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
Henry thinks back to the period after his mother died. It’s 1971 when his father brings home a young Korean woman from the airport. He doesn’t introduce her to Henry, simply telling him to go help her with her bags. After setting the woman up in the extra bedroom, he comes out and tells Henry that the woman has come to help him with the house and with raising Henry. Henry resents his father for not saying something earlier, but his father knew Henry wouldn’t have liked it, so he decided not to mention it. Henry’s father also reveals that they will be moving to a wealthy neighborhood outside the city. When Henry voices his outrage, his father switches from English to Korean, firmly telling his son that he has no say in the matter.
Henry’s father wastes no time moving on in the aftermath of his wife’s death. Instead of taking time to grieve Henry’s mother, he forges forward by deciding to move to the suburbs. He believes this is simply what one does when confronted with tragedy: keep going. Henry, though, is just a young boy, so the idea of embracing an entirely new life is undoubtedly daunting, especially when doing so means accepting even more change after his mother’s death.
Themes
The young Korean woman lives in a small bedroom near the kitchen and pantry at Henry’s new house in Ardsley. Henry hardly knows anything about her, as her entire life seems to revolve around keeping the house in order and making sure there’s always food. His white friends make fun of her, calling her “Aunt Scallion” and snickering about how she always smells like fish and garlic.
Although Henry’s white friends aren’t explicitly making fun of him, their comments convey a racist sense of intolerance when it comes to other cultures. What’s more, Henry and the housekeeper are both Korean, so his friends’ insults partially apply to him, too—a sign that, though he has found acceptance in the white suburbs, he still faces a casual, unexamined kind of everyday racism.
Themes
Years later, Henry and Lelia start spending the summers in Ardsley with Mitt, staying in a large room above Henry’s father’s garage. Lelia takes an interest in the Korean woman and asks Henry about her one night while they’re lying in bed. She wants to know if the woman has any family, but Henry can’t say—he has never heard her talk about having any close relatives, nor has he heard her communicating with them on the phone. When Lelia asks if the woman is friends with Henry’s father, Henry says no, but he admits (when she asks) that they might be lovers. Finally, she asks him to tell her the woman’s name, but he can’t—he doesn’t know it.
Even though the housekeeper has been in Henry’s life for a long time, he knows basically nothing about her. For an American like Lelia, his lack of knowledge in this regard is somewhat astounding, since it suggests that Henry doesn’t care about the housekeeper as a person. In the context of American society, then, Henry’s relationship to the housekeeper is rather hard to understand, but the novel will go on to explore this relationship in the context of Korean culture, in which such a relationship isn’t so unheard of.
Themes
The fact that Henry doesn’t know the Korean woman’s name deeply upsets Lelia. He simply calls her Ahjuhma, but that’s not her name—it’s a formal address that literally translates to “aunt.” He has a hard time helping Lelia see that not knowing the woman’s name isn’t necessarily a sign that he doesn’t care about her. She doesn’t understand that there’s no context in which he would ever call her by her actual name, nor does she understand that he often has to stop to think about his father and mother’s names. They always called each other “spouse,” and when someone asks him his parents’ names, he always takes a moment before answering, searching for a desperate moment before coming up with the response.
The novel suggests that it’s common in Korean culture to call people by various titles, whether those are formal or informal. For instance, Henry’s parents always called each other “spouse” instead of using each other’s names. Similarly, Henry has always called his and his father’s housekeeper Ahjuhma, which is a traditional address similar to “ma’am.” The fact that he doesn’t know her name therefore isn’t necessarily because he doesn’t care about her, but simply because of the cultural customs by which he, his father, and Ahjuhma abide.
Themes
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Henry and Lelia’s conversation about the Korean woman’s real name puts them at odds with each other. Lelia avoids him for the next few days. Finally, she decides to reach out to Ahjuhma on her own, making an effort to endear herself to the older woman. But Henry has to act as a translator. When they seek her out in the kitchen, she tells them to go away—the kitchen needs to be cleaned, and she has no reason to talk to Henry’s “American wife.”
