Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker

This was the first of my jobs for John Kwang. I had been with the campaign for two full weeks and I wasn’t getting near him. I was answering phones, photocopying, distributing newsletters on the street. I hadn’t even actually met him yet, and had spoken just once in passing to Sherrie Chin-Watt. It was only after I had mollified a rowdy assemblage of twenty or so Peruvians who worked for Korean greengrocers (they were protesting low wages and poor working conditions) that Jenkins and some others identified me as being capable and motivated.

The Peruvians showed up outside the door of the converted storefront of the new office with their tall skinny drums and guitars and handmade placards that read: “Koreans Unfair.” No permanent staffers were around to handle them. Sherrie was in Manhattan, Jenkins out of town. The group was becoming boisterous enough to attract attention on the street. I knew that someone in the neighborhood would eventually call a news crew, if they hadn’t already. So I invited the men inside and showed them around the offices. I told them that Kwang didn’t come in every day, but that when he did I would see that he was fully informed of their grievances. My face, perhaps appearing to them a little like his, seemed to assure them. I said he had some influence with the Korean businesspeople in the community, that he believed in fairness in pay and hard work, but that he could only do so much. What he could do was speak to the grocers in his next address before their business association.

The Peruvians seemed to accept this, if somewhat somberly. One of them, a very short older man with the squarest, broadest face of orange-brown I’d ever seen, said something to them and they all began leaving. At the door I handed each of them Kwang trinkets and souvenirs from a box labeled “Premiums.”

Outside, a young reporter and her cameraman were waiting on the sidewalk, ready to capture a provocative scene, but all they got were pictures of the workers exiting the district office carrying John -inscribed pennants and bumper stickers, oven mitts and disposable lighters. The camera was running, and some of the Peruvians saw this and began to wave. The small crowd that had gathered in the street joined in, jumping at the lens. Encores of flags. Fingers saying numero uno .

The following Monday Jenkins informed me that some of my hours were being reassigned and that I was to work on a media advance team. We went straight out to the streets. The leader of the team was Sherrie’s protégé, another bright young civil attorney out of Boalt, Janice Pawlowsky. Janice was originally from Chicago, sharp-tongued, abrasive, ambitious, and sexy — you maybe thought — like your best friend’s mean older sister. About fifteen pounds overweight, a bob of reddish, golden hair. She liked to wear a well-worn thrift-shop leather aviator jacket and black jeans, otherwise, smart dark suits tailored to make her look leaner than she was. All the hungrier. She would tell me in her maniacal west-side-of-Chicago accent that she really liked me.

I stayed out of her way.

“Henry!” she yelled to me that morning (Jack and I had decided it was safe to use my own first name). “Stay with me!”

It was raining on us hard, loud. Only Janice had thought to bring an umbrella.

“Don’t take your eyes off me! I’m only doing this once, goddamnit!”

Janice Pawlowsky was the scheduling manager. It was one of her many jobs. Her mission in this one was to fill every moment of Kwang’s waking time with events and meetings and meals. Get him out there at all costs. For a public appearance, she would take me and the other man, a squat, burly college student named Eduardo Fermin, to scout out the area the day before. For the Bedford-Stuyvesant gathering, Janice had already confirmed her plans with church representatives as well as the local Democratic district chairman, who would be on hand to “host” the gathering.

We were practicing a walk-through of the exact paces Kwang would take the next day. For his half-block “tour” of the neighborhood, Janice began on the steps leading up from the subway, her umbrella madly spilling rainwater, and then counted out the twenty seconds that Kwang would stand there and converse with the ministers. She tried to measure all his talking and stops in that same interval, so if they ran a clip of him on the news they’d be pressed to play the whole thing. If she let him talk for minutes and minutes whenever he wanted they’d just pick and choose quotes to suit their story, and not necessarily his. She made him speak in lines that were difficult to sound-bite, discrete units of ideas, notions. You have to control the raw material, she said, or they’ll make you into a clown.

Now she stepped down to street level and turned east, moving down the exact middle of the sidewalk. She chose east because there were tidy storefronts and an elementary school playground in that direction, and in the far background — if you were looking head-on at Kwang, as the cameras would — the shape of the Manhattan skyline. She paused after fifteen paces; they would stop here for ten seconds, in front of a Turk-owned deli, enough time for Kwang to make a comment about ethnic fellowship and shake the proprietor’s hand. Then they would move on to the end of the block.

Eduardo and I had a simple task: don’t let anything or anyone get between Kwang and the cameras. As she walked his steps, Janice indicated places of potential complication, points where foot traffic might impede the track of the small parade, checking to make sure of enough space for the newspeople covering the event. This was free advertising, and although there was a danger in having little or no control over the coverage or commentary, Janice could at least set up the shots by making them striking and obvious for the cameramen.

“TV people are lazy!” she shouted to us over the rain from beneath her umbrella. “You gotta help them out!” Eduardo and I both nodded, our hands shielding our heads.

Janice bought us breakfast in a coffee shop across the street. We sat in a window booth. After the rain stopped we’d do the drill a few more times. Eduardo ordered eight links of sausage and buttered toast, spraying all of it with hot sauce. He sat next to Janice, eating methodically. He looked older than twenty-three. He wore brand-new horn-rimmed glasses and he adjusted them at the corners after each swallow. He was studying political science at St. John’s at night, working afternoons for a caterer and volunteering whenever he could for John Kwang. He wanted to go to law school. Janice had obviously chosen him for his bulk; our job, I soon learned, required the ability and willingness to push around bodies, even shove some. Direct the traffic. He’d worked for her nearly a year. He was ideal for the job, centered low as he was in his fireplug body, a plow of well-muscled forearms in front of him, a pulling guard for a sweeping Kwang.

I wasn’t as apt as he. My glory years as a physical, athletic presence were at least twenty years behind me, when, in the seventh grade, I was generally the same height and weight as everyone else; I had excelled in football, basketball, baseball, tennis. I eventually grew, but grew skinny. I realized at some point that only my head could compete. I’d always wondered what might have been had I grown to six-foot-three and two hundred pounds. Now, I had been given to Janice’s advance team by Jenkins, an ex-basketball star at CUNY, once the kind of kid I could dribble circles around before he grew ten inches and wised up enough to realize he didn’t have to chase me, he could hang back near the basket and wait for my approach. Jenkins thought I might prove effective as a kind of herald for John Kwang. Calm the crowd with my amenable Asian face.