What has come to be known as the ‘Black-Korean conflict’ in the social sciences refers to a string of violent confrontations in the twentieth-century between African Americans and Korean storeowners in the U.S. In the late 1980s, a series of politicized boycotts of Korean grocery stores in various parts of New York City, including Brooklyn, Harlem, and Queens, first attracted media attention (Kim 2000). By 1990, the Red Apple Boycott, which took place in Flatbush, New York, became the most notorious of these skirmishes. A significant factor of the negative perception of these events was the resurgence of black power rhetoric, which called for black community control of local stores. This rhetoric politicized Haitian allegations of Korean racism and Koreans’ occupation of inner-city regions (Kim 2000). In 1991 Soon Ja Du, a middle-aged Korean storeowner was acquitted of shooting a black teenage girl, Latasha Harlins, in Los Angeles, raising questions about juridical justice for African Americans. The most publicized conflict between African Americans and Koreans during this period was the 1992 Los Angeles riot (Gooding-Williams 1993). The property losses in the aftermath of the LA riot in South Central and Koreatown amounted to more than $400 million dollars, making it “the worst domestic uprising in the twentieth century” (Lee 2002 2). Media images of Korean storeowners mounting rooftops to defend their stores from African American looters provided sensationalized evidence of the seemingly inevitable sense of conflict that maligned the interethnic exchanges of these two social groups.

The Black-Korean conflict is a critical backdrop for Chang-rae Lee’s debut novel Native Speaker (1995). Set in multiracial New York City of the 1990s, Chang-rae Lee offers a unique look into the ethnic relations of New York through the first-person narrative of Henry Park, a second-generation Korean American whose father lived the typical immigrant life of a small business owner and who himself is a spy for a private investigative company.¹ The two strands of Henry’s public and private lives are interwoven as Henry confronts a crisis in each realm. His marriage with a white, speech-therapist wife falters after the death of their seven-year old son in an accident. Alongside this marital crisis, Henry also encounters a professional crisis as he starts to develop personal relationships with the subjects he is assigned to spy on, particularly John Kwang, the charismatic Korean immigrant and rising star of New York City’s political scene. Kwang, with his political base in multiracial, immigrant Queens, springs onto the New York political scene with the promise of realizing a multiracial, multicultural coalition that represents the interests of the underrepresented. The promise Kwang embodies, however, dissipates rapidly as Kwang’s political career ends with the INS investigation into his political funds pooled with money from illegal immigrants, and Henry is left at the end of the novel to reckon with his role in Kwang’s demise, still uncertain about his place in the world. Instead of directly thematizing the Black-Korean conflict, Lee uses it as a backdrop to Kwang’s political campaign and to his immigrant father’s story of economic growth by green grocering in black neighborhoods. While a few critics have attended to the Black-Korean relations in the novel, both at the level of the novel’s content and its relation to African American literary precedents, no study has examined how the novel speaks to the Black-Korean conflict as it is enshrined in the social and cultural imaginary.²

In this essay, we, students of architecture and literature respectively, read Lee’s novel with an eye to how it incorporates the events of the Black-Korean conflict into its narrative and how it reinterprets the notion of inevitable conflict caused by interethnic competition through its spatio-literary imagination. Our purpose on focusing on the spatio-literary imagination is twofold. One aim is to highlight how Lee combines a spatial awareness with a linguistic awareness in his figuration of the (non) native speaker. English-with-an-accent is what marks immigrants as perpetual foreigners and distinguishes their place in society from native minority populations such as African Americans in the novel. By making linguistic awareness an integral part of spatial awareness, Lee suggests that the question of sharing space, a vexed question in a city such as New York, is something that requires the ability to tune into linguistic differences.³ The other aim is to identify the role of place in the novel to revise the interpretation of the Black-Korean conflict. We turn our attention to the literary depiction of the cityscape and examine how the description of New York City supports and enables the narrative’s progression. By lending New York City the status of a ‘character’ in the novel we can identify a physical and spatial leitmotif that rhetorically represents the multiethnic exchanges that seem forever deferred when we only focus on the individual actions of John Kwang and Henry Park.

