As Lee's Native Speaker shows, the ongoing subjection of immigrants and their

children is a social trauma that begets many unpredictable versions of personal trauma,

and it is not easy to identify and cut off the debilitating link between them. In many cases

of trauma, the phenomenon of persistent haunting and recurrence of the painful past

testifies to the indestructible, untamable power of trauma. But Lee's novel at least

provides its main character with some measure of insight about the nature of his

traumatically difficult past, which is inseparably entwined with his parent's struggle as

immigrants and his status as an interstitial ethnic minority. By doing so, Lee enables

Henry to distance himself from the gripping force of the traumatic incidents in his life.

Putting the troubling past in perspective and making peace with it is one of the most

effective ways of halting the vicious cycle of trauma. It is true that although Henry seems

to have managed to attain this hard-to-reach stage of insight and acceptance, his future

remains very open-ended at the end of the novel. Yet probably, that is the best that the

author Lee, who is also a son of a Korean immigrant like Henry, can do, for the story of

America, the land of immigrants, is not finished, but still in the process of making.



 Notes

251 John H. Harvey, Perspectives on Loss and Trauma: Assaults on the Self (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002), 2, 20.

252 Juana Canabal Antokoletz, "A Psychoanalytic View of Cross-Cultural Passages, The
American Journal ofPsychoanalysis 53.1 (1993), 37-39.

253 Ibid., 42-43, 38-39.

254 Leon Grinberg and Rebeca Grinberg, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and
Exile (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989), 12.

255 Ibid., 168.