On the opening pages of Native speakerChang-Rae Lee’s celebrated 1995 debut novel, Korean-American protagonist Henry Park receives a note from his wife when she leaves him. “You’re sneaky,” it begins, pinning him down with descriptive words, “[a] follower, traitor, spy.”
It turns out that Park is some sort of spy. At the behest of a dark organization that employs only people of color, he befriends influential people and destabilizes their leadership by gathering compromising information. He hid this life from his white wife, leading to suspicion, conflict, and eventually divorce. The novel fluctuates between Park’s lives and identities, focusing on how his life in disguise leaves him unseen in both his personal and professional life, and even by himself.
In Lee’s novel and other Asian-American literature, spies appear as a narrative prism that illuminates the experience of the Asian diaspora. Placed between worlds, nations and communities, these spies question to whom Asian Americans owe their loyalty and begin to deconstruct the binary link between belonging and being strange.
Before they took root in the literary imagination, spies had concrete roots in Asian American history. The book of 2021 Asian American spies by Brian Masaru Hayashi chronicles the declassified lives of three Asian-American spies in World War II.
Working for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, these spies used their language, appearance and cultural experience to provide intelligence services to the US throughout the war. Hayashi builds the book around the work of three important spies: the Japanese-American Joe Koide, the Korean-American Kunsung Rie and the Chinese-American Lincoln Kan. Their work ranged from producing propaganda to destabilizing foreign war efforts to reporting on war crimes or slowing the progress of foreign troops.
Central to the book is the presence of a mole within the OSS in the early 1940s, and how the Asian-American spies were held under suspicion. A double agent was leaking secrets, and because the firm’s recruiting centered on personal connections, essentially an “old boys network” according to Hayashi, suspicion reigned among those on the fringes, such as the Asian Americans who had been brought in for their expertise in Asian areas. But over the course of the book, Hayashi eventually reveals the identity of a mole within the OSS as one of the old boys, a highly educated and connected white American.
Image: Riverhead Books
Questioning the Asian-American loyalty of these spies, even as they risked their lives behind enemy lines, points to something elusive in the conflicted relationship between the US and the Asian diaspora living within it. The long history of immigration laws points to the perceived threat of Asians in America, both to family structures and to a constructed nationalistic allegiance. But for the Asian-American authors who put spies in their novels, the contested loyalty rarely leads to trying to prove loyalty, but to actually leaning on suspicion. Asian Americans, pushed away from the very definition of being American from the country’s inception, all have the experience of living in disguise and perhaps even working against the American project.
The critically acclaimed novel The sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen is presented as the confession of a double agent after capture and torture. The unnamed protagonist lives in a constellation of identities all trying to claim his loyalty. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a ghost, a two-faced man,” the main character writes. “Perhaps not surprisingly, I’m also a man of two minds.”
Rather than depicting a tension between being American or foreign, Nguyen’s main character is caught between many forces and identities, all of which demand his attention and loyalty. Set in the 1970s, the protagonist works as a mole for North Vietnamese powers and spies on the South Vietnamese refugee communities in California. Biracial, half Vietnamese and half French, he grew up in Vietnam but went to college in the US. He witnesses both the decline of the South Vietnamese community and the dumbing down that happens to him in the US with other Asian Americans. He gives advice on American films about the war, but ultimately comes up against the director’s desire to create a triumphant picture of the war and America.
Enter Lee’s protagonist Native speaker, the disputed allegiances are less historical, but focus on Park’s target, John Kwang, a rising Korean-American politician in New York. As Park tries to find dirt on Kwang, he becomes clingy to him like another Korean American. He sees and identifies with his struggle, even idolizing Kwang’s authoritative and powerful personality.
Park feels conflicted about destabilizing Kwang’s political campaign for mayor for an unknown power, but as Kwang’s campaign unravels and exposes a gang’s support network and Kwang’s own personal shortcomings and abuse of women, Park betrays him and reveals his connections to underground crime as his last job. before stopping.
As racial protests break out against Kwang, Park dismisses the constructed dilemma between supporting an abusive Korean American or working for the dark forces that be. After leaving the campaign, he quits his job as a spy.
Far from unusual, the thread of spies betraying their profession and shedding their disguise runs through Asian-American literature. In American playwright David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, the opera singer turned spy Song Liling develops an intimate relationship with a French diplomat who thinks Song is a woman. The play is based on true events and the relationship between Shi Pei Pu and Bernard Boursicot.
In the play, the diplomat is serving a sentence for treason and laments the 20-year relationship he had with Song. After Song reveals his identity to the diplomat and removes his disguise, the diplomat rejects him, claiming that he only loved Butterfly, the female persona Song inhabited, and not Song herself. Song has sincere love for the diplomat, but he himself is only loved in disguise.
Each of the spies in both novels and Hwang’s play reject the hiding profession, seeing it affects their ability to be loved and understood, to be seen. After years of living multiple lives, Nguyen’s protagonist unburdens himself through his confession and disappears in an overcrowded boat of refugees in the final scenes.
In Native speakerPark’s long life in disguise has slowly made him lose touch with both his wife and himself, but in his act of defiance to both betray Kwang’s so-called Asian-American civic ideal and quit his job, he regains authenticity for himself and he merges in New York at the end of the novel.
Exploring their protagonists’ arcs as spies, these Asian-American writers explain the experience of the Asian diaspora as one of always living in disguise. But instead of leaning on the need to prove loyalty or work for someone, these spies turn down the job altogether.