Fall of John Kwang: Cultural and Political Implications of His Project in Native Speaker

Abstract

As a Korean immigrant, John Kwang has achieved success in his work. Now he wants to become the mayor of New York City in order to bring all the various ethnic groups together. He introduces a ggeh, a monetary club, to the ethnic community as a way to realize part of his dream of establishing solidarity among the ethnic groups. However, the ggeh is found to be illegal, and he becomes a suspect of helping many illegal immigrants. Kwang's failure in running the ggeh shows his difficulty of adapting and adopting a new culture to a different city, New York City. Henry’s narration and reporting serve the purpose of ostracizing John Kwang from the city by making him a typical ‘oriental’ and ‘the other’. The otherness of John Kwang in this novel is very subtly rationalized in Henry Park’s narration and reporting, which illuminate Kwang’s Asiatic and Korean heterogeneous traits by delving into his private and public life. Henry Park becomes a voyeur peeping into the tiniest details of John Kwang’s private life. By the voyeur’s narration of the confidential parts of his life, he is successfully driven into a scandal, which could get ruined his private and political life. Because of the unseen political powers' intervention, moreover, he completely fails in his project. From Homi Bhabha’s perspective, however, he is a postcolonial warrior who attempts to subvert the dominant culture in New York City. Although Kwang fails in his project, his attempt to claim minorities' authority and dignity represents a sort of cultural and political movement in New York City that is trying to cause American culture to go in a new direction.