earticle

영어

This paper reads Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker focusing on the conflict between African Americans and Korean Americans. Lee describes black community’s boycott against Korean grocery stores in New York city along with yet a fresh memory of 1992 Los Angeles riots. While the Korean-black conflict is presented with a certain importance, the topic, strangely, has not received its due critical attention, when critical analyses mostly deal with the issues of language, assimilation, Asian American identity, and whiteness. Considering black demonstrations against racism and police violence still regularly degenerate into raid on Korean stores, the theme deserves more attention. Through memory of the protagonist Henry Park, who grew up as a son of a grocery owner, reality of the Korean-black conflict and speciousness of model minority myth are presented from an insider’s perspective. Lee shows that cause of the racial conflict lies in a social structure in which white supremacy dominates along with cultural and psychological differences. Lee seems to project Korean American’s collective hope for a political leadership on the fictitious character John Kwang, a city councilman and promising mayoral candidate. Kwang, beyond his personal success as an immigrant, dreams of the familial solidarity among ethnic minorities, especially by means of ggeh, a community money club rooted in Korean tradition. Kwang’s ambitious vision is systematically frustrated when the government agency procures the list of those who have participated in his ggeh, and what embarrasses readers is, rather, he himself contributes to his catastrophic ending with his misjudgment, immorality, and fragility. Lee seems to, ironically through Kwang’s failure, imply that personal agency could have made a different ending possible even in apparently watertight structure of racial hate and exclusion.