Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Native Speaker, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Multiculturalism
Silence, Language, and Communication
Racism and Xenophobia
Love, Loss, and Moving On
Summary
Analysis
Lelia has returned from Italy, but she hasn’t moved back into her and Henry’s shared apartment. Not wanting to be away in case she comes home, Henry has been spending less and less time in the office, which is just north of the city. Hoagland doesn’t like his absence, so he calls him at strange hours, ringing him up in the middle of the night to ask how he’s doing. He acts like he cares about Henry’s personal life, insisting that he wants his employees to be happy. In reality, though, Henry knows Hoagland is monitoring him closely because he messed up his last assignment.
Hoagland’s false sincerity hints that he’s untrustworthy. Given that Henry’s job seems a bit nefarious to begin with, it’s especially noteworthy that Hoagland is the kind of person who has ulterior motives, since this suggests that he’s someone Henry should be wary of—a fact that will later become quite clear. Henry also continues to keep Lelia at a distance despite wanting to be close to her, even as she’s returned to the U.S.
Themes
When Lelia was still in Italy, Henry was put on assignment to find out information about a therapist named Emile Luzan. To get close to him, he posed as a client. As with any of his assignments, he’d built up an entire backstory and was using a fake name, claiming to be a businessman dealing with depression for the first time in his life. But Henry found Luzan disarming and kind, and he began mixing his own life into his invented backstory. He started talking to Luzan in earnest about his life, even telling him about his dead son. As he got more and more wrapped up in the therapy sessions, he stopped trying to get information out of Luzan, for whom he developed a legitimate fondness.
It’s now revealed that Henry and Lelia had a son who died, which adds some context to why Lelia decided to leave for Italy. After all, tragedy often strains otherwise close romantic relationships. To add to this, Henry is a rather quiet, reserved person, so it’s likely that he and Lelia (who is outspoken about her feelings) mourned the loss of their son in different ways, with him mostly keeping his feelings to himself. And yet, the novel implies that he, too, yearned for some kind of emotional outlet, which is why he eventually opened up to Emile Luzan in therapy.
Themes
Eventually, Hoagland sent Jack to take Henry off the Luzan case. Now, Henry knows, Hoagland is monitoring him because he lost his sense of purpose while working on Luzan. For this reason, Hoagland has given him what’s supposed to be a very simple job monitoring a Korean city councilman named John Kwang. Kwang is a little younger than Henry’s father would be right now if he were alive. He’s rich and “self-made,” and the Democratic Party wants him to run for mayor. The job is supposed to be extremely easy for Henry, but he finds himself putting off the actual work, instead wandering around the apartment in an aimless, haunted fashion. There’s something about the apartment that troubles him—it’s too big, and it’s hard not to think about how he used to live there with Lelia and their son, Mitt.
Work isn’t Henry’s first priority right now, since his personal life is—to a certain extent—derailing. The reason he was unable to properly spy on Luzan is that the assignment gave him an opportunity to speak privately about his life. Not only has he lost a son, but he’s seemingly in danger of losing Lelia, too. And given that he opened up to Luzan, it suggests that Henry yearns for some kind of emotional support. But he now has to focus on work, since he has to make up for his failure. The problem, however, is that he identifies with his new target, John Kwang, who reminds him of his own father. This suggests that it will be harder to actively undermine him, despite Hoagland’s assumption that the job will be easy for Henry.
Themes
Henry thinks about what it was like to live in his and Lelia’s large apartment when Mitt was still alive. Mitt used to run around and yell, and they would often bathe him in the large tub they’d inherited from Lelia’s uncle. One time, Mitt slipped on the tiles and smashed his head on the floor. For a moment, his eyes fluttered, and then he started yelling. They took him to the emergency room, but everything was fine by the next day. Now, Henry’s not sure he and Lelia will keep the apartment, though he hasn’t talked to her about it because she has yet to come by—even though she’s back from Italy. He suspects that she’s staying at a friend’s apartment, so he often goes to a coffeeshop nearby and looks for her.
