Shakespeare and the asymmetries of assimilation

In her new book Shakespeare in Tongues, Kathryn Vomero Santos studies the popular conflation of “the language of Shakespeare” with English by examining the role Shakespeare’s works have played in overlapping histories of colonialism, slavery, and migration that continue to shape the linguistic cultures of the United States.

The following excerpt explores an intriguing reference to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 in Korean American author Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker, where the protagonist navigates the pressures of assimilation as the child of immigrants.

Early on in Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 debut novel Native Speaker, the protagonist Henry Park recounts a memory from his childhood when a group of white women customers entered his Korean immigrant father’s produce store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan: “My father, thinking that it might be good for business, urged me to show them how well I spoke English, to make a display of it, to casually recite ‘some Shakespeare words.’”

For Henry’s father, “Shakespeare words” clearly represent the height of fluency in English, promising to serve as the perfect medium through which to demonstrate his family’s successful absorption into American culture. Just as he has created a careful display of fruits and vegetables to be consumed by his wealthy white clientele, Mr. Park hopes “to make a display of” his son’s ability to speak English and thereby increase his own earning potential in the American capitalist marketplace.

Henry, on the other hand, resentfully understands himself as his father’s “princely Hal” in this moment and refuses to perform for the benefit of a white American audience, choosing to “grunt [his] best Korean” to the other employees in the store instead. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part 1, Henry resists his father’s demands to speak and behave in a manner that is legible to and deemed respectable by the center of power. Henry’s choice to align himself with the store’s immigrant workers echoes Hal’s preference to consort with the denizens of London’s underworld, where he boasts of his ability to “drink with any tinker in his own language.”

But the fact that Henry has to “grunt [his] best Korean” in this scene indicates that he is not totally comfortable in his father’s language either, leaving him uneasily suspended between his ancestral and adopted linguistic identities. Lamenting the reality that he “will always make bad errors of speech,” Henry explains later in the novel that he often hears himself “displacing the two languages, conflating them—maybe conflagrating them—for there is so much rubbing and friction, a fire always threatens to blow up between the tongues.”

At first glance, Henry Park’s allusion to Prince Hal may seem like a passing reference in a childhood memory of a father-son conflict in which “Shakespeare words” stand in for the English language itself, but Shakespeare’s youthful heir to the throne serves as a kind of foil for Henry Park throughout Lee’s depiction of a man who suffers the pain of a fractured identity as the child of immigrants. Whereas Shakespeare’s Hal goes on to be the center of a nationalist narrative about absorbing linguistic and cultural difference in the name of an emerging English empire, Lee’s Henry is treated, like so many Asian Americans, as a perpetual outsider, unable to fully assimilate into white American society. At the conclusion of the war between the English and French at the end of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the former prince turned king marries the French princess Katherine, who speaks English “brokenly.”

Conversely, the main character of Native Speaker is estranged from his white American wife, who works as a speech therapist for immigrant children learning English. Whereas King Henry V has to disguise himself as Henri Le Roi in order to hear what his soldiers really think of him, Henry Park is successful in his career as an industrial spy precisely because he is invisible in a society that refuses to see him. As the novel progresses and we learn that Henry is often hired to spy on wealthy and powerful immigrants, he becomes a literal manifestation of the Earl of Warwick’s description of Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part 2 as someone who “studies his companions / Like a strange tongue, wherein, to gain the language.” But for Henry Park, the connection between learning a “strange tongue” and being a strategic observer of people’s behavior is not metaphorical. It is the reality of his life as an outsider in American culture. As he says at the end of the novel:

What Henry has learned growing up as the child of immigrants in the United States is that the promise of assimilation is ultimately a one-sided and often unfulfilled agreement that demands intensive learning of American culture and forgetting of one’s heritage. To be his father’s “princely Hal” in this context is to inherit a profound sense of ambivalence about language and identity and to learn the truth of what Julissa Arce calls “the lie of assimilation.”