Finding a Place in a City of Many Languages

Numerous critics have commented on the figure of the native speaker in Lee’s novel (Kim 2003 Chen 2005 Ludwig 2007). The critical interest in this figure is only appropriate given the central role it plays in conveying Henry’s alienation and the representations of linguistic alienation for Asian immigrants in the novel. What has been paid less attention, however, is how the figure of the native speaker (or the non-native speaker, the two always exist as a pairing in the novel) relates to the novel’s investment in exploring New York City as a multiracial, multicultural space. Set in contemporary New York City and drawing from the contentious ethnic politics of the city, Native Speaker consciously places the figure of the suspect native speaker in the middle of developing race relations. The brief reading below is an excursion into how the novel interweaves a spatial sensibility with a linguistic sensibility in the character of Henry Park. The coming together of a spatial sensibility and a linguistic sensibility in Henry forms the basis of the novel’s literary imagination that reveals so persuasively the everyday life of ethnic New York.

Literary critic Amy Kaminsky, in her study of exile in South American literature, presents an intriguing view of how a linguistic awareness is intertwined with a spatial awareness. Relying on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s theory of how space becomes place based on the degree of the subject’s rootedness, Kaminsky argues that “[s]ymbolically, the beginning of spatial awareness may coincide with initiation into language, as language and space become known in juxtaposition, perhaps intertwined” (59). Such a view helps Kaminsky study what she calls the “embodied production of language” in the literature of exile where often a spatial dislocation is accompanied by a change of language (58). What is most interesting in Kaminsky’s study is that she is able to ground the abstract qualities of language and space in the material realities of linguistic and spatial interaction. For example, the physical aspects of language such as phonology and lexicon become more important in tracing the embodiment of language as opposed to grammar, semantics, or syntax. Kaminsky’s focus on the embodied production of language is helpful in reading the intersections of language and space in Native Speaker.

From early on in the novel when Henry first meets his wife-to-be Lelia, language is presented as something that acquires meaning in the interaction between speakers. During their first encounter at a mutual friend’s party in El Paso, Lelia tells Henry that she suspects he is not a native speaker. “[I]t’s my face,” Henry says, attributing the foreignness of his tongue to his Asian physiognomy (12). Lelia, however, denies the association between Henry’s race and his linguistic foreignness. Instead she says that it is because of the way he speaks. He was speaking too deliberately and too carefully (12). His manner of speech gives away his hyperconsciousness in speaking. Lelia’s comment removes the social perception of difference from the biology of race and instead pins it on embodied, situated speech. Other examples of how the perception of difference rests on embodied, situated speech rather than the biology of race abound in the novel. While racial difference is still key to social organization in Native Speaker, Lee astutely shows how the racialization of difference happens in everyday life through shifting focus from the biology of race to embodied, situated speech.

In many ways, John Kwang encapsulates the potential to utilize this turn for the benefit of the marginalized. Kwang is extraordinary and exceptional as a first-generation immigrant in that he can speak both flawless English and the many tongues of his political constituency. Disguised as a volunteer at Kwang’s campaign office, Henry is able to hear Kwang “greet his citizens in Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, Thai, Portuguese ... lilting forth with a perfection unborrowed and unstudied” (268). Literary critic Daniel Kim characterizes Kwang’s linguistic fluency as a “dual fluency”: he commands “the linguistic authority that would enable him to speak to a wider public while seeming to maintain an organic connection to the immigrant masses for whom he speaks” (2003: 46). By being fluent in the vernacular of the immigrants, Kwang induces a belief in his followers that they can one day be like him. As a campaign officer, Henry goes around Flushing saying “in ten different languages” “Kwang is like you. You will be an American” (143). The identification established between the potential voters and Kwang establishes a new “trope” for being American (140). For the underrepresented immigrant voters of Flushing, Kwang offers more than political agendas. To see a first-generation immigrant like him be a political heavyweight, maybe even a mayor is for them to be able to believe that the same narrative of inclusion is available for them. “A trope,” according to Henry, “is just a way to believe” and it is this that Kwang is able to offer.

