immigrant face.

  This is a city of words.

  We live here. In the street the shouting is in a language we hardly know. The strangest chorale. We pass by the throngs of mongers, carefully nodding and heeding the signs. Everyone sounds angry and theatrical. Completely out of time. They want you to buy something, or hawk what you have, or else shove off. The constant cry is that you belong here, or you make yourself belong, or you must go.

  Most of my days begin the same. In the morning I go out in the street and I search for them. I rarely need to go far. I look for the rises of steam from pushcarts. I look for old-model vans painted in matte, their tires always bald. I look for rusty hand trucks and hasty corner displays, and then down tenement alleys strung with fancy laundry and in the half-soaped windows of basement stores. I stop in the doorways of every smoke shop and deli and grocer I can find. They are all here, the shades of skin I know, all the mouths of bad teeth, the speaking that is too loud, the cooking smells, body smells, the English, and then the phrases of English, their grunts of it to get by.

  Once inside, I flip through magazines, slowly choose a piece of fruit, a candy. The store will grow quiet. The man or woman at the register is suspicious of my lingering, and then murmurs to the back, in a tone they want me to understand and in a language I won’t, to their brother or their wife. A face appears from a curtain, staring at me. I finally decide on something, put my money on the counter. I look back and the face is gone.

  My father, I know, would have chased someone like me right out, stamping his broom, saying, What you do? Buy or go, buy or go!

  * * *

  I used to love to walk these streets of Flushing with Lelia and Mitt, bring them back here on Sunday trips during the summer. We would eat cold buckwheat noodles at a Korean restaurant near the subway station and then go browsing in the big Korean groceries, not corner vegetable stands like my father’s but real supermarkets with every kind of Asian food. Mitt always marveled at the long wall of glassed-door refrigerators stacked full with gallon jars of five kinds of kimchee, and even he noticed that if a customer took one down the space was almost immediately filled with another. The kimchee museum, he’d say, with appropriate awe. Then, Lelia would stray off to the butcher’s section, Mitt to the candies. I always went to the back, to the magazine section, and although I couldn’t read the Korean well I’d pretend anyway, just as I did when I was a boy, flipping the pages from right to left, my finger scanning vertically the way my father read. Eventually I’d hear Lelia’s voice, calling to both of us, calling the only English to be heard that day in the store, and we would meet again at the register with what we wanted, the three of us, looking like a family accident, gathering on the counter the most serendipitous pile. We got looks. Later, after he died, I’d try it again, ride the train with Lelia to the same restaurant and store, but in the end we would separately wander the aisles not looking for anything, except at the last moment, when we finally encountered each other, who was not him.

  Still I love it here. I love these streets lined with big American sedans and livery cars and vans. I love the early morning storefronts opening up one by one, shopkeepers talking as they crank their awnings down. I l
ove how the Spanish disco thumps out from windows, and how the people propped halfway out still jiggle and dance in the sill and frame. I follow the strolling Saturday families of brightly wrapped Hindus and then the black-clad Hasidim, and step into all the old churches that were once German and then Korean and are now Vietnamese. And I love the brief Queens sunlight at the end of the day, the warm lamp always reaching through the westward tops of that magnificent city.

  * * *

  When I am ready, I will flag a taxi and have the driver take only side streets for the three miles to John Kwang’s house, going the long way past the big mansions near the water of the Sound, where my mother once said she would like to live if we were rich enough. She wanted for us to stay in Queens, where all her friends were and she could speak her language in the street. But my father told her they wouldn’t let us live there for any amount of money. All those movie stars and bankers and rich old Italians. They’ll burn us out, he warned her, laughing, when they smell what you cook in a house.

  Once, I get inside the Kwang house again. I call the realtor whose name is on the sign outside and we tour the place. As she keys the door she asks what I do and I tell her I am between jobs. She smiles. She still carefully shows me the parlor, the large country kitchen, the formal dining room, all six of the bedrooms, two of them masters. I look out to the street from the study at the top of the stairs. We go down to the basement, still equipped with office partitions. When we’re done she asks if I’m interested and I point out that she hasn’t yet mentioned who used to live in such a grand place.

  Foreigners, she says. They went back to their country.