Interestingly, Ahjuhma seems to have a certain amount of power, at least within the domain of the house’s kitchen. Although Henry’s family employs her, she feels unobligated to take time out of her busy day to talk to Lelia. Her unwillingness to engage with Lelia subtly suggests that Lelia’s efforts to get to know her are misguided. Lelia thinks she’s being kind, but—in reality—she’s just making things harder for Ahjuhma, who seemingly has no problem with the way things work in the Park household. By superimposing her own cultural beliefs about what’s polite and what’s impolite, Lelia misreads the situation and ultimately exacerbates whatever tension might have already existed between Ahjuhma and the Parks.
Themes
Eventually, Lelia finds Ahjuhma folding laundry and tries to help her, but Ahjuhma keeps bumping her out of the way. Undeterred, Lelia tries to fold as quickly as she can. Ahjuhma ends up trying to push her out of the room, at which point Lelia accidentally elbows her in the ear. Both women yell and run out of the room. Lelia fetches Henry and tearfully tells him what happened. When he goes to investigate, Ahjuhma yells at Lelia, calling her a “nasty American cat!” Henry reacts strongly to this insult, telling Ahjuhma that she can’t talk to his wife that way. Ahjuhma instantly bows her head and leaves. The sudden exchange upsets Lelia all the more, as she’s horrified by Henry’s ability to force Ahjuhma into such a submissive position.
Lelia’s efforts to show Ahjuhma kindness ultimately backfire. It’s quite clear that Ahjuhma doesn’t want Lelia’s compassion or help—she just wants to do her job and go about her life unbothered by outsiders like Lelia. What’s more, it’s possible that Lelia’s attempt to help Ahjuhma with the laundry is an insult of sorts, perhaps suggesting to Ahjuhma that Lelia thinks she can’t do her job well on her own. Either way, it’s evident that Lelia misreads the situation because she tries to place it within the context of American culture, in which it’s impolite for people in positions of power to completely ignore others. However, everyone else in the Park household abides by Korean cultural values, so Lelia’s American viewpoint is out of touch with the true reality of the situation.
Themes
Still thinking about his upbringing, Henry recalls conversations in which his father made him second-guess his own position in society. When Henry announced that he was going to a high school dance with a white girl, his father insisted that she didn’t actually like him and was just using him to get a free ticket to the dance. But there are also fond memories, like when he used to help his father wash windows with a hose. His father would give him the hose and then bend over in front of him, purposefully tempting him to spray his butt. As they laughed and played like this, Henry’s mother would watch, and none of them would ever have suspected that she would die of cancer very soon.
Henry’s relationship with his father was varied and complex. Sometimes his father was scornful and went out his way to teach Henry a rather dispiriting message: namely, that he shouldn’t expect that white Americans will ever fully accept him. At other times, though, his father was playful and loving. This balance has undoubtedly shaped Henry’s overall feelings about his father, a man he still thinks about with great frequency, almost as if he’s still yearning for the old man’s approval.
Themes
When Ahjuhma first arrived, she made an effort to take care of Henry, but he pushed her away. Ever since then, they simply went about their lives in parallel, coexisting as she made meals and ran the house. Once, Henry came home from college and caught Ahjuhma sneaking into his father’s bedroom in the middle of the night. The next day, he looked out the window and saw them gardening side by side, and the way they worked quietly next to each other hinted at a shared contentment and intimacy. Ahjuhma ended up dying not long before Henry’s father—she suffered from certain pneumonia-related complications, but she never even told Henry’s father, working diligently until her very last day on Earth.
When Henry saw Ahjuhma and his father developing an intimate bond, he perhaps realized that love comes in many different forms. It’s unlikely that his father and Ahjuhma ever developed a straightforward romantic relationship, but they did seem to establish a strong sense of companionship with each other—a bond based on a shared lifestyle and shared cultural values. Their quiet intimacy also suggests that there are ways to connect with people without using words, though not everyone is well-suited to this kind of bond; Lelia, for instance, clearly needs her partners to open up to her and share their feelings. For people like Henry’s father, though, an unspoken feeling of connection is enough.
Themes
