Becoming Traitors: Survival Stories of Trans-spatial Beings in Native Speaker

Abstract

This essay explores the survival of Asian Americans and its significance in term of globalization through a close reading of Native Speaker by Korean-American writer Chang Rae Lee utilizing the idea of trans-spatiality. Henry’s journey to find his true identity has two directions: endoscopic and telescopic. Henry’s introspective journey to find his identity is endoscopic. As a profiler, a spy, and an analyst, Henry—a sort of human endoscope—moves in and out of others’ psyches and emotions. Through this journey, Henry uncovers his true identity and that of Kwang as traitors. Henry’s endoscopic analysis of others widens to a telescopic journey as he moves through the spaces around him. The interpretive lens of this endoscopic/telescopic spatiality is ‘trans-spatiality’ in which a person who wanders and functions as an agent of speculation and cognitive mapping becoming a ‘trans-spatial being.’ Through these trans-spatial movements in urban spaces in New York, Henry spatially explores, maps, and scopes out spaces and ideological apparatuses within systems. While drifting across urban spaces, he can telescope them by diagrammatically and ideologically drawing ideological colors and segmentarities within the social spaces he occupies. Henry eventually discovers that the largest picture of the world is under the dominant influence of the big Other, the Empire. Henry then acknowledges that he belongs to a multitude that, without a fixed identity, perseveres and decentralizes the power of Empire and differential racism. In the end, Henry refuses to be assimilated into any apparatus in society after he quits his job. He abandons his ambiguous identity and becomes a trans-spatial stranger.