Fu Manchu, whom Robert G. Lee calls "the archetype of the sado-masochistic Asian

male character in American popular culture narrative of the twentieth century."320

 Overall, Henry's undercover activities as an ethnic spy, as well as his difficulty in

establishing and maintaining an intimate relationship with his family members,

symptomatically reflects his plight as an interstitial Asian-American subject. Always on

the artificially created border between "us" and "them," interstitial Asian-American

subjects are expected or dictated to become "good enough" for the acceptance and

approval by others by effacing themselves to the point of invisibility in order to serve

them. Commenting on Lee's deliberate utilization of the spy novel format, Tina Chen

observes that Lee's novel modifies the formula fiction in such a way that a spy's "racially

determined invisibility" connotes "not license but a debilitating erasure of self and

power."321 Native Speaker is a unique novel that explores and divulges what lies behind

the serene and perfect mask Asian-Americans don to protect themselves and survive as

"minor" subjects: layers of trauma, both social and personal, that are not healed and

mourned for while Asian-Americans silently endure and cope with their hardships in a

hostile and discriminatory environment. As a symptom of the suppressed, but not

forgotten trauma, the invisible, well-hidden pains in Lee's novel exist in parallel with the

invisibility characterizing Asian-Americans' presence as American citizens.

 The accidental death of Henry's son Mitt is a traumatic incident that marks a

crushing point of the American family romance that Henry dreams of creating on his own

terms. A biracial child with his form "already so beautifully jumbled and subversive and

historic" (103) even at an early age, Mitt embodies a harmonious integration of the two

different worlds of Henry and Lelia. Besides, Mitt finally brings to Henry what he so