Native Speaker

The start of Native Speaker, I thought was pretty slow even though it eventually speeds up. Also it’s not the easiest book to read and seems to tell things in a round about sort of way. What also makes it confusing is the fact that the narrator, Henry Park, is telling the story as a bunch of flashbacks so the reader has to try and put them all together. Also since the narrator is a Korean-American, the langauage that the author, Chang-rae Lee, uses is also hard to understand at times. Once again, the reoccuring theme of our novels, racism, pops up again in this book. This time having to do with being an immigrant in America and being a korean-american.  The fact of how hard it can be for people to learn english and the barrier there can be if you don’t know english and live in america is present in this book. This book shows that learning english might even be especially hard for koreans. The idea is present in this book of what it would be like to be basically stuck between two cultures, how do you balance between the two, or do you? Another thing that I found kind of disturbing about this book is the fact that Henry Park’s son, Mitt, dies. I don’t know why such an awful thing had to happen to a little boy.Lelia is another character, she is Henry’s wife. They have a very interesting relationship which definately went through some rough times when their son,Mitt died. We also learn that Henry is an industrial spy for some weird firm and Lelia is a english tutor. Lelia and Henry’s relationship is definately a interesting one like I said. At somepoints it seems great, other times they are lying to eachother, they temporarily split, etc. Native Speaker is definately an interesting book.