Analysis Of Henry Park

Henry Park 's work as a corporate spy is a metaphor for his life as an ethnically market second generation immigrant. Henry Park as a spy and as a person is an example of a forced ethnographic imperative representative of his kind. As a spy he gathers information about his targets without their knowledge or permission. He works in a multiethnic firm specialized in providing its clients with information about "people working against their vested interests" (p. 18).His firm is composed of people like Henry Park; people who come from different ethnic backgrounds and each targeted a group of people of his or her own." Each of us engaged our own kind, more or less. Foreign workers, immigrants, first-generationals, neo-Americans. I worked with

He describes his report as textbook example of writing that his boss used as writing reference for other associates. Henry explains that " as trained, I would follow the journalistic method, naming the who, the what, the where, when, and then very briefly interpret it, offer the how and why…"(p.170). He says that he is expected to be a clean writer, of the most reasonable eye (p.203). He says that he is to include anything of craft, argument, narrative, or drama (p.203). When Henry writes in this way, he loses any authority over his subjects and how he can present them. As argued by Tina Chen in her essay Impersonation and Other Disappearing Acts in Native Speaker, Henry Park 's "efforts to remove himself from his narratives emblematize as well as perpetuate his lack of agency as an Asian-American spy" (page 643). He creates ethnographic reports on subjects who look like him. He does not work on subjects from different backgrounds than his because he does not belong, and understand them which means he forever will remain an outsider. The firm presents a perspective that forces an immigrant to not only remain as an outsider no matter how long he stays in the U.S, but also stereotypically casts him as an ethnographic

Henry Park is an example of a forced ethnographic imperative representative of his community to other people. This is obvious from the way his in-laws perceive him. For example, he believes that the only reason his mother in law likes him is because he represents a charming notion to her "I am her exotic, like a snow leopard. Except I 'm not porcelain" (p. 118). More importantly, he is expected to be an ethnographic reporter to his reader. He is expected to be a model representative of his ethnicity so that some readers can use him to educate themselves about the entire Asian ethnicity, and to draw conclusion about them from reading a single man 's story. This is a second meaning of how he is to be a clear writer. He has to confide to the serotype of Asians as practical people, and to be a writer of all people of his kind. He is not permitted to employ his artistic vision in his own narrative because his readers want him to present facts. The writer conveys this notion when he occasionally speaks directly to his readers "…and whatever I possess in this life is more or less the result of a talent I have for making you feel good about yourself when you are with me…I am hardly seen. I won’t speak untruths to you...I fuel the fire of your most secret vanity" (p.