Cover of Native speaker

Book 1996

Native speaker

3.85 84 readers shelved it

Publisher
Riverhead Books
Language
English
Published
1996
  • Korean Americans
  • Aliens
  • Fiction
  • Private investigators
  • Individuality
  • Spy stories
  • Fiction, general
  • Fiction, thrillers, espionage

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.