Henry is all alone with his memories of Mitt—memories that are somewhat disturbing, as he rehashes stories like the one in which Mitt slipped and bashed his head on the tiles. Haunted by these thoughts of his beloved son experiencing pain, Henry has trouble living in the family apartment all by himself, clearly longing for Lelia’s support and companionship, which he seems to have taken for granted before she left. Still true to form, Henry remains at a distance from Lelia and waits for her to come to him.
Themes
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Henry goes to the company’s office in Westchester because he wants to see Jack. He and Lelia used to visit Jack’s house in a wealthy neighborhood north of the city, and Jack would make them beautiful meals while his stunning wife talked to them. Lelia loved Jack and his wife, who died not long ago from cancer. Jack took time off to care for her, and it was during this period that Hoagland told Henry about Jack’s past working for the CIA. He told him a story about how Jack was abducted by insurgents while working in Cyprus in 1964. He was viciously beaten and would have been killed, but then a car crashed into the building and his captors went to see what happened. When they left, Jack managed to kill the young guard still watching over him.
Henry has a close relationship with Jack, who acts as a caring mentor and friend. And yet, there’s no denying that Jack has an ominous past and, as such, might be a dangerous person—he has, after all, murdered people. Whereas Henry is a small-time spy who simply gathers information, Jack is more of a serious, old-school operative. The mere fact that he works at the same company as Henry suggests that the entire organization is perhaps more sinister than it might otherwise seem. Nonetheless, Henry seems to trust Jack, turning to him for support because he doesn’t have anyone else right now.
Themes
The company Henry works for operates under the name Glimmer & Company. The office is in a nondescript building full of doctors’ offices, and nobody ever visits their floor. The elevator door opens onto a small lobby, in which Hoagland has installed a hidden camera to monitor new arrivals. Today the office is relatively empty, but Henry knows Hoagland must be lurking around somewhere—he’s always likely to turn up when people least expect him.
The secrecy surrounding Glimmer & Company solidifies the ominous nature of Henry’s job. What’s more, Hoagland’s unpredictability is unsettling, giving Henry—and, in turn, readers—the impression that he's constantly monitoring everything related to the company. There is, then, a sense of paranoia at play in the novel, as Henry deals with a subtly hostile environment at his own job.
Themes
In the office, Henry sits with Jack and eats olives while talking about Lelia. Jack advises him to give her space, saying that she clearly needs time to think. Henry is inclined to listen to his older colleague, since he had such an admirable relationship with his late wife. Changing the topic, Jack asks about Henry’s progress on the John Kwang case, and Henry admits that he hasn’t spent much time looking over the file in preparation. He senses that Dennis Hoagland has urged Jack to check up on him, wanting to know how he’s coming along. But Jack won’t admit this—he just says that Henry should do his job, since Hoagland has given him an easy task this time around.
Henry sees Jack as a kind older friend, but he can also tell that he has an ulterior motive—that is, Jack is happy to offer Henry advice about Lelia, but he also intends to subtly prod Henry into doing the work Hoagland wants him to do. In turn, it becomes clear that Jack is something of a puppet for Hoagland: his first priority is to make sure everything goes according to Hoagland’s plan. It’s unclear, then, whether or not Henry can fully trust Jack, though Henry himself doesn’t seem too worried about this.
Themes
Henry thinks about how easy Jack is with his emotions. He can imagine Jack’s Greek parents and their willingness to burst into grand displays of feeling—something that starkly contrasts his own parents’ behavior. Henry’s mother was reticent and thought that showing emotion was akin to revealing some kind of personal failure. His father was similar, though he was also the only person who could elicit a smile or laugh or cry from her.
The novel begins to dip into Henry’s upbringing in this section, as he thinks about his parents and the way they handled or thought about their own emotions. It’s evident that they both embraced a stoic attitude when it came to their feelings—an attitude that valued quiet resilience over all else.
Themes
Henry and Jack talk about work politics, and Henry mentions that Lelia doesn’t trust Hoagland. She does, however, love Jack. In fact, she really doesn’t mind anyone at Henry’s work except for Hoagland, and Jack agrees that this is because all of them are quite likable—other than Hoagland, who is certainly “troublesome.” That said, though, he insists that it’s good Henry came into the office today so that he can put Hoagland’s mind at ease, insisting that their boss has been worrying about him.