Henry describes his hopes for Kwang’s upward political path in terms of a spatial expansion from the borough of Queens, Kwang’s political base which is made up of immigrants and ethnic minorities, to the Upper East Side in Manhattan, the political center of New York City. “Manhattan was going to be the next stage, the next phase of his life” Henry says (303). “He wasn’t going to be just another ethnic pol from the outer boroughs, content and provincial; he was going to be somebody who counted, who would stand up like a first citizen of these lands in every quarter of the city, in Flushing and Brownsville and Spanish Harlem and Clinton” (303). Kwang’s political ascension, which allows him to encompass not just the ghettos but also the affluent districts in one leveling sweep, is intimately linked to Kwang’s power of oratory in Henry’s mind. “He would stride the daises and the stages with his voice strong and clear, unafraid to speak the language like a Puritan and like a Chinaman and like every boat person in between,” says Henry (304). The fantastic power of oratory Henry confers on Kwang allows Henry to hear anew the “different English” that he shunned of his father, mother, his former self, and Ahjuhma. As the spatial distinctions of racial and economic conditions are removed in Kwang’s equal appeal to all quarters of the city, Henry can attend to “the ancient untold music of a newcomer’s heart, sonorous with longing and hope” instead of the accents in the immigrants’ English (304).

Henry’s fantasy, however, evaporates as Kwang meets a rapid political demise after a few missteps that involve the INS’s investigation into his political funds and the death of an underage Korean hospitality girl in the car Kwang was driving while drunk. The novel suggests that the new trope held out by Kwang may be too ahead of the times as Henry witnesses the xenophobic protests against Kwang. In the blink of an eye, Kwang turns into a foreigner from a rising political star. What hope remains at the end of the novel lies in Henry’s changed view of his immigrant past. Contrite over his involvement in Kwang’s exposure, Henry quits his job as a spy and sits with his wife on the windows of their Manhattan loft looking out into the Korean deli in the corner. The sounds of the workers at the deli remind Henry of his father’s grocery stores. But his response to “the earnest attempts of their talk, the bits of their stilted English” is quite different (337):

I know I would have ridiculed them when I was young: I would cringe and grow ashamed and angry at those funny tones of my father and his workers, all that Konglish, Spanglish, Jive. Just talk right, I wanted to yell, just talk right for once in your sorry lives. But now, I think I would give most anything to hear my father’s talk again, the crash and bang and stop of his language, always hurtling by. I will listen for him forever in the streets of this city. I want to hear the rest of them, too, especially the disbelieving cries and shouts of those who were taken away. I will bear whatever sentences they wish to rain on me, all the volleys of their prayers and curses (337).

The Korean corner deli that emits Konglish, Spanglish and Jive become the emblem of a multilingual New York City, the place where different people interact with each other daily and love and hate each other. Henry’s embrace of the sounds of the street, in all their cacophony and dissension, points to a new appreciation of the disempowered people who make up New York City. The question, however, still remains as to how Konglish, Spanglish and Jive are going to translate into each other’s idiom. The Black-Korean conflict of Flatbush, which is a crucial setting of Kwang’s political campaign, was a conflict that occurred in the process of understanding each other’s idiom, of speaking to and with each other. As Lee says at one point in the novel, the problem is that “respect is often altered or lost in translation” (188). If the fantasy of spatial reorganization and leveling that Kwang promised has been made futile, what remains in its place?

