SOURCE: "Secret Asian Man," in The Village Voice, Vol. XL, No. 10, March 7, 1995, pp. 26-8.

[In the following excerpt, Yang presents a highly positive review of Native Speaker and discusses Lee's examination of the difficulties posed by language for non-native speakers of English in the United States.]

Let me take this moment to confess to sins of the first and worst order for a writer: sins of language, my original sins. I was born in America but English wasn't my first tongue, not even my second. I was raised to toddlerhood in a three-room Brooklyn flat across from the hospital where I was born and where my mother and father worked. I received their native Chinese from an aunt who spoke little else, then frightened my weary immigrant parents by mangling it with Spanish. To their horror, I was experiencing multicultural meltdown, becoming a linguistic bastard. While my nanny-aunt was busy elsewhere, I'd been left to sample the forbidden fruits of public broadcasting—Villa Alegre, Carrascolendas—and, gracias al televisor, was stumbling ever further from their model of that good second-generational child who should be, must be, reared as a bi gok lang (American) speaking ying gi (English).

They sent me to nursery school early, to root out the traces of my parents' speech and of the polyglot electric box. Now I'm told that over the phone I don't sound Asian, that I sound just like … embarrassed pause, because in this day of recognized diversity, American sounds as American does. So now I'm a speaker of English without portfolio: I can't even successfully mimic the ching-chong mockery of others speaking yellow. I'm stuck in basic broadcast.

Which leads to my second, conscious sin: becoming an accomplice to the murder of my ancestral tongue, a language that could not be resurrected despite years of after-school remedial classes and the best efforts of my repentant parents. My Spanish is still better than my Chinese.

So reading Change-Rae Lee's debut novel was like being handed a confession to sign. I play the literary authority while hiding the suspicion that this name, this face, this carefully disciplined tongue will someday betray me. And half hoping someone will remember that I can't even read a Chinatown newspaper. Sorry, man. Se habla Asian American. Brother Lee too.

Which means we work the contradictions, and this is what we write: spools of cultural history looped and extended with spurious detail. Or immigrant fantasies embedding nuggets of remembered fact. Or ethnic Everyman metaphors that want to recount the story of our selves more surely than we would or could ourselves. All Asian American stories, ultimately, are biocryptography—not fiction, not nonfiction, but un-fiction, coded answers to the question: Who Am I?

Lee does have irony. He gives Native Speaker the disguise of a spy story, lending generic form to the spirit of cultural surveillance that inhabits most Asian American literature. Though the form is only cosmetic: Lee knows full well (as you will, early on) that he won't deliver a thriller's payoff in blood, lead, and adrenalin. What Lee does is to take the bones of a so-American genre and build them into a work of tremendous grace and discomforting resonance.

Lee's protagonist, Henry Park, is a Korean American man born to immigrant parents, raised in ivory suburban upstate New York, educated—overeducated—and then married and employed, both against the grain. His wife is a WASP speech therapist named Lelia, and their relationship has become broken and distant since the death of their son, Mitt, in a tragic accident.

Lelia's mourning over Mitt is raw and melodramatically American, open in a way that Henry finds he cannot match; this she correctly takes as a lack of feeling, or at least emotional truth, on his part. Their daily communication has shrunk into empty terminology. "We were hardly talking then," he says, "sitting down to our evening meal like boarders in a rooming house, reciting the usual, drawn-out exchanges of familiar news, bits of the day. When she asked after my latest assignment I answered that it was sensitive and evolving but going well, and after a pause Lelia said down to her cold plate, Oh good it's the Henryspeak."

If Henryspeak sounds disconcertingly like Company lingo—spook talk—that's no coincidence. Henry works as an ethnic intelligence expert, an identity-mole-for-hire. Working for Dennis Hoagland, a canny opportunist, he and his coworkers are assigned to get close to and observe their own, to speak their language and listen to their responses, reporting their secrets to unknown and invisible clients:

Each of us engaged our own kind, more or less. Foreign workers, immigrants, first-generationals, neo-Americans. I worked with Koreans, Pete with Japanese. We split up the rest, the Chinese, Laotians, Singaporans, Filipinos, the whole transplanted Pacific Rim…. Hoagland had established the firm in the mid seventies, when another influx of newcomers was arriving. He said he knew a growth industry when he saw one; and there were no other firms with any ethnic coverage to speak of.

Henry is a very good agent. The same things that impair him as a husband make him a perfect spy. A closeted identity is a necessary tool in this field, and Henry's lifelong fear of appearing alien has been useful:

If I may say this, I have always only ventured where I was invited or otherwise welcomed. When I was a boy, I wouldn't join any school club or organization before a member first approached me. I wouldn't eat or sleep at a friend's house if it weren't prearranged … call me what you will. An assimilist, a lackey. A duteous foreign-faced boy. I have already been whatever you can say or imagine, every version of the newcomer who is always fearing and bitter and sad.

Henry, friendly assimilist, cultural chameleon, has always been able to get close to others without being touched himself. But his most recent assignment has been a disastrous failure: asked to investigate a Filipino American psychotherapist named Luzon, he instead finds himself offering up revelations, blending facts from his life with the faux data of his cover. His son, his wife, his assembled artifacts of assimilation, have been stripped away, and he is all too vulnerable.

