Chang-Rae Lee: Literary Hero or Exploiter?

o Asian American male has ever enjoyed the kind of approval lavished on Chang-Rae Lee by the American literary establishment.

     But then no American novelist has ever loaded such mind-blowing guilt trips on his Asian male protagonists. Naturally even those AA readers who amply appreciate Lee's luminous, high-bandwidth prose come to wonder if there isn't some connection between the accolades and the deplorable moral profile of Lee's AM characters.

     In his first novel Native Speaker (Riverhead 1995) the narrator is Corean American Henry Park who has built a career with a shadowy private multinational intelligence firm by spying on notable Asians. This creepy professional life jeopardizes Park's marriage to a WASP princess, alienates him from society at large and, on some metaphysical plane, brings about the death of his young son. Park's no stereotypical Asian male in the conventional sense, but he does evoke not so subtley the stereotypical suspicion that Asian men are given to sneakiness, double-allegiance and profound social alienation. The effort earned Lee the PEN/Hemingway Award and the American Book Award, not to mention the prestigious job of director of the MFA program at CUNY's Hunter College.

     Lee's second novel A Gesture Life (1999) ups the angst ante. Turns out elderly narrator Franklin Hata had been, in a dim distant past, an officer in the Japanese Imperial Army who played a role in the deaths of two young Corean comfort women. The man's not exactly a monster but the skeletons in his closet aren't of the wholesome all-American variety either. The moral burden of Hata's past keeps him from cementing a promising relationship with an eligible widow -- not to mention developing a normal relationship with his adoptive daughter. AA readers might be excused for being flabbergasted at the sheer randomness of saddling the protagonist of an AA novel with the guilt of WWII sex slaves. The novel elicited high praise from the NY Times's Michiko Kakutani and won Lee a secure place among America's most promising young writers.

     The protagonists of both novels find redemption -- or at least the hope thereof. But the bleakness of their predicaments hardly advance the Asian American male quest for recognition as feeling, well-adjusted human beings. Instead, Lee's novels seem to confirm that, hell, yes, there are good reasons why Asian men can never fit comfortably into American life.

     That dark view finds little support in the outlines of Lee's own life.

     Chang-Rae Lee was born in Seoul, Corea on July 29, 1965. His family emigrated when he was either two or three, depending on source. He grew up in Westchester, New York and attended New Hampshire's elite Phillips Exeter Academy. He graduated Yale with an English B.A., then went to the University of Oregon for a masters in creative writing. A year as a Wall Street analyst convinced Lee to commit to a full-time writing career. In addition to his two novels, Lee has published stories and articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times and Granta magazine. He now lives in New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

  &nb Does Chang-Rae Lee's literary success expand possibilities for Asian American men? Or is he merely exploiting and reinforcing existing stereotypes?

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