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Thursday, December 09, 2004
native speaker | chang-rae lee
She wasn't talking much anymore. I didn't mention to her that I had known at least six John Kims in my life. Kim is a prevalent Korean surname, and the name John is still popular among immigrant parents because they think it's very American, although of course it was more popular twenty-five or thirty years ago, after the wars. I knew I could have tried to comfort her, perhaps telling her how John Kim was probably just as hurt as she was and that his silence was more complicated than she presently understood. That perhaps the ways of his mother and his father had occupied whole regions of his heart. I know this. We perhaps depend too often on the faulty honor of silence, use it too liberally and for gaining advantage. I showed Lelia how this was done, sometimes brutally, my face a peerless mask, the bluntest instrument. And Janice's John Kim, exquisitely silent, was like some fault-ridden patch of ground that shakes and threatens a violence but then just falls in upon itself, cascading softly and evenly down its own private fissure until tightly filled up again. (96)
She peers over the stainless-steel counter. I bow my head low to her. I want to thank her too, with a surprise of saying something in our language, but there is nothing in my throat to call up. I am half afraid of disappointing her with some fumble of poorly accented words. If I had the sentence, the right words, I would ask her about her family and she could tell me about her daughter and her son. If I were able with my speech, maybe her feeling would turn and she could confide in hushed tones that her husband who brought them here too late in his life died one morning of a heart attack and was simply gone, and that's why she's here and not at home, sound asleep near her good children. (316)
She wasn't talking much anymore. I didn't mention to her that I had known at least six John Kims in my life. Kim is a prevalent Korean surname, and the name John is still popular among immigrant parents because they think it's very American, although of course it was more popular twenty-five or thirty years ago, after the wars. I knew I could have tried to comfort her, perhaps telling her how John Kim was probably just as hurt as she was and that his silence was more complicated than she presently understood. That perhaps the ways of his mother and his father had occupied whole regions of his heart. I know this. We perhaps depend too often on the faulty honor of silence, use it too liberally and for gaining advantage. I showed Lelia how this was done, sometimes brutally, my face a peerless mask, the bluntest instrument. And Janice's John Kim, exquisitely silent, was like some fault-ridden patch of ground that shakes and threatens a violence but then just falls in upon itself, cascading softly and evenly down its own private fissure until tightly filled up again. (96)
She peers over the stainless-steel counter. I bow my head low to her. I want to thank her too, with a surprise of saying something in our language, but there is nothing in my throat to call up. I am half afraid of disappointing her with some fumble of poorly accented words. If I had the sentence, the right words, I would ask her about her family and she could tell me about her daughter and her son. If I were able with my speech, maybe her feeling would turn and she could confide in hushed tones that her husband who brought them here too late in his life died one morning of a heart attack and was simply gone, and that's why she's here and not at home, sound asleep near her good children. (316)
// posted by naomi @ 9:34 a.m. 
