Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee: A Review by Ray Steding

Native Speaker exposes the psychological function of the persona through descriptive interactions of the narrator's life. The book journeys from the first generation of Henry's non-native English speaking parents, through his native English speaking personal life, to his company that gathers data on multicultural persons of interest as a means to hold them to their personas or accordingly fold their personas from them.

I've often thought that identity seems to be a habit of the mind rather than what a person is; a habit of mind that passes away within two generations or in the case of Henry, his next assignment. People are neither their bodies nor their cultures nor their identities. They are the overall flux of their electrochemical states at any particular time.

To point out what the text does regarding emphasizing culturally specific personas that consist of habits of mind I juxtapose the alcoholic whose habitual actions transcend all cultures and blends individual traits into someone that is common but self-unidentifiable. The alcoholic’s persona deteriorates opposite to that of an idealized cultural habit worn as a mask. Emphasis placed on Henry’s immigrant family highlights the social code of mechanical characteristics of mind common to a cluster of like-minded individuals; all of whom wrap themselves in a collective Korean persona.

Henry de-masks his father’s persona into habits that people take on during their struggle to survive and live a healthy life. By following the flow of capital and the habit of humans to attempt to control it Henry reveals a cross-cultural persona and the real human quality that hides beneath it. As Lacan says, "We can find no promise in altruistic feeling, we who lay bare the aggressiveness that underlies the activities of the philanthropist." About his father, Henry states:

you worked from before sunrise to the dead of night. You were never unkind in your dealings, but then you were not generous. Your family was your life, though you rarely saw them. You kept close handsome sums of cash in small denominations. You were steadily cornering the market in self-pride . . . You considered the only unseen forces to be those of capitalism and the love of Jesus Christ. (47)

In the above paragraph the viewpoint of what one considers themselves as being and how they really are may be seen in its phrases and ideas: “not generous,” the family is “your life,” “cornering the market in self-pride,” and the only consideration being ideals of “capitalism and the love of Jesus Christ.” The paragraph expresses concepts to hold in mind and habits necessary to survive.

Continuing, the narrator depicts his father as having the romantic image of an ideal immigrant: "in his personal lore he would have said that he started with $200 in his pocket and a wife and a baby and just a few words of English . . . he would have offered the classic immigrant story" (49).

And, cultural identity as a means of survival builds stability, collectively reinforcing that image through association with other like-minded individuals: "there was a sense of how lucky they were, to be in America but still, have countrymen near" (52).

And finally, "My father like all successful immigrants before him gently and not so gently exploited his own" (54).

This last statement expresses the falsehood of the ideal of cultural identity through authenticating it as a mask worn for exploitation, the base necessity of surviving is used to exploit the habits of those wearing the culturally identifiable mask.

To me, having worked in machine shops in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and having partied with elites at the Mudd Club, Andy Warhol’s Factory and CBGBs, the book fabricates the way people are by heightening a viewpoint that reduces their humanity into base concepts. In this way, I found the novel a fiction of real human nature and not the way that people genuinely function in multi-racial / cultural societies: it cherry-picks a particularly stereotypical point of view by way of its descriptions when, in reality, people as individuals have only partial access to an objective view of who they are. I also found it excessively descriptive and to have a sentimental, conservative tone. The author takes sets of individuals, human collections, and generalizes them by giving them his imagined masks within geographically located spaces. He then places these specimens into mixing bags of workplace and family to highlight cultural issues through comparative / contrast descriptive review. In other words, it suffered from its synthetic viewpoint in a way that identity politics does--it lacks emphasizing the dynamics of the human mind and instead focuses on habits.