A disguise hides even more than identity in Asian American spy stories
In the opening pages of Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee’s celebrated debut novel from 1995, Korean American protagonist Henry Park is handed a note by his wife as she leaves him. “You are surreptitious,” it begins, pinning him with descriptives, “[a] follower, traitor, spy.”
As it turns out, Park is a spy of sorts. At the behest of a shady organization that only employs people of color, he befriends people of influence and destabilizes their leadership by gathering compromising information. He has kept this life hidden from his white wife, leading to suspicion, conflict, and eventual separation. The novel vacillates between Park’s lives and identities, focusing on how his life of disguise leaves him unseen in both his personal and professional lives, and even by himself.
In Lee’s novel and in other Asian American literature, spies appear as a narrative prism that illuminates the experience of the Asian diaspora. Placed between worlds, nations, and communities, these spies question to whom Asian Americans owe their loyalty and begin to deconstruct the binary of belonging and foreignness.
Before taking root in literary imagination, spies have had concrete roots in Asian American history. The 2021 book Asian American Spiesby Brian Masaru Hayashi details the declassified lives of three Asian American spies in World War II.
Working for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, these spies leveraged their language, appearance, and cultural experience to provide intelligence services to the U.S. throughout the war. Hayashi structures the book around the work of three main spies: the Japanese American Joe Koide, the Korean American Kunsung Rie, and the Chinese American Lincoln Kan. Their work ranged from
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