Chang-Rae Lee: Native Speaker

I am his lone American son, blessed with every hope and quarter he could provide. And yet I am bestowed only with the meager effect of his hard-fought riches, that troubling awe and contempt and piety I still hold for his life. This, I am afraid, will endure. If he would forgive me now. For what I have done with my life is the darkest version of what he only dreamed of, to enter a place and tender the native language with body and tongue and have no one turn and point to the door.

I should have seen that Dennis never really wanted any other material. The monographs, the reports. The daily registers. For him it was all trivial prose. John Kwang, I can hear him saying with a pop in his voice, is not so important a man. At least not individually, as a single human possibility. No one is. If a client is interested at all it is because there is activity going on behind the man in question, because the man exercises an influence or maybe even grace on some greater slice of humanity. Or most simply, he is representative, easily drawn and iconic, the idea being if you know him you can know a whole people.

To Dennis, and to the reporters that are here, I could explain forever Kwang’s particular thinking, how the idea of the ggeh occurred as second nature to him. He didn’t know who was an “illegal” and who was not, for he would never come to see that fact as something vital. If anything, the ggeh was his one enduring vanity, a system paternal, how in the beginning people would come right to the house and ask for some money and his blessing. He wasn’t a warlord or a don, he had no real power over any of them save their trust in his wisdom. He was merely giving to them just the start, like other people get an inheritance, a hope chest of what they would work hard for in the rest of their lives.

When I listened to their requests for money, I wondered if I could ever desire as much from this land. My citizenship is an accident of birth, my mother delivering me on this end of a long plane ride from Seoul. In truth, she didn’t want me to be an American. She didn’t want any reasons to stay. By rights I am as American as anyone, as graced and flawed and righteous as any of these people chanting for fire in the heart of his house. And yet I can never stop considering the pitch and drift of their forlorn boats on the sea, the movements that must be endless, promising nothing to their numbers within, headlong voyages scaled in a lyric of search, like the great love of Solomon.

Yet, in the holds of those ships there is never any singing. The people only whisper and breathe low. Not one of them thinks these streets are paved with gold. This remains our own fancy. They know more about the guns and rapes and the riots than of millionaires. They have heard stories of bands of young men who will look for them to beat up or murder. They know they will come here and live eight or nine to a room and earn ten dollars a day, maybe save five. They can figure that math, how long it will take to send for their family, how much longer for a few carts of fruit to push, an old truck of wares, a small shop to sell the dumplings and cakes and sweet drinks of their old land.

* * *

Last night, I come right home after seeing the news with Janice. All the lights in the apartment are out, and Lelia is already in bed. I take off my clothes and sit beside her. I try to whisper to her, but she’s asleep. I put my hand on the rise of her hip. She moans, and I say I am here.

“You’re home,” she says, still half asleep.

“Yes.”

“Henry,” she says, suddenly waking up. “So many. They got so many.”

“Yes,” I whisper.

She turns on the lamp. She sits up, squinting at me. “Do you know them?”

“Only a few,” I say, my head in my hands.

“What’s going to happen now?”

I tell her, “They’ll each have a hearing. Most of them will probably be declined asylum, and there will be appeals, and it will take many months until in the end they’re sent back.”

She looks sick for me. “But you didn’t know this would happen.”

“What does it matter,” I answer. “Something bad was going to happen. I always knew that. All those years should have told me. Dennis has a use for everything. Even throwaways, like a list of immigrants. On the way home, I kept putting my father in their place.”

“No one would be sending your father anywhere,” Lelia says. “He would have slipped away.”

I say, “Maybe I would have found him.”

“If he let you,” she says.

I know Lelia is right. My father was a kind of trickster all his own. He’d keep me guessing with his storefront patois. Any moment I had him square in my sights, he’d surprise me with a dip, a shake, a move from the street that I’d never heard or seen.

I say to Lelia, “Imagine, though, if they told my father he really had to leave. If they put him inside a plane and it took off. Can you see his face? It would be a death for him. Or worse.”

“Nothing’s worse,” she says to me, her voice sad and low. “Nothing. You remember that, Henry. No matter what happens, damnit.”

“Okay.”

“It’s over,” Lelia now says. “You don’t work for Dennis anymore. You can help those people if you want.”

“It’s too late,” I say. “They need lawyers.”

“Then you can work here,” she says, taking me by the shoulders. “I have too many kids. I need another set of hands.”

“Another mouth,” I say.

She brushes my hair, gently kissing me now. “Yeah.”

We can’t sleep. Instead, we sit for a long time in the open windows, looking down on the intersection. On the far corner is the all-night Korean deli; two workers, a Korean and a Hispanic, are sitting on crates and smoking cigarettes outside. There’s no traffic, and when the wind is right, their voices filter up to us. We listen to the earnest attempts of their talk, the bits of their stilted English. I know I would have ridiculed them when I was young: I would cringe and grow ashamed and angry at those funny tones of my father and his workers, all that Konglish, Spanglish, Jive. Just talk right, I wanted to yell, just talk right for once in your sorry lives. But now, I think I would give most anything to hear my father’s talk again, the crash and bang and stop of his language, always hurtling by. I will listen for him forever in the streets of this city. I want to hear the rest of them, too, especially the disbelieving cries and shouts of those who were taken away. I will bear whatever sentence they wish to rain on me, all the volleys of their prayers and curses.

In the morning, Lelia already knows where I am going. She wants to go with me but I ask her to stay home. One more trip to him, that is all. She looks sick, worried.

“Nothing will happen to me,” I promise.

“You better be right, Henry,” she says, her voice breaking a little. “Or I’ll come find you and kill you, I swear.”

I have her snap all the bolts on the door. Don’t answer the phone, don’t answer the door.

I go out into the street and look for a cab. An old silver Pontiac pulls up. It’s Jack’s car.

“Let me give you a lift,” he says. “Come on, now.”

I get in. I say, “What, Jack, you want to go inspect the ruins?”

“No, Parky,” he says, pulling away. “I came to see you.”

We drive for a while without talking. He takes the tunnel, and when we come back out and pass the toll plaza he takes the first exit. He drives the smaller streets to the house in Woodside.

“Parky,” he says softly, “what is there to say?”

“Not much,” I answer. “You won. I guess this is my concession ride.”

“I won nothing,” he says firmly. “Dennis has, perhaps. But then he wins all the time.”