Locating a New ‘Character’ in Native Speaker

In contrast to the inherent conflict that characterizes academic and media accounts of the ‘Black-Korean conflict’ of Flatbush, New York, Native Speaker establishes an alternative lens from which to interpret the racial landscapes and urban situations where African Americans and Koreans historically met in the city.  While Lee maintains a description of place that inscribes the racial tensions of everyday situations, these racial tensions never flare up into a race war between poor black residents and first generation Korean immigrants.  Instead, we are presented with a New York City that is a space of interethnic tolerance, cultural simultaneity, and individual paradoxes that conspire to create a place of multiple exchanges, even as the individual efforts of the novel’s protagonists fail to politically orchestrate the realities of a collective ideal.  By taking New York City to be a full-fledged ‘character’ of the novel, albeit a non-anthropomorphic one, the personal failings of John Kwang and Henry Park are supplemented by the organic complexities of a living, breathing, emergent and collective entity that cities like New York represent. This complex urban fabric encompasses the individual action of each character in the novel and produces a collective urbanity that thrives in spite of deep-seated racial tensions. Lee hints at this collectivity in a conversation between Henry Park, a Korean-American, and his boss Dennis Hoagland, an Italian-American:

You know that no matter how smart you are, no one is smart enough to see the whole world. There’s always a picture too big to see. No one is safe, Harry, not in some fucking pleasure boat in the Caribbean, not even in lovely Long Island or Queens. There’s no real evil in the world. It’s just the world. Full of people like us (46).

This representational space of the city continually reminds the reader of a “picture too big to see” that is connected by “people like us”. Lee’s literary reimagining of the everyday, the space within which the tortured psychological and interpersonal conflicts between ethnicities are bound to occur, is the medium that structures the narrative progression of Native Speaker.

            Such a discursive, interpretive depiction of urban space challenges the reader to rethink the social horizons that are possible in Lee’s literary re-imagination of 1990s New York City. Somewhere in the fault lines between the image of a first-generation ethnic political candidate and the inert material contexts that serve as background for the narrative’s progression, Native Speaker reveals the generative potential of everyday life that was highlighted by Michel de Certeau’s critical definition of the quotidian. De Certeau’s conception of the everyday departed from the largely geometric notion of architectural objects in space, and the idealized geometry of boundless perspectival space, to become a space of operations that was delimited by the set of “social practices” that occurred within a site (De Certeau 96).  This space of interaction became the critical platform upon which all other social practices intersected with one another, making it the ideal medium for interpreting the interconnectedness of the urban landscape. In Lee’s textual weaving of the everyday, the simultaneity of the city’s sights and sounds mirrors and situates the discreet intersections created by individual aspirations within the city. In a sense, the city lives and breathes alongside the characters of the novel, connecting them and their actions in subtle and unexpected ways. Within this heterogeneous space of social operations, the remote happenings of the Red Apple Boycott have a distant relationship to the meteoric rise and fall of John Kwang’s political career, both thematically and spatially.  Lee’s textual weaving of actions and intentions also creates a sense of place for the novel that reconnects other seemingly discreet sites and contexts; the basements, interiors, and sidewalks of the local haunts that each character individually inhabits.  This interrelated matrix, at least within the confines of the impoverished boroughs of New York City, makes the common spaces of Native Speaker a seminal ingredient for the novel’s progression: embedded within this literary depiction of place lies the potential to interconnect remote individual expectations, which in turn can accomplish more than any single actor can on their own.

