son's ambivalent stance toward him is prompted not by an emulative aspiration to be like

him and ultimately displace him, but by a desire to distance himself from his father in

order to avoid witnessing his social abjection and to chart his own path out of his father's

rut of disempowerment, then the presence of the immigrant mother is integral for many

reasons for the survival of the family.

 It is necessary to approach the oedipal conflicts and struggle of the immigrant

family from a perspective that does justice to their social environment, their values, and

goals in a new land. For the immigrant family, the pressing concerns of social adjustment

and survival tend to override other concerns of the libidinal investment and rivalry within

the family. Additionally, the numerous social challenges the immigrant family faces

become such an integral part of each family member's life that they change the

interaction within the family, putting an additional burden on the immigrant mother.

 The Korean mothers in Lee's Native Speaker, like Henry's mother and John

Kwang's wife May, are self-abnegating martyr figures who live in their husbands'

shadow. The literary critics You-me Park and Gayle Wald aptly observe the

"hyperprivatized existence" of the female characters in Lee's novel and comment on its

ideological implications: "The shadowy figures of Korean American women disrupt

Lee's narrative, which mostly concerns itself with the legitimation of a male immigrant

subject in the public sphere. Tucked away in the hyperfeminized private sphere

sanctioned by both traditional Korean ideals of domestic women and the U. S. belief in

Asian-American self-sufficiency these women are denied any meaningful access to

the public sphere."309 It is true that women in Lee's novel, as Park and Wald assert, are

endowed with no interiorityy" and live extremely private lives away from the spotlight.