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In Native Speaker, what is learned about male Koreanness and America by the end?

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By the end of Native Speaker, Henry Park learns to balance his Korean identity with his American life, realizing he can embody multiple roles—a husband, a father, and a Korean man. The novel highlights the challenges of maintaining cultural heritage in America, where identities can be fragmented. It also critiques America's reluctance to accept immigrants fully and the internal conflicts among immigrant communities. Ultimately, Henry finds peace by embracing language's flexibility and reconciling with his wife.

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Lee's Native Speaker deals with themes of identity and connection to our past and culture while dealing with our own individuality. In the context of being a first-generation immigrant, as Henry Park is, it is difficult to maintain these connections while living as an American. Throughout the novel, Park is constantly trying to find his place in the society he lives in. He is, in many ways, connected to Korea. Park's personality and his emotional cadences are very much "Korean." Park also spends a lot of time in Korean places in America, further symbolizing his connection to an identity in a land that is both home and foreign.

In the end, Park begins to realize that he can maintain his identity as a Korean man along with the other identities he holds. Park can be a husband, a father that lost a child, and a man. Native Speaker shows that...

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we are never just one thing, despite how rooted in an identity we are. On the other hand, we learn that America is a double-edged sword. In America, we can be who we endeavor to be. We can maintain all of the identities that form a complete and dynamic person. However, because of the fact we all come from another place, we are never really connected⁠—we are all separated, despite being American.

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Henry Park is an incredibly complicated character; his facility with words and language is part of what has made him so successful in his job as a spy in the US, while in his private life the stoic silence he learned from his Korean father cost him his relationship with his wife Lelia, who is alienated by (among other things) his inability to articulate his emotions upon the loss of their son. It's tempting to reduce Henry to component cultural pieces (his "silence" is Korean, and his emotional and linguistic facility at work are "American"), but the story defies simple answers and checked boxes. Henry does come to believe that Korean men (or at least he and his father) “depend too often on the faulty honor of silence, use it too liberally and for gaining advantage.” (Perhaps this is why he is so fascinated by Kwang, the Korean American politician who functions so effectively, so openly and communicatively, in American society.) Henry finds a kind of peace at the novel's conclusion when he starts working with Lelia as a speech therapist for non-native speaker children. He watches the children discover the fun and flexibility of language—something he wishes he had been taught when he was acquiring his second language in a country where language and its politics can so easily sway perceptions of identity. As the kids see Henry as a model of success (someone whose "voice moves in time with his mouth, truly belonging to his face" as he owns the language), he comes to an understanding about what it means to be a "speaker" and a "native" (eNotes). It's hard to draw definitive conclusions about what it means to be a male Korean American—but Henry at least seems to have made peace with one aspect of it as he reconciles with his wife and breaks the "silence" he has held onto in his personal life (and rejects his previous public one when he quits his job).

I also think there's a lot readers might learn about America. One of the most salient details to me seems to be the way Park questions whether one can be a "native speaker" and still hold onto one's cultural heritage in the US today—and whether even then the country will recognize an Asian face as truly "American." The novel also suggests a deep reluctance in American politics to accept recent immigrants as candidates (as illustrated by John Kwang's fate). It also draws a vivid portrait of the way immigrants are made to fight or betray each other (as Henry betrays John, who has trusted him in part because of their Korean connection). Henry is so aware of the linguistic and cultural legitimacy denied to those with Asian faces that he chose to raise his child without Korean customs so that he would have "the authority and confidence" that Henry himself never felt.

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