Native Speaker: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

Lelia moves back into her and Henry’s apartment. Despite Henry’s difficulty with the Kwang operation, they enjoy a relatively happy period together. Lelia starts seeing students in the apartment, working with children who have trouble speaking English for various reasons. The students that stand out most to Henry are two Laotian cousins whose immigrant parents drop them off so they can work on their pronunciation. The boys remind Henry of himself when he was a child. He had one teacher who was particularly strict, slapping his hands with a ruler when he mispronounced words. When the Laotian boys get picked up one day, Henry talks to their fathers, who barely speak English. Still, they recognize that he’s Korean and enthusiastically voice their support for Kwang.

After the Laotian boys leave, Henry and Lelia decide to take a ferry trip to Staten Island, where they’ll stay in a small hotel. On the ferry, they talk about what it feels like to leave home on a boat, which leads to a conversation about Lelia’s father’s time in World War II. He’s never mentioned it to Henry, but he fought in Korea. But Henry isn’t surprised—Stew has the look of a white man who might call a Korean a “gook.” Lelia has never understood that term, so Henry explains that it came from a misunderstanding. When American soldiers arrived in Korea, villagers would yell, “Mee-gook!” The Americans thus thought they were calling themselves “gooks.” In reality, though, “Mee-gook” means “American.”

Lelia laughs at the ignorance of American soldiers like her father. But then she says she would have lost her mind with anger if any of the neighborhood kids in Ardsley had called Mitt a “gook.” She erupts into fury, but then she chokes back a cry, suddenly unable to contain her emotion. 

That night, Henry and Lelia stay at a rundown hotel. They have sex while corny spy movies play on the television. Later, they switch to the news and learn that something terrible has happened: the Kwang offices have been bombed. Henry knows that Kwang himself is in D.C. tonight, so he’s safe. But it’s unclear whether or not anyone was in the building at the time. Lelia is overwhelmed by the news, understanding that Henry could have been there when the bomb went off. She runs to the bathroom and throws up, and then she comes back to bed and lies next to him, asking questions about who could have planted the bomb. But he has no idea. All he knows is that he’s frightened.