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"Visions Of Me In The Whitest Raw Light": Assimilation And Doxic Whiteness In Chang-Rae Lee's 'Native Speaker', Tim Engles

Tim Engles

In Chang-rae Lee's first novel, 'Native Speaker,' the protagonist is jolted by the death of his son and the subsequent departure of his wife into intensification of a lifelong identity crisis. The book's guiding metaphor, figured in Henry Park's job as a spy, cleverly elucidates the immigrant's stance as a watchful outsider in American society, but Henry's double life also figures largely in his equally representative struggles to decide for himself what kind of person he is. As a child of immigrant parents, Henry is, in Pierre Bourdieu's useful terms, endowed with a bifurcated "habitus," two sets of culturally induced …