Native Speaker
Ratings4
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings4
Average rating3.5
Korean-American Henry Park is a "surreptitious, B+ student of life, illegal alien, emotional alien, yellow peril: neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy ..." or so says his wife, in the list she writes upon leaving him. Henry is forever uncertain of his place, a perpetual outsider looking at American culture from a distance. As a man of two worlds, he is beginning to fear that he has betrayed both -- and belongs to neither.
Reviews with the most likes.
So all during my cross-country tour for grad school interviews, this book I borrowed from Lauren was waiting for me in my suitcase. I kept reading other things...“Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” “No Reservations,” and InStyle magazine, mainly. Quick airport reads. I'm really glad I finally committed myself to reading this. I was off to a slow start, but as the book progresses, the language becomes ever more deliberate and ever more beautiful. I've read a lot of contemporary fiction about the immigrant/child of immigrant experience (such as Indian-Americans Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, etc., which are exquisitely wonderful in their own right), but I don't know much about Korean culture (right, culture CAPITAL C and all that, too long to go into in a goodreads review), so a Korean-American experience, not to mention a male Korean-American experience in particular, was really an interesting one to feel I was gaining insight into. In some ways, Lee's writing reminds me of Marilynne Robinson's. All of sudden, you realize that a page and a half ago you've been smacked between the eyes with a heartbreakingly beautiful insight, rendered into concise yet poetic language. Count me as a big fan. Four starts instead of five only because it took me (and possibly entirely due to my own halted reading pace) a while to realize all that this book had to offer.
