Chang-Rae Lee: Native Speaker

She has been on her visits around the city. The city hires people like her to work with summer students whose schools don’t have speech facilities, or not enough of them. She brings her gear in two rolling plastic suitcases and goes to work. Today she has two schools, both in Manhattan. One of the schools is on the Lower East Side, which can be rough, even the seven- or eight-year-olds will carry knives or sharp tools like awls.

We decide that I should go with her. Besides, I’ve been an assistant before. Luckily, the school officials we check in with don’t seem to care. They greet her and then look at me and don’t ask questions. They can figure I am part of her materials, the day’s curriculum. Show and tell.

Lelia usually doesn’t like this kind of work, even though it pays well, mostly because there are too many students in a class for her to make much difference. There are at least twenty anxious faces. It’s really a form of day care, ESL-style. We do what we can. We spend the first half hour figuring out who is who and what they speak. We have everyone say aloud his or her full name. When we finally start the gig, she ends up giving a kind of multimedia show for them, three active hours of video and mouth models and recorded sounds. They love it. She uses buck-toothed puppets with big mouths, scary masks, makes the talk unserious and fun.

I like my job. I wear a green rubber hood and act in my role as the Speech Monster. I play it well. I gobble up kids but I cower when anyone repeats the day’s secret phrase, which Lelia has them practice earlier. Today the phrase is Gently down the stream . It’s hard for some of them to say, but it helps that they can remember the melody of the song we’ve already taught them, and so they singsong it to me, to slay me, subdue me, this very first of their lyrics.

Lelia doesn’t attempt any other speech work. The kids are mostly just foreign language speakers, anyway, and she thinks it’s better with their high number and kind to give them some laughs and then read a tall tale in her gentlest, queerest voice. It doesn’t matter what they understand. She wants them to know that there is nothing to fear, she wants to offer up a pale white woman horsing with the language to show them it’s fine to mess it all up.

At the end of the session we bid each kid goodbye. Many freelancers rotate in these weekly assignments, and we probably won’t see them again this summer. I take off my mask and we both hug and kiss each one. When I embrace them, half pick them up, they are just that size I will forever know, that very weight so wondrous to me, and awful. I tell them I will miss them. They don’t quite know how to respond. I put them down. I sense that some of them gaze up at me for a moment longer, some wonder in their looks as they check again that my voice moves in time with my mouth, truly belongs to my face.

Lelia gives each one a sticker. She uses the class list to write their names inside the sunburst-shaped badge. Everybody, she says, has been a good citizen. She will say the name, quickly write on the sticker, and then have me press it to each of their chests as they leave. It is a line of quiet faces. I take them down in my head. 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.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker , winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft ; and The Surrendered , winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest novel, On Such a Full Sea , will be published in January 2014. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century,” Lee teaches writing at Princeton University.