Reading Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker: Espionage, Assimilation, and the Immigrant Home

Reading Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker: Espionage, Assimilation, and the Immigrant Home

With several scholars participating out of sheer interest in the topic, evident through the 2005 Spring conference “Teaching Asian American Literature" held by the Korean Society for Teaching English Literature(KSTEL) was that while for most scholars in Korea Asian American literature is not one's expertise, it is increasingly being introduced in the college/university classroom. A number of participants agreed that though the category “Asian American literature" may be difficult to state definitively, if one were to understand it as literature that reflects and addresses the experiences of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans, it can be identified as being clearly in distinction from literatures that are written by writers who do not write from or thematically address conditions of marginalization and exclusion that accompany immigration. Korean American literature in particular, as those present at the conference pointed out, can be of especial importance in the Korean classroom, since many students tend to become drawn to the literature without much difficulty or resistance (because of the familiarity that students experience, such as recognizable generational conflict and familial relations depicted in the literature). With Korean American literature often addressing the contradictions between democratic inclusion and minoritization specific to the immigrant experience, it can encourage Korean students to understand the processes of exploitation and violence built into American national narratives, and moreover, the connection between literary production and social life. In this paper, I take one Korean American novel popular in Korea, Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, and perform a reading that in some ways refuses to read the novel simply as a critique of racial relations in the U.S. While it is still in the process of demonstrating how Lee illuminates the violence of immigration and racialization, I concentrate on how in Lee's novel, the ethnic private sphere of the immigrant home furthers and reinforces oppressive relations experienced by immigrants as racialized subjects in the larger white society. As such, I argue that Korean American literature can bring into light the crucial connection between Korea and Korean America and the disturbing complicity of Korean America in the reproduction of oppressive relations in the U.S.