  * * *

  By the time I reach home again Lelia is usually finishing up with her last students. I’ll come out of the elevator and see her bidding them goodbye outside our door. She’ll kiss them if they want. They reach up with both arms and wait for her to bend down. The parent will thank her and they pass by me quickly to catch the elevator. Then she is leaning in the empty doorway, arms akimbo, almost standing in the way I would glimpse her when I left her countless times before, her figure steeled, allowing. She wouldn’t say goodbye.

  Now, I am always coming back inside. We play this game in which I am her long-term guest. Permanently visiting. That she likes me okay and bears my presence, but who can know for how long? I step inside and walk to the bedroom and lie down and close my eyes. She follows me and says that this is her room. I usually sleep on the couch.

  Usually? I murmur.

  Yes, she says, her voice suddenly closer, hot to the ear, and she’s already on me.

  After a few hours of lying around and joking and making funny sounds she’ll get up and drift off to the other end of the apartment. It’s a happy distance. She’ll prepare some lessons or read. Maybe practice in a hand mirror being the Tongue Lady, to make sure she’s doing it right for the kids.

  I make whatever is easy for dinner, tonight a Korean dish of soup and steamed rice. I scoop the rice into deep bowls and ladle in broth and bring them over to where she is working. We eat by the open windows. She likes the spicy soup, but she can’t understand why I only seem to make it on the hottest, muggiest nights. It’s a practice of my mother’s, I tell her, how if you sweat and suffer a boiling soup in the heat you’ll feel that much cooler when you’re done.

  I don’t know, Lelia says, wiping her brow with her sleeve. But she eats the whole thing.

  She has been on her visits around the city. The city hires people like her to work with summer students whose schools don’t have speech facilities, or not enough of them. She brings her gear in two rolling plastic suitcases and goes to work. Today she has two schools, both in Manhattan. One of the schools is on the Lower East Side, which can be rough, even the seven- or eight-year-olds will carry knives or sharp tools like awls.

  We decide that I should go with her. Besides, I’ve been an assistant before. Luckily, the school officials we check in with don’t seem to care. They greet her and then look at me and don’t ask questions. They can figure I am part of her materials, the day’s curriculum. Show and tell.

  Lelia usually doesn’t like this kind of work, even though it pays well, mostly because there are too many students in a class for her to make much difference. There are at least twenty anxious faces. It’s really a form of day care, ESL-style. We do what we can. We spend the first half hour figuring out who is who and what they speak. We have everyone say aloud his or her full name. When we finally start the gig, she ends up giving a kind of multimedia show for them, three active hours of video and mouth models and recorded sounds. They love it. She uses buck-toothed puppets with big mouths, scary masks, makes the talk unserious and fun.

  I like my job. I wear a green rubber hood and act in my role as the Speech Monster. I play it well. I gobble up kids but I cower when anyone repeats the day’s secret phrase, which Lelia has them practice earlier. Today the phrase is Gently down the stream. It’s hard for some of them to say, but it helps that they can remember the melody of the song we’ve already taught them, and so they singsong it to me, to slay me, subdue me, this very first of their lyrics.

  Lelia doesn’t attempt any other speech work. The kids are mostly just foreign language speakers, anyway, and she thinks it’s better with their high number and kind to give them some laughs and then read a tall tale in her gentlest, queerest voice. It doesn’t matter what they understand. She wants them to know that there is nothing to fear, she wants to offer up a pale white woman horsing with the language to show them it’s fine to mess it all up.

  At the end of the session we bid each kid goodbye. Many freelancers rotate in these weekly assignments, and we probably won’t see them again this summer. I take off my mask and we both hug and kiss each one. When I embrace them, half pick them up, they are just that size I will forever know, that very weight so wondrous to me, and awful. I tell them I will miss them. They don’t quite know how to respond. I put them down. I sense that some of them gaze up at me for a moment longer, some wonder in their looks as they check again that my voice moves in time with my mouth, truly belongs to my face.

  Lelia gives each one a sticker. She uses the class list to write their names inside the sunburst-shaped badge. Everybody, she says, has been a good citizen. She will say the name, quickly write on the sticker, and then have me press it to each of their chests as they leave. It is a line of quiet faces. I take them down in my head. Now, she calls out each one as best as she can, taking care of every last pitch and accent, and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are.

  Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft; and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest novel, On Such a Full Sea, will be published in January 2014. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century,” Lee teaches writing at Princeton University.