Balancing Self and Other through Speech and Silence in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses

Abstract

Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, both published in 1995, share a keen focus on language, gender, and community. Each novel is written in first person, Lee’s from the perspective of New York spy Henry Park and Tan’s from the perspective of San Francisco photographer Olivia Li. Both narratives begin just as the marriages of the protagonists have broken apart. In Lee’s novel, Henry’s wife Lelia, a speech therapist who refers to herself as “an average white girl” (9), has left Henry, who is Korean American, because trauma and deception have replaced joy with pain and speech with silence; as Henry reports, “We were hardly talking … sitting down to our evening meal like boarders in a rooming house” (6). In Tan’s novel, Olivia, whose father was Chinese and whose mother “calls herself ‘American mixed grill, a bit of everything white, fatty, and fried’” (1), has just initiated divorce proceedings against her husband Simon, a writer of Chinese, Hawaiian, and European ancestry; she attributes their breakup after seventeen years together to “many things: a wrong beginning, bad timing, years and years of thinking habit and silence were the same as intimacy” (24).