There could be many themes in this novel, but I think many of them are related somehow with family. Do not take your family for granted; choose family over everything else. I think these two themes come up many times as the narrator, Henry Park, switched back and forth from the present to the past.
Do not take your family for granted and choose your family over everything else. Henry lost all of his family some way or another. His mother died, then Mitt died, then his father died in that exact order. Afterwards, Lelia, his wife, left him, leaving him with only a piece of paper of what seems to be a list of insults. This is a very good case that supports both themes mentioned above. He is starting to realize all the things he missed out on, and all the things he did wrong. With his mother, he doesn’t even remember what happened in the hospital room the day she died. “I don’t now remember what I saw in her room, maybe I never actually looked at her” (59). With his father, he probably regrets many things: not being able to allow his father to show his true feelings, only criticizing him for his faults, having so many unnecessary fights… “In truth, Lelia’s own eventual list was probably just karmic justice for what I made him endure those final nights, which was my berating him for the way he had conducted his life with my mother, and then his housekeeper, and his businesses and beliefs, to speak once and for all the less than holy versions of who he was” (49). In the case of Mitt, the reader is still unsure of how he died, but it seems like he spent a lot of time with Mitt in the past before he died because when Henry reminisces about the past, it seems like Mitt is having a fun time in each event he is mentioned in. As for Lelia, I’m sure Henry is full of regret. He knew his marriage was falling apart, yet he was still focused on his job and wasn’t thoughtful of her feelings. “this was the way, the very slow way, that our conversations were spoiling… For the next few days, Lelia was edgy. She wouldn’t say much to me” (70). Henry had no idea how to deal with fights and how to make Lelia feel better. This eventually caused her to leave him alone with no one to talk to except his friends at work.
Henry also has a taste of living a lie and living life with regrets. When he first met Lelia, he was very calculative, lying about who he truly was. “I made those phantom calculations, did all that blind math so that I might cast for her the perfect picture of a face” (13). Instead of acting like his usual self, he tried to be her ideal man and calculated his every move in his head. Another thing that supports the idea of Henry living a lie is the fact that his job is to lie. “We worked by contriving intricate and open-ended emotional conspiracies. We became acquaintances, casual friends. Sometimes lovers… Then we wrote the tract of their lives, remote, unauthorized biographies. I the most prodigal and mundane of historians” (18). His job impacted the way he lived his life, causing him to unintentionally calculate his actions and emotions. These themes all intertwine with each other. Living life with regrets is a result to taking family for granted or not setting priorities straight. All these themes are cause and effect, and it just so turns out that Henry suffered all these unfortunate events.
Live life with no regrets is a common theme that everyone talks about, but it’s true; living life with regrets will cause a person to keep looking back into the past instead of moving on as in Henry’s case. Taking family for granted can also follow a person everywhere, especially if it is Henry since many of his family members died. These themes correlate with the conflicts of the novel which include relationships (love or family) and identity problems. Also these themes say things about the cultural identities of Americans. You can find anyone in America and ask if they have any regrets, only to be given either a truthful answer or a lie. Some people say they have no regrets, but in my opinion, I think everyone has at least one regret; it could be small or big as long as you want to change what the result was. I think in this novel, Chang-Rae Lee is saying that people will always regret something and that instead of hovering over the regret, people should just move on in order to not create another regret in the present.