Once again, the novel presents Hoagland as a rather sinister character. Even Jack, after all, calls him “troublesome,” though he also changes the topic, subtly siding with Hoagland by suggesting that Henry should talk to him—a clear sign that Jack will continue to work on behalf of Hoagland, regardless of what he actually thinks about his boss.
Themes
As Jack talks, he cleans olive pits off a picture of a woman he once seduced as part of the job. The fact that he still has this picture even though the case has been closed for so long makes Henry wonder about how Jack lives with the things he has done. Even for a seasoned professional like Jack, it must be hard to forget certain things—like, for instance, murdering a young man in Cyprus. But this, Henry thinks, is simply the nature of the job: all of them lead double lives. One version of Jack killed the guard in Cyprus, but another version of him seduced the woman in the picture on his desk. And still another version, it would seem, had a long and rewarding relationship with his beloved wife.
Henry’s thoughts about his and his colleagues’ double lives sheds light on the way he has previously approached his relationship with Lelia. Instead of opening up to her and being completely honest about what he does, he has kept his work life separate from his home life—or so he thinks. In reality, breaking up his life like this has just driven Lelia from him, since it just makes him seem emotionally unavailable. The novel thus spotlights how complicated it can be for people to successfully compartmentalize their own lives; in the end, it seems, the many different aspects of a person’s life or identity converge into one messy whole.
Themes
Henry and Jack move into the privacy of the office’s microfiche room to look at various press snippets about John Kwang. He has already been attracting quite a bit of attention as an inspirational figure in the city’s Democratic Party. He’s been on the city council for two years, and everyone is talking about how he should run for mayor, though he himself has denied that this is his intention. Still, the current mayor, De Roos, is clearly nervous about Kwang’s ascendancy, so his associates have been subtly trying to make Kwang look bad by villainizing his interest in giving people tax vouchers to pursue a bilingual education. De Roos’s people want the city’s Latinx constituents to think that Kwang would cut institutionalized bilingual programs from the schools in favor of his new approach.
De Roos’s efforts to hurt Kwang’s popularity have xenophobic undertones, since he’s ultimately using Kwang’s interest in cultural unity and widely accessible language programs against him. Although Kwang is very popular, then, it’s clear that he’s not without some enemies—enemies who will gladly portray him as a threat because of his strong multicultural political message.
Themes
Kwang is a formidable opponent because he’s so likable. Jack thinks Henry might look like Kwang in 15 years or so. At this point, the councilman is a “media darling” who seems somewhat unbeatable, but the fact remains that Mayor De Roos is an experienced politician who knows how to compete. Because the press likes Kwang so much, De Roos hasn’t been overtly trashing him. Instead, he frequently expresses his admiration for him while adding subtle asides that misconstrue or villainize the councilman’s intentions or beliefs. Henry, for his part, notes that the polls indicate an overall hesitancy to embrace “bilingualism” among New York City constituents—something Henry sees as a sign that people don’t want to give “anything more to immigrants.”
The challenges that Kwang faces as a politician underscore the broader challenges that many immigrants face in the United States. Henry recognizes a certain unwillingness to accept people from other cultures, even in very diverse places like New York City. The fact that Henry has a multicultural identity himself means that he likely understands what Kwang is dealing with in a way that his boss probably doesn’t, ultimately hinting that he might find it difficult to work against the councilman.
Themes
It’s clear to Henry that Jack has already done quite a bit of research on Kwang. Jack shares that Kwang is very closely connected to his core base of constituents, the majority of whom are grocers and dry cleaners who frequently hand him donations in envelopes after seeing him at local church services. Hearing this detail, Henry wonders aloud if his own father ever donated to Kwang. “Let’s hope not,” he hears behind him, turning to see Hoagland standing there and observing him. Hoagland informs him that he will be placed in one of Kwang’s new headquarters, which is opening in Flushing, Queens. He’ll pose as an intern who found the organization through a temp agency.
