Native Speaker

The day my wife left she gave me a list of who I was.

I didn t know what she was handing me. She had been compiling it without my knowledge for the last year or so we were together. Eventually I would understand that she didn t mean the list as exhaustive, something complete, in anyway the sum of my character or nature. Lelia was the last person who would attempt anything even vaguely encyclopedic.

But then maybe she herself didn t know what she was doing. She was drawing up idioms in the list, visions of me in the whitest raw light, instant snapshots of the difficult truths native to our time together.

The year before she left she often took trips. Mostly weekends somewhere. I stayed home. I never voiced any displeasure at this. I made sure to know where she was going, who d likely be there, the particular milieu, whether dancing or a sauna might be involved, those kinds of angles. The destinations were harmless, really, like the farming cooperative upstate, where her college roommate made soft cheeses for the city street markets. Or she went to New Hampshire, to see her mother, who d been more or less depressed and home bound for the last three years. Once or twice she went to Montreal, which worried me a little, because whenever she called to say she was fine I would hear the sound of French in the background, all breezy and guttural. She would fly westward on longer trips, to El Paso and the like, where we first met ten years ago. Then at last and every day, from our Manhattan apartment, she would take day trips to any part of New York City, which she loved and thought she would never leave.

Sometimes she would have kids over at our place. The children she saw had all kinds of articulation problems, some because of physiological defects like cleft palates or tied tongues. Others had had laryngectomies, or else defective hearing, or learning disabilities, or for an unknown reason had begun speaking much later than was normal. And then others the ones

Chang-rae Lee is the author of On Such a Full Sea, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Selected by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best writers under forty, Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Princeton University.

"One of the year's most provocative and deeply felt first novels...a searing portrait of the immigrant experience."—Vanity Fair

"With echoes of Ralph Ellison, Chang-rae Lee's extraordinary debut speaks for another kind of invisible man: the Asian immigrant in America...a revelatory work of fiction."—Vogue

"The prose Lee writes is elliptical, riddling, poetic, often beautifully made."—The New Yorker

"Deft, delicate...The book's narrative is lyrical, its plot compelling...The novel's interwoven plots and themes, its slew of singular characters, and Henry's ongoing recollections and reflections are rich and enticing."—Boston Globe

"A tender meditation on love, loss, and family."—The New York Times Book Review