            One concrete scale of the everyday in the novel that relates to the historic ‘Black-Korean conflict’ of Flatbush, New York is the Korean grocery store. Lee’s description of Korean store owners dramatizes the everyday details of the racial landscapes that intersect in small business settings of the ghetto. The character Henry Park describes his father, a man who spent “twenty-five years of green-grocering in a famous ghetto of America”, as a man of deep social prejudice (49). His father not only holds essentialist views of blacks and whites in America – he considers black’s to be lazy and rushes them from his store because they never buy, and white patrons are overly fussy and problematic shoppers – but he reserves his most exploitative behavior for the fellow Koreans that work in the store, earning only $200/week as day laborers. In relation to the black, white, and Korean social spaces that intersect in the corner grocery, this site is consistently represented as a place of racial and economic exploitation. Despite all of this however, the overt and subtle prejudice of Park’s father never results in a protest that matches the likes of the Red Apple Boycott of the 1990s. This is particularly strange considering the overt racism that is associated with this character in the novel, the exact type of racism that historically sparked the grocery boycotts of New York in the 1990s. By countering our expectation of direct racial conflict, the Korean grocery is presented as a site of “civil” social interactions, to quote the sociologist Jennifer Lee, which permits enduring racial prejudice to be mitigated by a social practice of tolerance for racial difference.⁴ This depiction of mitigating difference does not anesthetize the xenophobia of Korean storeowners towards their customers in the novel. Yet, the possibility of a Black-Korean commercial space capable of minimizing full scale racial conflict is presented as a routine occurrence in the narrative of Native Speaker. This very possibility counters much of the assumption in previous academic and media accounts of the inevitable crisis that seemingly maligns Black-Korean interethnic exchanges.

            A second concrete example of a multiethnic everyday space represented in the novel comes in the form of John Kwang’s political headquarters, located in the borough of Queens. Kwang strategically works from his political base in Queens to develop a rapport with other disaffected minority groups throughout the city in order to present himself as a viable candidate for Mayor. In the novel, African Americans, Haitians, Latinos, Peruvians, and Koreans all walked through the front doors of Kwang’s campaign offices in search of the kind of relief that an ethnic candidate might offer a hungry and diverse electorate. The physical space of these headquarters became what the sociologist Elijah Anderson has called a “cosmopolitan canopy”, which is a space within the city where multiple races of people can mix with one another without the fear of taboo or reprisal that might otherwise be associated with interethnic interactions (Anderson 14-31). In Anderson’s terms, Kwang’s political headquarters emulate the function reserved for strategic leisure spaces in the city like farmers markets or public parks, spaces that become associated with the social expectation of ethnic diversification. Kwang even goes so far as to form a community level ggeh or money lending club to better reach out to his political constituents, which serves as the financial engine for his political operations. This ggeh is non-conventional in the sense that it was not restricted to Korean members as traditional money lending clubs typically are; in the novel multiple ethnicities were permitted to participate if their needs seemed legitimate, and if they were deemed likely to continue to support the campaign. Even though this racial, spatial, and economic integration does not survive the demise of Kwang’s political career, the plausibility of its appearance must be seen as a latent aspect of the demographic and political complexity embedded within the racial landscape of New York City. Lee simply presents us with one of many possible scenarios implicit in contemporary cityscapes.

            The “cosmopolitan canopy” generated by Kwang’s political headquarters persists when he is forced to move his political operation to his home in Queens after a mysterious fire in the original location. It is in the cellar of this new location that Henry Park personally regulates the community ggeh as a sort of underground financial market, underground both literally and figuratively since some of the members of the ggeh are non-citizens. The cellar of Kwang’s home doubles as a literal storage facility for his family’s perishable Korean goods. All of the foodstuffs and items that could be associated with their foreignness, their ‘Korean-ness’, has been sent down into the basement and away from public view, which is the same eventuality for the financial engine that represents the economic and cultural engine of Kwang’s political campaign. Jars full of pickled meats and cabbage line the cellar walls, in effect ornamenting Kwang’s dungeon of ethnic wares, testifying to the relegation of foreignness that is required to be an effective mainstream American political candidate. In a sense these jars speak in concert with Henry Park’s private conversations with the constituents of Queens, both citizen and non-citizen, with the subterranean site mirroring the non-formal hierarchy of the underground markets that are generated by Kwang’s political campaign. Not only is the cellar setting a fitting metaphor for the challenges of ethnic political candidacy in the United States, but in the space of the novel this space literally enables private conversations to take place, all while foreshadowing the eventual revulsion of the media to Kwang’s money lending scheme.

