ABSTRACT
Globalization, used reciprocally with multinationalism, implies the breakdown of national boundaries while multiculturalism often connotes the endorsement of distinctive identities of racialized cultures. Deploying a plethora of multicultural and multinational references, Suki Kim’s The Interpreter follows a 29-year-old Korean American woman’s sumptuous yet inexplicably hollow life in New York City, where racial and global references are mingled in the commodified landscape of the city and its heterogeneous residents. In Kim’s novel, both globalization and multiculturalism espouse what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note as postmodern qualities: namely, “mobility” as represented by the ability to move across national boundaries and cultural geographies; “difference” that privileges heterogeneity over homogenization; and “hybridity,” a synergetic merging of disparate identities. A vivid illustration of the cosmopolitan life, The Interpreter traverses the streets of Manhattan, from busy 32nd street across from Penn Station, where exotic Korean restaurants and pubs line up, to Columbia University uptown, where students from all over the world discuss their “usual suspects” (51): Jacques Derrida, Vladimir Nabokov, Edward Said, and Akira Kurosawa, to name a few. Fancy multinational brand names such as Prada, Ralph Lauren, and Starbucks embody the globalized city as well and appear in the daily language of the novel’s protagonist-a court interpreter named Suzy Park. What establishes The Interpreter as a compelling work on American multiculturalism and globalization, however, is neither these ample “multi-” references nor the fact that the novel was written by a Korean American author who, one interviewer points out, still has “a lingering Korean accent” (McGee). In portraying the postmodern America that upholds the auspicious prospect of a multicultural society, The Interpreter makes
a unique contribution by revealing the painful story of “losers in the process of globalization” (Hardt and Negri 150) and intervenes in the liberatory discourse of globalization and its platitudes of mobility, difference, and hybridity. For example, the Parks, Suzy’s parents, run a crammed grocery store in Manhattan, barely speaking English and suffering from “the claustrophobia of immigrant life” (122). Damian and Tamiko, an eminent scholar-couple of East Asian studies and Comparative literature at Columbia, are viewed as “the perfect union between East and West” (49). Yet the couple’s hybridity, which conjoins a white male and a Japanese female, turns out to be falsely founded upon Damian’s “xenophilia,” an “uncritical embrace of the Other” (Adler 497), which results from his hatred of his own race rather than from a genuine understanding of his Asian wife. Above all, Suzy is haunted by loneliness and hollowness despite her ability to understand two languages and cultures. Insofar as Suzy feels “stuck in a vacuum” (166) rather than culturally enriched by her multicultural knowledge, Suzy’s life testifies to the downside of multiculturalism. These examples illuminate the blind spots of such global “virtues”—mobility, difference, and hybridity-which can cause dislocation and uprootedness as well as liberation.1
