Native Speaker Themes

Throughout Native Speaker, Henry Park explores the complexities of his own identity, as he feels simultaneously connected to and estranged from his Korean roots. As a Korean American man raised in New York City by Korean immigrant parents, he’s intimately familiar with Korean culture, but he doesn’t have the same relationship with this culture as his mother and father do. His father, for example, remains entrenched in his Korean identity even as he lives…

Native Speaker is a novel that considers the ways people communicate with one another, and how those modes of communication impact their relationships. When Henry first meets his future wife, Lelia, she says that she can tell right away that he isn’t a “native speaker,” despite the fact that he has a perfect American accent, because of how his face looks when he’s talking. It’s as if he’s carefully listening to himself to make…

Native Speaker investigates the difficulty of navigating loss alongside a loved one. More specifically, the novel looks at the immense strain that grief can put on a relationship, which is what happens after Henry and Lelia’s son, Mitt, dies at age seven. This loss isn’t the first one Henry has experienced in his life, since his mother died when he was only 11 years old. When that happened, though, his father responded very…