SOURCE: "Secret Asian Man," in The Village Voice, Vol. XL, No. 10, March 7, 1995, pp. 26-8.

[In the following excerpt, Yang presents a highly positive review of Native Speaker and discusses Lee's examination of the difficulties posed by language for non-native speakers of English in the United States.]

Let me take this moment to confess to sins of the first and worst order for a writer: sins of language, my original sins. I was born in America but English wasn't my first tongue, not even my second. I was raised to toddlerhood in a three-room Brooklyn flat across from the hospital where I was born and where my mother and father worked. I received their native Chinese from an aunt who spoke little else, then frightened my weary immigrant parents by mangling it with Spanish. To their horror, I was experiencing multicultural meltdown, becoming a linguistic bastard. While my nanny-aunt...