Portrait of Childhood Shame

Chang-rae Lee is one of our great writers of dislocation and doubt. In novels like Native Speaker and The Surrendered, Lee deployed fairly elaborate premises (multigenerational historical sagas, spy stories, dystopian apocalypses) to probe the ambiguities of self-knowledge and social belonging. A Tender Age, his seventh, is a more intimate affair. The narrator, Jeon-Gi, known to his friends as J.G., is the first child and only son in a family of Korean immigrants who settle in a fictional town in the Westchester County, New York, suburbs. Ten years old in 1976, J.G. appears to be adjusting well to his new life, succeeding at school and interpreting the English language for his parents. He even spends his spare time building model airplanes and playing with the multiethnic group of working- and middle-class children who live in the same run-down tenement complex