Native Speaker Summary

Henry Park is a Korean American man who lives in New York City and works as a spy of sorts. His job is to go undercover in a variety of contexts and gather information about a specified target. His boss is a man named Dennis Hoagland, whose firm gets hired by outside clients to gather information about “people working against their vested interests.” In general, the people Henry spies on are usually wealthy immigrants who secretly support insurrections or revolutions in their home countries.

Most recently, Henry was assigned to gather information on a Filipino therapist named Emile Luzan. It’s normally easy for Henry to stick to his invented backstory, but he had a hard time doing this because life was in shambles: his wife, Lelia, had recently gone to Italy alone. Her departure was tied to the fact that their son, Mitt, died at the age of seven.

Lelia felt alone with her grief because Henry never talked about it, but Henry just isn’t a very expressive person. This is thanks to his Korean upbringing. His family moved to New York City from Korea when he was young, and his father worked hard to open grocery stores in the city. He did this with money from a ggeh, or a Korean “money club.” After Henry’s mother died when he was 11, his father moved Henry to a wealthy neighborhood north of the city and didn’t dwell on his wife’s death. Henry eventually became accustomed to his father’s silent, stoic ways.

These days, Lelia has returned from Italy but hasn’t moved back in with Henry. She’s still angry about the way he mourned Mitt’s death, which happened when they were staying with Henry’s father during the summer. Mitt eventually wound up becoming close friends with the white children in the neighborhood, but during a rowdy pig pile at a birthday party, Mitt was crushed beneath the weight of the other boys and died.

Back in the novel’s present, Henry has been avoiding his company’s office because he doesn’t want to talk to Hoagland about what happened during his Luzan assignment: Henry developed a real therapeutic relationship with Luzan and planned to warn Luzan to be careful. But two of his coworkers appeared and took Luzan away before Henry could say anything. One of those coworkers was Jack, an older Greek man who’s a mentor to Henry. Now, Henry has been put on a new assignment, and Hoagland has instructed Jack to oversee it.

Henry is supposed to gather information about a Korean American city councilman named John Kwang. The fact that both Henry and Kwang are Korean Americans living in New York City is supposed to make the job easy for Henry, whose task is simply to work at Kwang’s new political headquarters in Queens as an intern. He’s supposed to write periodic reports about Kwang’s activities and send them to Hoagland. But he’s slow to get started, since he’s preoccupied with what’s happening in his relationship with Lelia. Henry turns to Jack for advice on how to fix his marriage, knowing Jack had a happy marriage before his wife died. In turn, Jack not only acts as a professional mentor, but also as a friend and confidante—and yet, it becomes increasingly clear that his advice to Henry about how to handle the Kwang case comes directly from Hoagland.

In the first weeks of his internship, Henry notices how much the other volunteers respect Kwang. They see him as a unifier who’s representative of New York’s immigrant communities. One volunteer, a young man named Eduardo, stands out as being especially devoted to Kwang. Eduardo is a 23-year-old—though he looks older—college student who has become close to Kwang. As for Kwang himself, he has a magnetic presence and hasn’t yet confirmed or denied whether or not he’ll be running for mayor. The current mayor, De Roos, is clearly nervous that Kwang will make a run for the position, so he has been criticizing him in public.

As Henry works his way into the Kwang organization, he manages to reestablish contact with Lelia. He does this by asking if he can borrow tape recordings she has of Mitt, saying he wants to hear their son’s voice. This leads to a late-night conversation at their mutual friend’s apartment—a conversation in which Lelia makes it clear that she left Henry because she’d had enough of his silence and secrecy, she hates that he never talks about Mitt, and she also dislikes his commitment to his job. After this, Lelia and Henry begin to see each other more regularly.

Slowly but surely, Henry endears himself to Kwang, who takes an interest in him because he’s Korean American. Henry likes Kwang because he reminds him of a younger version of his father. The closer Henry works with the councilman, the more Kwang takes him under his wing, which only makes Henry feel worse about sending information about him back to Hoagland. Jack pays him several visits and encourages Henry to do his job, indicating that Hoagland is getting impatient.