As a tentative and open-ended conclusion, we return to the question we raised earlier about how to translate the different languages spoken in New York City into each other’s idiom without losing respect. Lee provides a provisional answer to this question through Henry’s observation of what happens in the corner deli at the end of the novel. Henry sees a Latino worker and a Korean worker taking a short break from work. Led to a reflection on the multilingualism of New York City by this scene, however, he asks how “Konglish, Spanglish, Jive” are going to get along. Where does Jive come from? The black worker is absent from the corner deli; it is Koreans and Latinos, most likely new immigrants to the country that provide the intensive labor for the deli. Maybe it is the racism of Koreans that prevents the black worker to find a place in the Korean corner store; maybe the black worker resists the disciplining of labor enforced by the Korean storeowner who desires the economic mobility that is a part of the American Dream. These speculations underlie the conspicuous absence of Jive from the corner deli. Henry, however, hears Jive alongside Konglish and Spanglish. It is in this insertion of Jive into the echoes of Konglish and Spanglish that Henry hears that we identify a larger potential for living together in different languages than what is reflected in the social reality. The space of the city is larger than the individuals, and Jive exists even in instances where the social and economic relations try to exclude it from being represented.       

It is in Chang-rae Lee’s careful weaving of the quotidian spaces of the corner merchants, migrant workers and political volunteers within the seemingly banal landscape of the everyday that his prose is capable of bridging the social realities contained within the complexity of a dense and integrated cityscape. This textual weaving of the small scale interactions of the everyday within the complexity that characterizes the broader scale of urban relations rhetorically presents the reader with a textual context that is already engaged in the spatial and ethnic integrations that the characters of the novel aspire to. These textual materialities also provide the reader with individual opportunities to challenge the popular fictions that have characterized the Black-Korean conflict of Flatbush, New York either as an intractable field of racial competition, or as a self-generating hotbed of conflict in lower income Black-Korean spaces. Lee’s literary depiction of New York City as a teeming envelope of different languages, bodies, and political voices reflects the position that the noise between languages and races is not always an internal expression of conflict, but at times merely the expression of tolerance and situational complexity. In this way, the novel encourages us to think in utopian directions while situating our speculations within the material realities that frame our decisions.

NOTES

1.      Lee Pyong Gap Min (2008) for a recent study of Korean immigrants’ relationship to small businesses. The question of stereotypes have come up in the reception of Lee’s novel not for his portrayal of a Korean immigrant as owner of a green grocer but for making his main character a spy. The Korean American community of New York vetoed the nomination of Lee’s novel for a citywide reading campaign. Those who opposed the selection of Lee’s novel “argu[ed] that the novel reinforced the cliché of Asian inscrutability by casting Park as a spy” (Wu 2006:1461).

Many reviewers have noted Native Speaker’s divergence from the generic conventions of the spy novel (qtd. in Chen 2005: 164-165). For literary critics, however, this divergence from the spy novel is what allows Lee’s novel to have a more nuanced view on race and language (Chen 2005: 164-165).

2.      Daniel Kim provides an astute analysis of how Kwang’s political rhetoric draws on a black rhetoric of civil rights (2003); Yung-Hsing Wu reads Lee’s novel and Richard Wright’s Native Son with an eye to how the intertextual affinities both invite comparison and show its limits (2006); in a recent book, Caroline Rody devotes a chapter to unearthing what she sees as the subdued black presence in the novel (2009). 

3.      Political scientist Claire Kim calls New York City “one of the most highly segregated metropolitan areas in the nation” (Bitter Fruit 22).

4.      The sociologist Jennifer Lee is clear about this in relation to Korean groceries in inner-city ghettos when she says that “The everyday interactions between Jewish, Korean and African American merchants and their customers are not antagonistic, but rather positive, civil, and routine. The ordinariness of these merchant-customer relations is perplexing because it contradicts both media accounts and past scholarly research that highlight intergroup conflict in urban communities” (Civility in the City 6).

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