Chang-rae Lee,  Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books,1995. 324 pages. $22.95 hardcover, $12.00 cloth.

Native Speaker, Chang-rae Lee's first novel, received a great deal of attention upon publication. The first work of fiction by a Korean American to be published by a major house (Riverhead Books is a fledgling division of G.P. Putnam and Sons), this cross between a spy novel and a second-generation identity search was reviewed widely and for the most part positively, establishing its young writer as one to watch. It went on to garner a fistful of honors and awards, including the 1996 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. The good news is that Lee's graceful, multilayered, and at times poignantly affecting novel fully merits the extensive attention it has received.

As the book opens, thirtyish Henry Park, son of Korean-American immigrants, tells of the day he said goodbye to his white New Englander wife, Lelia. As she boards a plane for a break from him in the Mediterranean, Lelia thrusts a note in his hand: "You are surreptitious / B+ student of life.... Yellow peril: neo-American...stranger / follower / traitor / spy." Left to ponder the implications of this stinging assessment, Henry gradually discloses much about his past with her, including the recent loss of their son, seven year old Mitt, who suffocated under a "dog pile" composed of neighboring white kids. This loss has jolted both of them into reconsideration of who and what Henry is (the questions of how Lelia came to be, who she is, and what responsibility she might have for their difficulties figure little in Henry's account). Lelia has retreated from her husband's seemingly emotionless reaction to their son's death, while Henry conducts a search throughout much of the book for clues from his past that might explain what they both consider to be his overly cool, overly detached demeanor.

A parallel plot details Henry's exploits as a spy for Glimmer and Associates, a detective agency with a multicultural staff which specializes in gathering useful information on non-white subjects for shadowy clients. As Henry repeatedly digresses with adroitly sketched memories of his tightlipped, self-conscious, ever-struggling parents and other scenes from his beleaguered past, it becomes clear that certain of his inculcated attributes--a tendency to repress his emotions, a skill at memorizing whatever he learns, and a tendency to don masks in the frustrating quest for social acceptance--have perfectly suited him for work as a spy. Much to the consternation of Henry's white boss, though, his recent assignment as patient to a Filipino psychiatrist known to be a "Marcos sympathizer" (along with proddings from Lelia, who wants him to come out of his shell) has resulted in major slippage of his spy mask.

Increasingly uncomfortable with the internalized restraints of his upbringing, Henry loses control on Dr. Luzan's couch and finds himself "freely talking about my life, suddenly breaching the confidences of my father and my mother and my wife." He is pulled from the job, then given another chance with John Kwang, a Korean-American city councilman pegged as a good contender for New York's mayoral seat and intriguingly described as the figurehead of a truly mixed rainbow coalition. But Kwang often reminds Henry of his own father, and of himself, and his posture as a spy again erodes into personal engagement with his case.

As Henry shifts back and forth between these plots--trying to reconnect with his wife and trying to dig up dirt on Kwang--his language shifts accordingly, moving back and forth from searching, haunted lyricism to clipped, terse spy-speak. Both voices are rendered effectively, and the lack of a unified narrative voice, while bothersome to some critics, subtly signals the linguistic flexibility of a person who has grown up working to develop an identity largely by trying on those of others. Lee's choice of spying as a metaphor for Asian American experience effectively ties the two plots together, suggesting for Henry and the reader how being raised in an Asian American household while being perpetually ostracized by white America can make a person feel like a spy on the outskirts of society.

While many of Henry's ruminations concern the remnants within himself of his parents' culture, he gradually opens his eyes to the resistance encouraged by both Korean culture and American capitalism to consideration of the human stories lying beneath the surfaces of economic exchange and labor relations. Henry's wife serves as a catalyst for his empathetic reflections on the lives of exploited and/or struggling immigrant laborers, the inner-city poor, and the children who visit his apartment for speech therapy with Lelia. Prior to her shocked reaction to Henry's stifled response to their son's death, Lelia questions him about "Ahjumah," a housemaid brought from Korea by Henry's father. As Henry explains to her, ahjumah, literally "aunt," means something like ma'am in Korean society. Lelia "didn't understand that there weren't moments in our language--the rigorous, regimental one of family and servants--when the woman's name could have naturally come out."

Lelia's outsider perspective, though, prompts her to view this linguistic practice as a coldly impersonal example of a cultural tendency to avoid engagement with difficult aspects of the lives of others. It also makes her wonder anew what she is in the eyes of her husband, whether or not he thinks of her as anything more than "the wife." Henry eventually convinces her that she means a great deal to him, and his story is in large part a love song for Lelia; it begins and ends with her, and the narrative shifts from the past tense to the present (another move many critics found inexplicable) when Henry describes their reconciliation, with present tense immediacy signaling his revitalization.

Lee's book begins with an epigraph from Whitman: "I turn but do not extricate myself, / Confused, a past-reading, another, / but with darkness yet." As his darkness becomes light and he begins to define himself as a person no longer shrouded in self-centeredness, Henry focuses with increasingly Whitmanesque sweep and affection on "Kwang's people," New York's teeming myriads of hopeful immigrants speaking innumerable tongues, sweating away their lives in pursuit of America's supposed promise. Lee's novel touches revealingly on many aspects of immigrant and minority experience, including the difficulties inherent in the position of a minority politician, and interethnic tensions (the Black/Korean conflict is effectively incorporated). Finally, Henry becomes a native speaker of himself by learning to sing of other selves.