When Henry wonders aloud if his father ever donated to Kwang’s political organization, he acknowledges the overlap between his and Kwang’s backgrounds: they’re both Korean Americans, meaning that they’re familiar with the same immigrant community in New York City—a fact that will only make it harder for Henry to undermine Kwang as a spy, since doing so might feel like working against people like his own father. Hoagland’s response, meanwhile, is extremely ominous, as it implies that he expects Henry to keep his personal life separate from his work—something the novel implies is, perhaps, impossible.
Themes
Henry will primarily work for Kwang’s head of PR, Sherrie Chin-Watt. Sherrie is a Chinese American lawyer in what seems to be an unhappy marriage to an investment banker. She met Kwang years ago, when she was still in law school, but she has only recently joined his political team. Hoagland says that she’s not yet romantically entangled with Kwang, but he insinuates that this is almost sure to change.
Hoagland is clearly interested in digging up dirt about Kwang. Before Henry has even set foot in Kwang’s headquarters, Hoagland is already filling his head with Kwang’s possible downfalls and transgressions. His eagerness to find a scandal serves as a good reminder that Henry will be actively working against Kwang as he tries to get closer and closer to him.
Themes
Hoagland motions for Henry to step into his office alone. He then urges him to be diligent as he formulates his backstory for the Kwang case. Everyone, he insists, is rooting for Henry after his unfortunate experience with Emile Luzan. Hoagland claims that everyone has gone through a similar thing as Henry did, but he also tries to make him feel better by suggesting that he had Luzan in the perfect position—he could have squeezed any information he wanted out of him. But Henry’s not so sure Luzan had anything valuable to reveal. He thinks Luzan was a good man, but Hoagland doesn’t care about that.
For Hoagland, the purpose of Henry’s job is clear: he’s supposed to find out secrets about other people. But for Henry, things aren’t quite so clear-cut. He’s capable of recognizing when his subject is a good person, but this ability to empathize with his targets only makes the job harder. After all, forming a genuine connection with Luzan is what made Henry unable to complete his assignment. It remains to be seen, then, whether or not he’ll be able to remain in an unbiased position while spying on Kwang—a man who comes from the same culture as Henry and even reminds him of his own father.
Themes
Henry thinks back to his dealings with Luzan, who was a Filipino-American who supported Ferdinand Marcos (the former president of the Philippines). Luzan’s advocacy for Marcos in the United States attracted negative attention to him, but nothing he did was violent or sinister. Henry learned not long after he left the case that Luzan died shortly thereafter while at a conference in the Caribbean. Henry called his house to offer some kind of explanation for why he suddenly stopped going to therapy, but Luzan’s wife answered and informed him of the news.
It's unclear if Luzan’s death was an accident or if it had something to do with his ties to the former president of the Philippines. Given that Henry was hired to spy on him, it’s clear that some organization (or individual person) was keeping a close eye on him, so it seems likely that he died under nefarious circumstances. And now that he knows about Luzan’s death, Henry is left to grapple with the fact that he was hired to actively work against a man he genuinely came to respect.
Themes
Before Henry leaves the office, Hoagland tells him not to mess this assignment up. What happened with Luzan cost the company—“and not just money,” he says, adding that “people are talking.” Henry responds by pointing out that Luzan himself can’t talk, but Hoagland pushes back against his implications: sometimes people simply drown, even people with suspicious ties to secretive political plots. Hoagland insists that evil doesn’t truly exist; the world is just the way it is, and there’s nothing more to it than that. In other words, things happen, and people have to deal with reality as best they can.
Hoagland denies—in so many words—that Luzan was murdered. And yet, the mere fact that he goes out of his way to emphasize the supposed randomness of Luzan’s death suggests that he’s hiding something. When he insists that evil doesn’t exist and that reality has nothing to do with right and wrong, he makes a heavy-handed attempt to convince Henry that what their company does isn’t inherently bad or immoral. By saying this, he essentially urges Henry to focus on his assignment without considering any moral implications or the sinister things his actions might lead to.
Themes