John Kwang—Korean American Queens councilman, potential mayoral candidate and messiah apparent of the gorgeous mosaic—is Henry's second and last chance. Hoagland plants Henry as a mole in the Kwang campaign. It seems like a plum gig. Henry's long-disused ties of blood and language make it easy for him to gain Kwang's trust. But Henry himself is slowly seduced by this patriarch, this Moses out of Flushing, in whom so many have invested immigrant hope. Kwang calls Henry by his Korean name, weaves around him a cocoon of familiarity. By story's end, Henry must make a painful choice: Should he tell Kwang's secrets, or should he keep them? If he speaks, he will be returned to his former state of cultural denial—the good agent-American, condemned to a voiceless life. Silence, by contrast, might set him free.

Here as elsewhere, for Lee, "to speak or not to speak" and "to be or not to be" have identical meanings. Language is pandemic, it infects and pervades and mediates everything: Speech is culture, speech is power, speech is sex. It's Lelia's crispness of tongue, her confidence in lingua Americana, that first attracts Henry. "Even before I took measure of her face and her manner," Henry muses, remembering their original encounter,

I noticed how closely I was listening to her. What I found was this: she could really speak…. Every letter had a border. I watched her wide full mouth sweep through her sentences like a figure touring a dark house, flipping on spots and banks of perfectly drawn light.

In contrast with Lelia's lack of verbal inhibition, Henry is emotionally ingrown, mute. He attributes this to being brought up within his father's culture of silent endurance, where pain must be swallowed in public (before the whites) and can only be expressed in private in the secret speech of home, in the father tongue which Henry, at the hands of his American education, has lost. Henry notes that what remains is "all that too-ready devotion and honoring, and the chilly pitch of my blood, and then all that burning language that I once presumed useless, never uttered and never lived."

Having smothered that burning tongue beneath the English of his teachers and peers, he's left with a language stacked against him: "There isn't anything good to say to an average white boy to make him feel small. The talk somehow works in their favor, there's a shield in the language, there's no fair way for us to fight." So is it any wonder that when grown-up Henry speaks, it is with a dissociation that suggests that the syllables and images flowing from his mouth sluice around his being without touching it? They come from some external source, the pen of an unseen author, some primeval phrase book; they aren't native to his heart. Henry has become living proof that man can be an island, even an Alcatraz. What he wishes he could say lies trapped behind the seal of the Good, the Silent, the Model Minority.

The spy in the house of culture: Lee's device works on so many levels, none deeper than as an examination of the position of the immigrant, and particularly of the Asian immigrant. Since World War II, of course, Asians in America have faced suspicions of divided or imperfect loyalty. The internment of Japanese Americans and, more recently, allegations in the news of Chinese immigrants acting as sleeper spies: these are examples of how the foreignness of Asians is seen as running deep as blood. We are not only different from whites, but also blacks. Thus, too frequently, our survival in America's bicameral politics of race means adopting one or another alias, smiling and wearing camouflage.

I remember a late night with an Asian American friend who'd been brought up midwestern; we were discussing Los Angeles's Museum of Tolerance, the identity theme park that had recently opened to mostly white, mostly uncritical acclaim. To enter its exhibit halls, you must pass through a set of doorways that damn you to self-definition, marked in cold letters WHITE and COLORED. Of course, we thought, this device would shock and "educate" only those for whom the recognition of this divide was not a fact of daily life, and how often is any person of color given a choice between these doors? And then we considered our own childhoods, marked by spot-moments of acceptance and rejection, by inane and desultory wranglings with identity.

"Which door would you've gone through?" my friend joked.

I thought for a moment before answering.

"In one, out the other, I think."

While I was being half facetious then, on another day I might have meant it—a more bitter or honest day. As Henry notes in Speaker, "It's still a black-and-white world."

"It seems so, Henry, doesn't it?" Kwang agrees. "Thirty years ago it certainly was. I remember walking these very streets as a young man, watching the crowds and demonstrations. I felt welcomed by the parades of young black men and women…. I tried to feel what they were feeling. How could I know? I had visited Louisiana and Texas and sat where I wished on buses, I drank from whatever fountain was nearest. No one ever said anything."

"Soon there will be more brown and yellow than black and white," Kwang says. "And yet the politics, especially minority politics, remain cast in terms that barely acknowledge us…. [I]f I don't receive the blessing of African-Americans, am I still a minority politician? Who is the heavy now? I'm afraid that the world isn't governed by fiends and saints but by ten thousand dim souls in between. I am one of them."

Dim souls—finless, featherless creatures of the gray world. In the binary of our race politics, Asians are regularly seen as double agents, outsiders and in-betweeners harboring an enigmatic personal agenda; more so now, when anti-immigrant hysteria has brought back the interrogator's hot lights and the loyalty oath. In post-Proposition 187 California, to be yellow or brown invites accusation. To be a nonnative speaker becomes a daily confession. "Traitor" and "spy" and "false speaker of language" have become identical; and now more than ever we are tongue-tied.

Like every politician, Kwang has skeletons hidden in his closets; unlike many, he won't be allowed to keep them. Since he resolutely refuses to enter a door—WHITE or colored—Kwang will be swept off the stoop. This, Henry grows to realize, is the nature of his assignment. And so: speak or be silent? The time comes when Henry is asked to call his loyalty, an identity to keep and be damned. It's to Lee's credit—or is it?—that Henry gets a third option, and a resolution of his Who Am I? is withheld. After all, there are no easy answers, and admission through whichever door comes at a price that Asian Americans—that no one—should have to pay.

Speaker's world, with its New York precisely drawn as a mosaic cracked, its boycotts and bombings, the machinery and manipulation of its politics, is familiar enough to leave the reader wondering if chapters after the last will be played out in headlines.