Native Speaker Part One

March 30, 2008 bonkie02

I kind of enjoyed reading the first two chapters because I find reading made-up stories are more interesting than reading memoirs. They make your life better than in the stories you read….but I don’t know. Anyway let me get in to the story because I find this story, so far, to be very interesting. I keep noticing that Chang-Rae Lee focuses a lot on speech. On page six he writes “Her signature, again: False speaker of language.” Then on page twelve he writes “I heard then speaking Spanish, and I heard English, and then something else that Lelia said was called mixup. And at the bottom of that page “If I had to guess, you’re not a native speaker…You said Leel-ya so deliberately. You tried not to but you were taking in the sound of the syllables. You’re very careful.” It’s a reoccurring theme in the first two chapters. Another theme I see is that he points out the similarities and differences between Koreans or Asians i n general to other nationalities. “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,” a quote from page ten comparing Korean last names to Chinese and Japanese last names. Lelia annoyed me because it seemed like she liked Henry but then she would always make comments about his race like the above statement. I can’t wait to read more of The Native Speaker.