Around this time, Lelia moves back in with Henry. They’ve been on good terms ever since a trip to clean out his father’s house (his father died not long after Mitt). On this trip, Henry finally opens up to Lelia about his feelings. He even tells her about his difficulties at work, explaining that he’s under pressure to dig up dirt on Kwang. He also implies that Hoagland might want him to make something up if he can’t actually find anything scandalous about Kwang. But Henry’s hesitant to do so because he knows Kwang might get hurt; after all, he recently learned that Luzan was killed in an alleged “accident” while traveling.

One night, Lelia and Henry are watching the news and discover that Kwang’s headquarters have been bombed. Two people died: a custodian and Eduardo. Henry immediately contacts Hoagland and Jack, but they claim to have had nothing to do with the bombing. After this, Kwang’s political operation moves to his house in Queens, where Henry starts working late and taking on many of Eduardo’s duties. Everyone on the team is tense: Kwang still hasn’t made a statement about the bombing and refuses to be seen in public. He’s unraveling. Late one night, he comes downstairs and drinks with Henry. There have been rumors in the news that Eduardo was secretly renting an expensive apartment in Manhattan. People think Kwang was bankrolling him, but they don’t know why. When Henry tries to broach the subject, Kwang gets angry, and their conversation devolves into an argument in which Kwang shouts at Henry. Henry backs down, and then Kwang declares that they’re going out together.

It's almost four in the morning when Kwang tells Henry to drive him into the city. They stop to pick up Sherrie, Kwang’s PR coordinator. They then go to a Korean after-hours club where the waitresses shower the (mostly male) clientele with flirtation and physical affection. Henry can tell that Kwang and Sherrie have been here together before; they’re clearly having an affair. Once inside a private room, Kwang tries to pair Henry off with the waitress. Noticing that Henry is very uncomfortable, Sherrie decides to leave—but the door is locked. Kwang jumps up and physically restrains her, so Henry defends her by tackling Kwang. Sherrie slips out of the room, and then Kwang turns his rage on Henry. He’s quite drunk, and he claims that everyone is against him. Even Eduardo was against him, he says, explaining that Eduardo was stealing information. When Kwang found out, he says, he hired a Korean gang to take care of the matter, though he claims he didn’t know they’d bomb the headquarters. Henry is speechless and leaves as Kwang sits back for a lap-dance from the waitress.

Around this time, Jack meets Henry in a diner and urges him to give Hoagland information. One of the duties Henry took over from Eduardo is organizing Kwang’s “money club,” which Kwang has styled after the traditional Korean ggeh to empower his community of immigrants. Henry is in charge of keeping track of all the people who contribute to the ggeh, and now Jack tells him that Hoagland wants a copy of the list of names. After some hesitation, Jack delivers the list.

Kwang is arrested the following day. Kwang returned to the club the previous night, got drunk, and crashed his car while driving with one of the waitresses, a 16-year-old Korean girl. His entire political team is thrown into chaos, but not just because of the scandal—there’s also a report that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has gotten its hands on a list of people participating in Kwang’s “money club.” Most of the people in the club are undocumented immigrants, and by the time Henry is watching the news broadcast, the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service reports that they have all been arrested and will be deported. Henry is devastated. He feels as if he has betrayed his own people, and he refuses to ever work for Hoagland again. He now knows Eduardo was another of Hoagland’s operatives.

Henry quits his job and spends his days walking through Queens. He sometimes passes by Kwang’s old house. Kwang himself has moved back to Korea with his family, but Henry still thinks about him. Otherwise, he spends time with Lelia and helps her in her job as an ESL teacher, going into classrooms and helping children work on their pronunciation—an activity that at least makes him feel like he’s helping the immigrant community instead of hurting it.