Native Speaker

THE "KOREAN AMERICAN DREAM" FOR THE SECOND GENERATION In recent interviews. Korean immigrants showed disappointment in their occupations as shopkeepers and small business owners and surprise al their entrepreneurial status, given the advanced academic degrees they acquired back in Korea or even in America. Although more than 70 percent of the men emigrate intending to own businesses in America, first-generation immigrants have expressed hope that their children will not face the same discrimination, economic uncertainty, and occupational isolation they have encountered as small urban business owners. The dream is for their children to become professionals and to thereby avoid this fate (Abelmann and Lie, p. 129).

A novel set in New York City and its suburbs during the 1990s; published in 1995.

by Chang-rae Lee

Synopsis
A young man confronts past conflicts with his immigrant father and the frustrations of assimilating into American society as a second-generation Korean American.

    The Novel in Focus
    Sources and literary context


Chang-rae Lee was born in South Korea in 1965 and immigrated to the United States when he was three years old. He and his family lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and New York City before moving to the suburb of Westchester, New York. Lee's father completed his medical training in the United States and became a psychiatrist after learning English. Lee himself attended Phillips Exeter Academy and then Yale University. After college, he worked as a financial analyst on Wall Street and then, in 1993, acquired a master of fine arts from the University of Oregon where he also taught creative writing. Lee went on to direct the creative writing program at Hunter College in New York and to launch his own set of novels before joining the creative writing faculty at Princeton University in 2002. His initial novel, Native Speaker, won widespread critical acclaim and distinction as one of the first Korean American novels to be released by a major American publisher. Fictionalizing a Korean American experience, Native Speaker portrays the diversity of and tensions between immigrant communities in late-twentieth-century New York.

For More Information
Abelmann, Nancy, and John Lie. Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Beckett, Andy. "I Spy with My Little Eye." Review of Native Speaker. The Independent, 13 August 1995, 30.
Bell, David A. "The Triumph of Asian-Americans." New Republic, July 1985, 24-31.
Belluck, Pam. "Being of Two Cultures and Belonging to Neither: After an Acclaimed Novel, a Korean-American Writer Searches for His Roots." New York Times, 10 July 1995, B1.
Eder, Richard. "Stranger in a Strange Land: A Novel of a Newer, Rawer Immigrant Experience." Los Angeles Times Book Review, 19 March 1995, 3, 13.
Kim, Claire Jean. Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Le, Ngoan. "The Case of the Southeast Asian Refugees: Policy for a Community 'At Risk.'" The State of Asian Pacific America: Policy Issues to the Year 2020. Los Angeles: LEAP Asian Pacific Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1993.
Lee, Chang-rae. Native Speaker. New York: head, 1995.
Osajima, Keith. "Asian Americans as the Model Minority: An Analysis of the Popular Press Image in the 1960s and 1980s." In Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies. Eds. Gary Y. Okihiro et al. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1988.
Park, Edward J. W. "The Impact of Mainstream Political Mobilization on Asian American Communities: The Case of Korean Americans in Los Angeles, 1992-1998." In Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Park, Kyeyoung. The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Song, Min. Review of Native Speaker. Amerasia Journal 23, no. 2 (fall 1997): 185-89.
Tabor, Mary B. W. "Unfulfilled Promises." New York Times, 26 October 1992, Bl.