Chang-Rae Lee: Native Speaker

Before she left I had started a new assignment, nothing itself terribly significant but I will say now it was the sort of thing that can clinch a person’s career. It’s the one you spend all your energy on, it bears the fullness of your thoughts until done, the kind of job that if you mess up you’ve got only one more chance to redeem.

I thought I was keeping my work secret from her, an effort that was getting easier all the time. Or so it seemed. We were hardly talking then, sitting down to our evening meal like boarders in a rooming house, reciting the usual, drawn-out exchanges of familiar news, bits of the day. When she asked after my latest assignment I answered that it was sensitive and evolving but going well, and after a pause Lelia said down to her cold plate, Oh good, it’s the Henryspeak .

By then she had long known what I was.

For the first few years she thought I worked for companies with security problems. Stolen industrial secrets, patents, worker theft. I let her think that I and my colleagues went to a company and covertly observed a warehouse or laboratory or retail floor, then exposed all the cheats and criminals.

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.

I lied to Lelia. For as long as I could I lied. I will speak the evidence now. My father, a Confucian of high order, would commend me for finally honoring that which is wholly evident. For him, all of life was a rigid matter of family. I know all about that fine and terrible ordering, how it variously casts you as the golden child, the slave-son or — daughter, the venerable father, the long-dead god. But I know, too, of the basic comfort in this familial precision, where the relation abides no argument, no questions or quarrels. The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

And yet you may know me. I am an amiable man. I can be most personable, if not charming, and whatever I possess in this life is more or less the result of a talent I have for making you feel good about yourself when you are with me. In this sense I am not a seducer. I am hardly seen. I won’t speak untruths to you, I won’t pass easy compliments or odious offerings of flattery. I make do with on-hand materials, what I can chip out of you, your natural ore. Then I fuel the fire of your most secret vanity.

I should have warned my American wife.

I met Lelia at a party given by an acquaintance of mine from college, a minor painter of landscapes. I bumped into him by pure chance in a trinket shop in El Paso. I was in the city on assignment, only my second one solo, and I’d just completed the job. It had been successful, but I was still jittery, the way you feel after a massive release of energy, my nerves on end and still working. I was planning to fly out that evening, but he invited me to a gathering of some of his artist-and-crafter friends and I decided to stay until the next morning.

That evening I went to his living loft and studio, which was on the second floor of a run-down hacienda in an old section of town. The party was crowded, mostly candlelit, the talk unfiltered, unwinding all over the single large room. People were sitting in groups on oversized floor pillows and on cane chairs turned backward, smoking grass and drinking tall-neck beers. Nils — the painter — greeted me in the open kitchen.

“My good friend Henry,” he said stridently, the strangeness of that notion hanging there for us.

I simply took his hand. He had a woman with him, or next to him, and he introduced us. She said hello to me and her voice surprised me with its pitch, clearer and higher than I was hearing those days. The women I knew back in New York grumbled from down low in the gut, in messy plaints, everything spoken in 2 A.M. arias.

It ended up that Lelia was the only person I spoke with. In fact Nils seemed to want us to talk, if only to keep her occupied while he entertained the other guests. He was probably figuring I wouldn’t get in the way. He didn’t say as much, they weren’t lovers, but I could tell he desired her, the way he was ushering her around with his paint-splattered hand clinging to the small of her back. Make a gesture, he must have thought, let my Asian friend in the suit have a pleasant moment with her.

She was wearing a sand-hued wrap, a kind of sari, except it was looser than that, as if it had just been unwound and then only casually repinned. One shoulder was bared. I noticed she was very white, the skin of her shoulder almost blue, opalescent, unbelievably pale considering where she lived. When he left us she bid him goodbye using his surname, with neither irony nor derision. Then she told me to wait and she left. She came back after a few minutes with two beers pressed against her chest and a bowl of tortilla chips in her free hand. I took the bottles from her. They left winged damp marks on her wrap, which she didn’t seem to notice. She led us to an open double window at the quieter end of the studio. She balanced the bowl on the wide sill and said to me, “I saw you right away when you came in.”

“Did I look that uncomfortable?”

“Terribly,” she said. “You kept pulling at your tie and then tightening it back up. I saw a little kid in a hot church.”

“I’m usually better at parties,” I told her.

“I’m usually worse,” she said. “I guess tonight I feel social.”

We clinked bottles.

She was looking at me closely, maybe wondering what a last name like Park meant ethnically. After a while our talk came ’round to it, so I told her.

“I knew,” she said. “Or I was pretty sure. A friend in middle school taught me about Korean names, how Park and Kim were always Korean, the other names like Chung and Cho and Lee maybe Korean, maybe Chinese. Never Japanese. Am I getting this right?”

“You’re getting this right.”

“Aren’t you going to guess what flavor my name is?”

She was about to remind me of it but I said Boswell aloud, very slowly as if in a recital or bee. I guessed somewhere in the Commonwealth.

“I’m too easy,” she cried. “You even got the Massachusetts part without trying. It’s so depressing. You don’t know what it’s like. An average white girl has no mystery anymore, if she ever did. Literally nothing to her name.”

“There’s always a mystery,” I offered. “You just have to know where to look.”

“I bet,” she said.

I was immediately drawn to her. I liked the way she moved. I know how men will say this, to describe that womanly affect they find ineffable. I am as guilty as them all. There is a hurt that pinches your throat or chest when you look. But even before I took measure of her face and her manner, the shape of her body, her indefinite scent, all of which occurred so instantly anyway, I noticed how closely I was listening to her. What I found was this: that she could really speak. At first I took her as being exceedingly proper, but I soon realized that she was simply executing the language. She went word by word. Every letter had a border. I watched her wide full mouth sweep through her sentences like a figure touring a dark house, flipping on spots and banks of perfectly drawn light.

The sensuality, in certain rigors.

“So I work for a relief agency,” she said, warming up. “I drive a pickup truck. I deliver boxes of canned food and old clothes to some neighborhoods around town. Many of the people there are illegals, Mexicans and Asians. Whole secret neighborhoods brown and yellow. Tell me, am I being offensive?”

“I don’t think so.”