Asian Pacific American Law Journal

Native Speaker defies easy summary. Published in 1995, Native Speaker engages with the uneasy milieu of its era—the rise of globalization that accompanied the end of the Cold War, race relations and ethnic tensions in the United States during the 1990s and, connecting the two, an increased consciousness of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.

Criticism about Native Speaker commonly focuses upon Henry’s role as a spy, and the politics of ethnic visibility and racial capital that accompany this creative decision. There is also a strong scholarly focus on place and cosmopolitanism, particularly with Native Speaker’s brief forays into globalism. Finally, John Kwang is another central figure for literary scholars, particularly in conjunction with Henry’s role as a spy and a mole within a Korean American politician’s base. I will depart from these analyses in the general topics of my focus, although they will figure into my scholarship. Instead, this essay will first investigate Native Speaker’s heavy emphasis on language and speech—two threads that run throughout the novel and are indivisible from the central concerns Native Speaker addresses. Then, I will focus on how Henry’s family influences his understanding of identity, often through their own unique modes of communication. In particular, I will explore family as a mediator of assimilation, looking at how Henry derives an understanding of his own right to belong in America through his parents, his wife Lelia, and son Mitt. I argue that Native Speaker contests and problematizes the racist system of white supremacy through these thematic elements, often marking moments of ideological whiteness with physically white objects or descriptors. Ultimately, Native Speaker indicates that little is as we expect it to be regarding the way race operates in America, questioning even the foundations of social interaction such as language and the family unit.