A review by sunui
Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee

4.0

this seems to inhabit a type of Asian American anxiety that is partially familiar to me, but in the same way that history textbooks are familiar. it's all Asian men who marry white women, minorities clashing up against one another, Korean Americans who lose their native tongue and struggle to see themselves in Koreans. Sometimes that all combines to feel a bit artificial but I guess that's the form that anxiety at that time must have demanded, real intricacy in both its formation and its rebuttal. I also can’t help but feel that whatever makes this book feel foreign to me is also what makes it so important. this was a huge trap book but still a banger