Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker

He stops his humming. He drinks stiffly and without looking at me, says, “What do you think?”

“I think they must miss their father.”

“Oh yes,” he says, pushing up the loose terry sleeves. The old boxer again. “What else, Park Byong-ho shih? ”

“They must wonder if he’s all right,” I answer.

“Ah. And is he? What would you tell them? Is their father being himself?”

I don’t answer him.

“Well, come on! You sound like you want trouble tonight. Why don’t you ask me about Eduardo and his apartment? You are the only one left who hasn’t! Is it because you actually respect my grief or are just afraid of what you will hear?”

“I am not afraid of you.”

John cries, “You sound so formal! Even with a little hate you are so respectful and Korean.”

“What do you want me to sound like?”

He says, in a laughing Korean, Ah, you, I want it just like that!

“Aayeh!” I yell.

He yells. That’s much better, you! Why not yell at me? I’ll allow it. Don’t think of me as elder; come, strike out at me with your words, or something else. This is America, we can do this. Say it in English if you have to. Get it out in the open. You want this. I am not your father. I am not your friend. Come on, I will survive .

He steps toward me, his hands balled into fists. We’re not two feet apart. I don’t move. Something in me wants to crush him but I don’t move. I think I can’t bear his inaction. His weeks of strange silence. I think I can bear silence from anyone but him. I want him to stand up and show his face and say something for Eduardo. And for a moment I feel that hot ore of my father’s rage, what would sometimes drive him like disease or madness to hack like a demon at wet sod in the backyard. I am still silent, but I know not for long. I think, let him come at me. I’ll shout him right down.

He says in Korean, Watch out, boy . Then he slowly backs away and sits down again. He pours more whiskey for himself and then puts down the bottle between us. I roll my chair forward, stretch out my arm, take it up. I can see that he is hurt, the instant hang in his expression. How his American life shows through so clearly. Another Korean man of his generation would not forgive the moment so quickly, if ever at all.

We sit for at least an hour saying nothing else. Yesterday, he canceled another news conference at the last minute — or rather, I canceled it for him.

Sherrie and Jenkins refuse to make the phone call to pull him out. They counsel fiercely against it. They practically shout at him while he sits mutely at his desk, moving a crystal paperweight inside a splash of light and then out again. Like everyone else, they want him to speak. They want him to go on television and eulogize his dead, to make a statement to the city with his best public face and deny any involvement with what Eduardo Fermin was allegedly doing after hours; that he had no idea of his running whatever’s been rumored, a pyramidal laundering scheme, a people’s lottery, an Asian numbers game. That he knew the boy and liked the boy but neither all that well. They want to get him some distance from the fire and bombing, from anything of that scenery which enforces the idea of John Kwang as a man losing control over his people, weak and vulnerable and somehow deserving.

Earlier, the news stations run competing evening stories profiling Eduardo, and in the hastily set-up video room we watch him painted as an overly ambitious student who was treated like a son by the councilman: he worked like a religious fanatic for the man, who in turn, according to the reporter, was steadily building an “empire” from his “ethnic base” in northern Queens. They show the ground-floor apartment the Fermin family inhabits, the lethal scene of the office, the procession of black cars rolling through the famous cemetery in Queens, the immense necropolis below the highway, distant spires of Manhattan against the stone monuments, the last one Eduardo’s.

“Perfect,” Janice screams at the monitor. “Drop a cherry on top.”

Next they get De Roos on videotape, saying with a straight face how much he has admired the councilman in recent years, how he wished he had some of that “amazing mystical energy” for himself, but adding, too, in response to the rumors, that “everyone in this town has to follow the rules.”

Kwang isn’t present for any of this. He remains at the top of the house until everyone has gone home. Then maybe, if she’s even here, Sherrie climbs up, stays for a while; I think I can hear the chant of their voices conducting through the iron pipes. Sometimes edgy laughter, raised voices. When she leaves through the side door of the kitchen, I know it’s just the two of us, two Korean men at opposite ends of a stately Victorian house.

The place feels borrowed to me, unlived in. There are no strange smells, no lingering aroma of cooking oils. The house is a showplace for the Kwangs’ many guests and visiting dignitaries, trimmed in heavy damask and chintz, with freshly cut flowers. There’s too much ornate woodwork here, and the precious layerings of molding and mullion and balustrade and apse, all those thousands of genteel decisions, the studied cuts, just unsettle me.

I prefer it here in the mostly unconsidered rooms of the basement, the stone walls rough-hewn, damp, ill lighted like any memory. Helda, on May’s orders, kept the Korean foodstuffs down here, the earthenware jars of pickled vegetables and meats, the fermented seasoning pastes and sauces, strips of dried seafood. All of it was scrupulously sealed and double-wrapped but it didn’t do any good. The smell is still Korean, irreparably so, cousin to that happy stink of my mother’s breath. When we moved here after the fire, I noticed that some staffers balked when they first reached the bottom of the stairs. Once I saw Jenkins suspiciously tap one of the jars with his size sixteen wingtip, checking for signs of life.

Now John finally rises to go upstairs, teetering a little, pulling his robe tightly around him. It’s almost four in the morning. He says to me stiffly, “You are done with your work?”

“Almost.”

“Finish up quickly. I’ll be back down in half an hour. You will drive me somewhere?”

I say I will.

* * *

He sits quietly in the back of the sedan. When I pull the car in front of his house, he immediately goes to the rear where the windows are tinted black. He says to drive to Manhattan by the bridge. I take us west down Northern Boulevard to the Queensboro. This late at night there’s no real traffic and the lights let us run almost all the way.

When we finally stop at a light a half mile from the bridge he says we’re going to the Upper East Side, on Park Avenue. In the mirror I see him gazing out at the shops and lots of the boulevard, the rows of bulb and neon stretching west before us like a luminous trail to the island. Manhattan was going to be the next stage, the next phase of his life. He wasn’t going to be just another ethnic pol from the outer boroughs, content and provincial; he was going to be somebody who counted, who would stand up like a first citizen of these lands in every quarter of the city, in Flushing and Brownsville and Spanish Harlem and Clinton. He would be the one to bring all the various peoples to the steps of Gracie Mansion, bear them with him not as trophies, or the subdued, but as the living voice of the city, which must always be renewed.

The place, he once told me, where no one can define you if you possess enough will. Where it doesn’t matter if no one affords you charity, or nostalgia for your memories. Where you know your family is the one thing without price. He has also spoken this in public, with fire and light in his eyes. He has sung whole love songs to the cynical crowds, told tall stories of courage and honor, doing all this without any mythic display, without savvy, almost embarrassing the urban throng. They would look up at him from their seats and see he was serious and then quietly make certain to themselves that this was still the country they grew up in. They had never imagined a man like him, an American like him. But no one ever left.