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Chapter 4
Themes
and Colors
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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