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 sure he doesn’t make a mistake or say something with a Korean accent. Her observation hints at the great lengths Henry has gone to present himself as fully assimilated into American society, but it also suggests that communication can be very complex—there are, it seems, modes of nonverbal communication that can reveal things about people that words themselves might not reveal on their own.
To that end, Henry views silence as a useful form of communication because he was raised with traditional Korean values that present silence as respectful and honorable. When confronted with hardship, for example, he’s raised to remain silent; when it comes to suffering, he’s taught, “the quieter the better.” In his adulthood, though, he recognizes that Korean Americans might “depend too often on the faulty honor of silence” and “use it too liberally.” For instance, after Henry and Lelia’s son, Mitt, dies at the age of seven, Lelia is the only one who ever brings him up, and Henry’s silence on the matter makes Lelia feel like she’s dealing with the loss on her own. This tension creates a divide in their relationship, and the divide gets increasingly worse until Lelia finally leaves Henry. It isn’t until she returns that he finally starts opening up to her about his feelings, talking not just about Mitt but also about the confidential aspects of his job as a spy. His newfound openness transforms their relationship and enables them to heal as a couple, emphasizing the benefits of honest, free-flowing communication. And yet, the novel doesn’t condemn the use of silence as a form of communication. Rather, it simply suggests that there’s a time and place for silence and that, because of its ambiguity, it can be interpreted differently depending on cultural context.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Silence, Language, and Communication ThemeTracker
Silence, Language, and Communication Quotes in Native Speaker
And then others—the ones I always paid close attention to—came to her because they had entered the first grade speaking a home language other than English. They were nonnative speakers. All day she helped these children manipulate their tongues and their lips and their exhaling breath, guiding them through the difficult language.
But I wasn’t to be found anywhere near corporate or industrial sites, then or ever. Rather, my work was entirely personal. I was always assigned to an individual, someone I didn’t know or care the first stitch for on a given day but who in a matter of weeks could be as bound up with me as a brother or sister or wife.
“People like me are always thinking about still having an accent,” I said. […]
“I can tell,” she said.
I asked her how.
“You speak perfectly, of course. I mean if we were talking on the phone I wouldn’t think twice.”
“You mean it’s my face.”
“No, it’s not that,” she answered. […] “Your face is part of the equation, but not in the way you’re thinking. You look like someone listening to himself. You pay attention to what you’re doing. If I had to guess, you’re not a native speaker. Say something.”
We worked by contriving intricate and open-ended emotional conspiracies. We became acquaintances, casual friends. Sometimes lovers. We were social drinkers. Embracers of children. Doubles partners. We threw rice at weddings, we laid wreaths at funerals. We ate sweet pastries in the basements of churches.
Then we wrote the tract of their lives, remote, unauthorized biographies.
“So what’s her name?” Lelia asked after a moment.
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
I told her that I didn’t know. That I had never known.
“What’s that you call her, then?” she said. “l thought that was her name. Your father calls her that, too.”
“It’s not her name,” I told her. “It’s not her name. It’s just a form of address.”
It was the truth. Lelia had great trouble accepting this stunning ignorance of mine.
We perhaps depend too often on the faulty honor of silence, use it too liberally and for gaining advantage. I showed Lelia how this was done, sometimes brutally, my face a peerless mask, the bluntest instrument.
“Just think about it. You haven’t said his name more than four or five times since it happened. You haven’t said his name tonight. Maybe you’ve talked all this time with Jack about him, maybe you say his name in your sleep, but we’ve never really talked about it, we haven’t really come right out together and said it, really named what happened for what it was.”
[…]
“It was a terrible accident.”
“An accident?” she cried, nearly hollering. She covered her mouth. Her voice was breaking. “How can you say it was an accident? We haven’t treated it like one. Not for a second. Look at us. Sweetie, can’t you see, when your baby dies it’s never an accident. […]”
I steadily entrenched myself in the routines of Kwang’s office. […] I had to show the staff that I possessed native intelligence but not so great a one or of a certain kind that it impeded my sense of duty.
This is never easy; you must be at once convincing and unremarkable. It takes long training and practice, an understanding of one’s self-control and self-proportion: you must know your effective size in a given situation, the tenor at which you might best speak.
