Ethnic Particularism and White Universalism in Native Speaker and Aloft

Abstract

Chang-rae Lee’s first two novels, Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999), explicitly deal with the complex psychology of an Asian American man straddling two continents and two cultures. Native Speaker foregrounds the political aspect of Asian American experiences. Its main character, John Kwang, is an ethnic politician who not only seeks a particular voice for his own community but also wants to speak for American people as a whole. Lee employs a trope of visibility and invisibility for figuring ethnic specificity and white universalism, by contrasting the hypervisible “color” of the minority subject with the standard whiteness unnoticed. Although his third novel, Aloft (2004), delves into the mindscape of a white male living in Long Island suburbs, race is still the major issue. Lee questions the permeable white universality, as opposed to other races’ differences examined in the previous works. In Aloft, whiteness is self-consciously observed from the perspective of a wealthy Italian American, Jerry Battle. Unfortunately, Lee’s interrogation of whiteness is only half successful, since the white male patriarchy is ultimately upheld by the symbolic sacrifice of racial minorities. Jerry achieves redemption in exchange for the victimization of Korean Americans and Hispanic Americans. Both Native Speaker and Aloft illuminate the individuals’ response to the multiethnic and multicultural U.S. society, one from the perspective of a minority subject struggling with ethnic particularism, and the other from the perspective of a white male recognizing his whiteness no more universal. A comparison of the two novels brings to attention the limits of identity politics, while suggesting a changing viewpoint in exploration of race and ethnicity, with more emphasis on how race is perceived by both whites and nonwhites.