Reading Contests and Contesting Reading: Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker and Ethnic New York

In Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker, the first-person narrator of the novel imagines the possibility of a Korean American mayor in New York City: [John] Kwang was certainly arresting to me.... Before I knew of him, I had never even conceived of someone like him. A Korean man, of his age, as part of the vernacular. Not just a respectable grocer or dry cleaner or doctor, but a larger public figure who was willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of family.... In media photographs and video he appeared to me as an ambitious minority politician.... A lover of the republic. An underdog champion. (129-30) Later, the narrator describes Kwang as "a new plot," a "space for a story to bloom in [the] mind," and a "necessary invention" (130). While possibly a charismatic persona, John Kwang actually emerges as a problem of writing, some quantity straddling the border between the unimaginable and the realized. In much the same way that the narrator portrays Kwang as an idealized Asian American, a man who will not only represent his particular location and constituency in Queens but also become part of a metropolitan vernacular, New York tried in February 2002 to settle on a single book that would similarly move from its particulars to being a more universally accepted cultural touchstone: one book to unite the city in a ritual of reading and collective interpretation. The selection of Lee's novel immediately set off debates as to its appropriateness. It is easy, in hindsight, to read the novel now as a parable predicting its own fate. The ad hoc New York book selection committee chose Native Speaker because of its representation of the city's racial and economic diversity. And in much the same way that John Kwang is undermined in the novel (he is metaphorically disqualified from the political race because of his efforts to represent those who are unrepresentable, the undocumented workers of the city), the book's representative potential has been called into question not explicitly as a function of its "multicultural" content but by way of anxieties regarding body snatching, a thinly veiled, science fictional allusion to the threat of an alien takeover. In this paper, I reflect on the novel's own foreclosure of idealized representative possibilities that, paradoxically, may be the very reason it can critically gesture toward all that exceeds signification in New York. Many are now familiar with the One Book, One City program, a sort of mass reading bee, designed to promote civic and literary conversation around a single book read in the same week. (This program enjoyed great success in Chicago where tens of thousands of local readers took up Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in October 2001.) (1) Four months later in New York, an all-white ad hoc committee of overwhelmingly female educators, librarians, and booksellers selected Lee's 1995 novel, Native Speaker, for this purpose. (2) The selection promptly began a war of words, with pundits, quoted in the New York Times and New Yorker, proclaiming that New York, already the literary center of the country, if not the globe, did not need such a reading scheme to promote its culture and city life (Ann Douglas of Columbia University, quoted in Kirkpatrick B1). Barbara Gerard of the Women's Agenda seemed to indicate that the selection of Native Speaker was premature: "We are not quite sure we should go with 'Native Speaker.' I certainly want to finish reading it before I can say anything to see if there is anything derogatory toward Korean Americans or Asians at this point" (Kirkpatrick B9). Gerard implicitly assumes that positive portraiture of Korean Americans equals further representational progress for Korean Americans, with literary content translating directly into (progressive or regressive) social effects. Here, reading is interpreted as a type of access to the other. To my mind, however, the most interesting (and slippery) objections to the selection of Native Speaker came from commentators who voiced distaste for the very "mass" or "groupthink" qualities of the reading program itself: "these mass reading bees [are] rather like the idea that we are all going to pop out and eat Chicken McNuggets or something else horrid at once," said Harold Bloom in an oft-quoted snippet (Angell 27). …