One of the key things I've noticed throughout the novel was the constant shift between the past and the present. There is some great significance in Henry's constant flashbacks because I think the past represents everything he regrets whereas the present is full of conflicts and issues he deals with that makes him a stronger person in the end. It pulls the whole "live in the present" and "learn from your mistakes" aphorisms together throughout the novel.
One place where I see the past being a time of regret is when he talks about his son, Mitt. "You suddenly notice that all of his friends are wild, bad kids, the kind that hold lighted firecrackers until the very last second, or torment the neighborhood animals. Mitt, the clean and bright one--somehow, miraculously, ours--runs off with them anyway, shouting the praises of his perfect life" (100). This goes back to the whole idea of how Henry regrets not being able to prevent Mitt's death either by stopping the kids from crushing Mitt or by stopping Mitt from continuously hanging out with these children who were horrible examples to follow. He always describes Mitt as an angelic type of kid who was "clean and bright," but several instances in the book, Henry mentions the kids who contrasted with Mitt's character. I can take this further and say that holistically, the relationship between the bad kids and Mitt might be a microcosm for Henry's relationship with the world. Henry can be seen as the caring and nice man who has this horrible job of basically ratting out bad or even good people like John Kwang and Dr. Luzan. The world is this horrible, dark place where Henry is forced to continue to do this job that he feels uncomfortable doing. The only difference between him and Mitt is Henry was able to overcome the world and fight for his idenity (identities) whereas Mitt was not strong enough to fight off the other children.
Henry may regret the past, but in the present he starts to realize who he is and what he has been doing wrong. "And the more I see and remember the more their story is the same. The story is mine. How I come by plane, come by boat. Come climbing over a fence. When I get here, I work. I work for the day I will finally work for myself. I work so hard that one day I end up forgetting the person I am. I forget my wife, my son. Now, too, I have lost my old mother tongue. And I forget the ancestral graves I have left on a hillside of a faraway land, the loneliest stones that each year go unblessed" (279). Henry is somewhat of a workaholic; he concentrated so much on his work that he did not spend enough time with his son and his wife. He regrets doing that to his son the most because now, although he has the chance to spend more time with Lelia now that he realized this, Mitt is long gone, and he will not be coming back. This adds to the pity that I feel for Henry and for Lelia as well. Also, Henry sometimes forgets about his parents; now that he is reflecting on some of the actions his parents did, Henry feels like he should have treated his parents, especially his father, with a better attitude. Although he always listened to his father and what he ordered Henry to do, it seemed like Henry felt servile under his father. Now, he realizes that what his father did (giving up his succes in Korea to work hard in America) was one of the biggest things that Henry took for granted.