Free Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee Page B

tightly shut, his breath filtering softly through his nose. A single fly, its armored back an oily, metallic green, was dancing a circle on his chin. What he’d brought home from work.
    Once, he came home with deep bruises about his face, his nose and mouth bloody, his rough workshirt torn at the shoulder. He smelled rancid as usual from working with vegetables, but more so that night, as if he’d fallen into the compost heap. He came in and went straight up to the bedroom and shut and locked the door. My mother ran to it, pounding on the wood and sobbing for him to let her in so she could help him. He wouldn’t answer. She kept hitting the door, asking him what had happened, almost kissing the panels, the side jamb. I was too frightened to go to her. After a while she tired and crumpled there and wept until he finally turned the lock and let her in. I went to my room where I could hear him talk through the wall. His voice was quiet and steady. Some black men had robbed the store and taken him to the basement and bound him and beaten him up. They took turns whipping him with the magazine of a pistol. They would have probably shot him in the head right there but his partners came for the night shift and the robbers fled.
    I would learn in subsequent years that he had been trained as an industrial engineer, and had actually completed a master’s degree. I never learned the exact reason he chose to come to America. He once mentioned something about the “big network” in Korean business, how someone from the rural regions of the country could only get so far in Seoul. Then, too, did I wonder whether he’d assumed he could be an American engineer who spoke little English, but of course he didn’t.
    * * *
    My father liked to think I was a civil servant. Sometimes he asked Lelia what a municipal employee did on trips to Providence or Ann Arbor or Richmond. Size comparisons, Lelia might joke, but then she always referred him directly to me. But he never approached me, he never asked me point-blank what I did, he’d just inquire if I were earning enough for my family and then silently nod. He couldn’t care for the importance of
career
. That notion was too costly for a man like him.
    He genuinely liked Lelia. This surprised me. He was nice to her. When we met him at one of his stores he always had a sundry basket of treats for her, trifles from his shelves, bars of dark chocolate, exotic tropical fruits, tissue-wrapped biscotti. He would show her around every time as if it were the first, introduce her to the day manager and workers, most of whom were Korean, tell them proudly in English that she was his daughter. Whenever he could, he always tried to stand right next to her, and then marvel at how tall and straight she was,
like a fine young horse
, he’d say in Korean, admiringly. He’d hug her and ask me to take pictures. Laugh and kid with her generously.
    He never said it, but I knew he liked the fact that Lelia was white. When I first told him that we were engaged I thought he would vehemently protest, again go over the scores of reasons why I should marry one of our own (as he had rambled on in my adolescence), but he only nodded and said he respected her and wished me luck. I think he had come to view our union logically, practically, and perhaps he thought he saw through my intentions, the assumption being that Lelia and her family would help me make my way in the land.
    â€œMaybe you not so dumb after all,” he said to me after the wedding ceremony.
    Lelia, an old-man lover if there was one, always said he was sweet.
    Sweet.
    â€œHe’s just a more brutal version of you,” she told me that last week we were taking care of him.
    I didn’t argue with her. My father was obviously not modern, in the psychological sense. He was still mostly unencumbered by those needling questions of existence and self-consciousness. Irony was always lost on him. He was the