Re: Chang Rae Lee Native Speaker Pdf Download
Leana Eckes
Lee: No. It was a novel that I couldn't publish. It was an escapist novel. I was trying a lot of things, a lot of voices. I was exploring. It had a certain kind of very intellectualized energy. But it wasn't a happy time for me, though I did get a kind of solace from the writing.
Lee: After my mother died, I came to realize that the novel wasn't going anywhere, and a friend of mine suggested that I get out of New York City, to get out of a rut and away from all that had gone on. She had attended the University of Oregon as an undergraduate, and said it might be a good place to get some work done, and on that basis alone I started looking into programs on the West Coast. It was sort of crazy. The University of Oregon's MFA Program gave me a fellowship based on that first attempt at a novel. The director of the program, Garret Hongo, the poet, happened to be in New York before I decided to attend, and we had a drink. I felt an immediate connection with him. We didn't work together in terms of the writing, but he was someone I could relate to, both personally and artistically, and it tilted my decision to go to that program. I wasn't interested in school so much as I was interested in having a couple of years supported, and the company of peers. I had the ideas for Native Speaker, and I wanted to get to work.
Lee: I got a lot out of it. I had a weekly forum for the chapters of my novel. I quickly learned that you have to leave a lot of the suggestions on the table, but it was great to hear the range of responses to the work. It was a wonderful time for me to have a respite from everything. Being away from New York helped me write about New York in a way that I wouldn't have written had I been in the midst of it. It gave me a perspective that was more imagined than real, which is of course the approach one needs for fiction writing. It's not about the real.
Johnson: All three of your novels so far have been written from the first-person point of view. What draws you to this point of view, and what are the benefits and challenges of writing a novel from the perspective of one main character?
Lee: The first novel had to be in the first person because of my explorations and interest in identity and how someone figures himself out, particularly through voice. That's often the underlying theme of first novels. In the other two, I've been deeply interested in the drama of consciousness, which is partly to do with identity and how people come to be and inhabit a place and a context of their choosing. For me it's been very interesting, and it has an intimate connection to what I believe about literature, which is that it has everything to do with language. In these first three novels, language has so much to do with the human void. That's how I understand character, and how I understand story. I've enjoyed it because I can get so deep inside one person's head and focus on that for the whole book. It gives me so much room to explore internally. The drawback is that it doesn't give me as much room to explore the world. Everything is filtered through a consciousness, so it's limited. It's a great challenge to tell a story that sustains dramatic energy despite the limits of a single consciousness, and that can continue to draw fascination from the reader.
Johnson: Each of your novels seems to have required research of some kind. For example, Native Speaker must have required research about spying and speech therapy and inner city politics; A Gesture Life required research about the Japanese comfort women, as well as research about the details of life as a soldier and medic; and Aloft required research about flying, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and pregnancy, among other things. At what point do you conduct your research, and how do you go about finding what you're looking for?
Lee: A Gesture Life took the most research, and in that case, the research happened first. In the other books I backed into it. Both Aloft and the Native Speaker feature landscapes I knew quite well. With Jerry Battle, I researched the plane. With Henry Park, once I discovered who he was, I had to go back and learn more about industrial spies, or speech therapy. Research is important, but it's not terribly important-except for in A Gesture Life, which partly focuses on a historical period. I wanted to make sure that I had that period right so that it would be as accurate and authentic as possible.
Johnson: All three books employ a similar technique for creating a subtle sense of suspense, and this is to reveal a bit of information without the surrounding details. For example, in Native Speaker, we know Henry and Lelia had a child who died, but we don't learn what happened until well into the book. What reasons are there for waiting to reveal key information beyond that of creating a narrative drive?
Johnson: Native Speaker redefines what it means to be American much like Gish Jen's Typical American. It challenges our assumptions about what the "American Experience" means today. Was this your intention at the outset?
Lee: That's part of Henry's desire, to try to bring those lives to life. There are sections where he talks about the shopkeepers who stay open all night and wait for the kids to come out of the clubs. He has a lot of empathy for them, which is veiled empathy for his father. He's trying to show you a part of the world that's the center of his world-it's just not yours.
Johnson: In Native Speaker, the main character is a corporate spy, and his wife a speech therapist, which plays in nicely with the themes of language, speaking, and communication. But how did you arrive at Henry's profession? What drew you to explore the emotional and metaphoric possibilities in living a life undercover?
Johnson: Part of Henry's job is to be a "clean writer" of what occurs in his dealings with the subject in question. He says, "The teller, I know, can keep his face in the shadows only so long. We want him to come out, step into the light, bare himself. This the shape of our era." Is there any aspect of that statement that you identify with as a novelist?
Lee: I agree with that statement. I think it's true, but sometimes I wish it weren't. I think that's what's happening with the book business. People focus on the personality, the celebrity, the who, and it begins to taint how they read the language. The great thing about books is that they transport text from other ages of which we have no idea about the who, and they still move us. That's the mark of a classic. As for what's going on in Native Speaker, Henry Park shows us, I think, that the more you speak about others, the more you begin to tell the story of yourself. That's inevitable for him. He has to step into the light, not because he wants to, but because that's how we'll get to know him. Henry Park is the person who's trying to hide by telling other peoples' stories. It's a strange sort of humanity, but it's his.
Johnson: You also explore the idea of action as a kind of language: "...when you make a bomb you are also constructing a statement, employing a more complicated grammar than is required. It's the way civilized man now encumbers his territory, not with great walls or stretches of wire but with a single well-placed device, a neat bundling with the workings of a mind. It reads time, speaks volumes. Long after the flash, the concussive burn, it will speak to you again, at your fine desk, in your fine bed. Saying these are your certain ruins."
Johnson: Henry Park remembers a poem that Lelia wrote about a woman who cleans out her father-in-law's house after his death, and through the remembered poem, we experience the cleaning of Henry's father's house from Lelia's point of view. It's an interesting method for getting another character's point of view in a first-person narrative. How did you arrive at this?
Lee: With the first person, at a certain point, you need to get around the narrator and get other people involved. You can do that with dialogue and with that example there. You get into a rut. It's deep and full, but sometimes you have to shut down the usual process and let in a little air. That air is usually someone else's language, someone else's voice.
Johnson: The theme of invisibility comes up over and over again in Native Speaker. There is the invisibility of the immigrant, regardless of ethnicity, the invisibility of the nonnative speaker, and the invisibility that Henry Park assumes as a spy. What draws you to the idea of the individual blending into the social landscape?
Lee: It's about the draw and power and attractiveness of assimilation, and then its attending problems. There's a deep-seated human need to assimilate and be part of a group. It's a survival technique. All of us talk about being individuals, especially in this country, but really we're not. We're members of many different little groups. For an outsider like an immigrant, the idea is not to stand out, because when you stand out, you get cut down. To be an individual is to be in a dangerous position. It's about the very overriding desire to join, but then most of that book and especially in A Gesture Life, it's about the darker side of assimilation, and what people become when they've given up themselves. This invisibility is self-imposed, an invisibility that is also a kind of self-protection; but it's not without ill effect.
Johnson: Let's talk about beginnings and endings. Each novel opens with a memorable line, a line that characterizes the narrator and the tone of the narrative to come. For example, Doc Hata, in A Gesture Life, finds security in his position in his town of Bedley Run. The book begins, "People know me here." What do you look for in an opening, and how do you arrive at your opening line?
7fc3f7cf58