Native Speaker Summary and Analysis

Chapters 1-3 Summary

Henry Park explains that the day his wife, Lelia, left on a solo vacation, she gave him a list she had been compiling for a year. He says the list is “who I was.” It is mostly made-up negatives, including “emotional alien,” “stranger,” “traitor” and “spy.” He remembers how he initially met Lelia at a party where she noticed he spoke English too carefully to be a native speaker.

Lelia returns from vacation, but she doesn’t come home to him. Henry’s career as a spy is similarly in trouble: His last assignment ended in failure. His firm specializes in getting close to and gathering data on people of specific ethnicities. He’d been posing as a patient of a Filipino psychoanalyst, Emile Luzan, and his grief at losing his young son, Mitt, had bubbled up, blurring the line between his real self and his persona. Henry needs to succeed in his new assignment. Dennis Hoagland, Henry’s boss, tells him he will be placed on the staff of John Kwang, a Korean American city councilman considering a run for mayor. Henry recognizes that his job is in jeopardy, but he also struggles with whether he wants to keep it. He reveals that the Filipino therapist died in a boating accident in the Caribbean. He worries his firm might have been responsible.

Chapters 1-3 Analysis

The opening of the narrative sets up one of the novel’s main themes, Henry’s search for identity as a Korean American. He says the list given him by his wife is “who I was”: spy, alien, stranger. The list illustrates the emotional gulf Lelia feels is between them. It also seems to lay bare some kind of truth, one Henry must grapple with. His job is to use his identity as a Korean American to get close to people with a similar ethnicity. Other people in the firm have different ethnic backgrounds, so they are deployed accordingly. There are two ways this job intersects with Henry’s search for identity. One is that it clearly presents a moral dilemma. He uses his ethnic identity to dig up dirt on other minorities, rather than building up solidarity in the Korean immigrant community. This inserts a barrier between himself and those with whom he shares a background. The second is that he uses his experience of assimilating into American society to play the roles he is assigned. He already has the skill set needed to be a spy because many of the same performative skills are required to assimilate into a culture. This allows spying to operate as an extended metaphor for being a foreigner in American society.