Native Speaker Part Two

April 1, 2008 bonkie02

I’m getting into this novel because it is very intriguing.  Anyway  while we were talking in class about the money or “ggeh” I noticed that Henry’s father said at the end of page fifty-one ” In America, he said, it’s even hard to stay Korean.” I thought that the phrase had connections to the other books that we read before. In American Born Chinese he “transforms” into being American because he couldn’t stay true to his heritage because people gave him dirty look or called him names. In Nisei Daughter, Monica Sone feels ashamed of being Japanese and tries very hard to become American. It is an ongoing theme in all of  the Asian American Literature we have read thus far. “And to this day, when someone asks what my parents’ names were, I have to pause for a moment, I have to rehear them not from the memory of my own voice, my own calling them, but through the staticky voices of their own friends phoning from the other end of the world,” on page sixty-nine, relates to how Maxine Hong Kingston, in Woman Warrior, didn’t know her father’s name. When we were talking about our opinions of how Lelia reacted to Henry not knowing his parents’ names I was thinking that maybe that it was telling the reader that every family, no matter what their race is, have their own “traditions” and that people are too quick to judge things and people that are different from our “traditions” and who don’t look like us. Lee was trying to portray to people that Americans were to quick to judge Asians. When Henry was “replacing” John Kwang he commented, on page ninety-two, that “Mostly they were focused on me, whispering, nodding, conjecturing on who i was. Someone important, maybe. Known. Powerful. I was unaccustomed to this scope of attention,” it makes me think of celebrities get attention because, well, they are famous, and Henry isn’t use to it because he is seen as a “nobody”. There are rarely any celebrities that are famous Asians minus Lucy Lui, Tila Tequila, and Jackie Chan. We have never had any Asian president or any other leader that is Asian or any other race…only a white male. What is wrong with us?

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One Comment Add your own

• 1. solisg240  |  April 3, 2008 at 7:25 pm

  For a while that line about it being difficult to stay Korean was bugging me. Luckily I ended up commenting here and I think you nailed it just right. The idea of becoming something else does appear in our previous readings. What are your thoughts on Henry’s dad though? Sure he says it’s hard to stay Korean, but is that somethig he wants? Does he want to keep what Korean is in him, or does he feel it’s just something that’s going to pass out of him?.

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