We joked a little more, I thought like regular American men, faking, dipping, juking. I found myself listening to us. For despite how well he spoke, how perfectly he moved through the sounds of his words, I kept listening for the errant tone, the flag, the minor mistake that would tell of his original race. Although I had seen hours of him on videotape, there was something that I still couldn’t abide in his speech. I couldn’t help but think there was a mysterious dubbing going on, the very idea I wouldn’t give quarter to when I would speak to strangers, the checkout girl, the mechanic, the professor, their faces dully awaiting my real speech, my truer talk and voice.
I have always known that moment of disappearance, and the even uglier truth is that I have long treasured it. That always honorable-seeming absence. It appears I can go anywhere I wish. Is this my assimilation, so many years in the making? Is this the long-sought sweetness?
I felt I should leave him a gift. Honor him with some fraction of the truth. He nodded and said he would wait. I had already decided that I was going to advise the doctor to be careful in his future dealings, that he should be wary of unfamiliar invitations, strange visitors to his home or office, as well as chance meetings with other Filipinos, especially when he vacationed or traveled. I was prepared to reveal whatever was required for him to take me seriously, which would have probably been significant given how tattered and desperate he thought I was.
I took her and we lay down on the carpet. Before I could do anything else to stop myself I told her his name. John Kwang. I could almost see her turning the words inside her head. Of course she knew who he was, that he was Korean. He was appearing on the broadcasts almost nightly because of the boycotts. She didn’t say anything, though, and I could see that she was trying her very best to stay quiet, to think around the notion for a moment instead of steaming right through it. Ten years with me and now she was the one with the ready method. […] And now her voice brooking in my ear, in a voice I hardly recognized. “You just say what you want. Please say what you want.”
“Everyone’s got a theory. Mine is, when the American GIs came to a place they’d be met by all the Korean villagers, who’d be hungry and excited, all shouting and screaming. The villagers would be yelling, Mee-gook! Mee-gook! and so that’s what they were to the GIs, just gooks, that’s what they seemed to be calling themselves, but that wasn’t it at all.”
“What were they saying?”
“‘Americans! Americans!’ Mee-gook means America.”
“That’s perfect,” Lelia says, shaking her head. “I better ask Stew.”
“Don’t harass your father,” I tell her. “He won’t know anything. It’s funny, I used to almost feel good that there was a word for me, even if it was a slur. I thought, I know I’m not a chink or a jap, which they would wrongly call me all the time, so maybe I’m a gook. The logic of a wounded eight-year-old.”
“If I had heard that one redheaded kid say even one funny word to Mitt! God! I would have punched his fucking lights out! I would have made him scream!” Her chest bucks, and she almost starts to cry, strangely, as if she’s frightened herself with a memory that isn’t true.
And I think she’s saying it perfectly, just like she should. When you’re too careful you can’t say anything. You can’t imagine the play of the words in your head. You can’t hear them, and they all sound like they belong to somebody else.
He is no longer moving in his customary way. He looks old and weary, like he’s standing still. He decides to make a brief appearance for the media in the foyer of the ruined offices (against the repeated warnings of Janice, who hates the shot—all that shadowy wreckage and defeat), and with the barrage of questions and arc lights and auto winders he actually falters. Perhaps for the first time in his public life he mumbles, his voice cracks, and even an accent sneaks through.
“[…] He worked for me for nothing, the same as you. For nothing, except for what I might show him about our life, what is possible for people like us. I thought this is what he wanted. Was I crazy? I would have given him anything in my power. But he was betraying us, Henry. Betraying everything we were doing. […] I loved him, Henry, I grieve for him, but he was disloyal, the most terrible thing, a traitor.”
For so long he was effortlessly Korean, effortlessly American. Now I don’t want him ever to lower his eyes. I don’t want to witness the submissive dip of his brow or the bend of his knee before me or anyone else. I didn’t—or don’t now—come to him for the occasion of looking upon this. I am here for the hope of his identity, which may also be mine, who he has been on a public scale when the rest of us wanted only security in the tiny dollar-shops and churches of our lives.
And when I reach him I strike at them. I strike at everything that shouts and calls. Everything but his face. But with every blow I land I feel another equal to it ring my own ears, my neck, the back of my head. I half welcome them. And at the very moment I fall back for good he glimpses who I am, and I see him crouch down, like a broken child, shielding from me his wide immigrant face.
When we’re done she asks if I’m interested and I point out that she hasn’t yet mentioned who used to live in such a grand place.
Foreigners, she says. They went back to their country.
Now, she calls out each one as best as she can, taking care of every last pitch and accent, and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are.
