It's easy to obsess over our faults and failures.
When Henry's wife leaves him a list of his faults and failures, instead of burning the note, he keeps it with him and reads it over and over, until it's deeply set into his sense of self, completely memorized. This goes to show that it's easy to see our failures clearly while we fail to see the meaningful parts of ourselves. For Henry, this means he has a difficult time feeling "Korean enough."
Ethnic heritage may not mean preserving a tradition.
When Henry turns his attentions to his identity as a Korean, he makes the mistake of thinking that he's not "Korean enough" just because he hasn't preserved a Korean lifestyle or a Korean point of view. It may have been that being Korean was actually very meaningful, but maybe not in the traditional sense. Henry's self criticism leads him to feel ostracized from his own identity as a Korean American.
This is important. Immigrant communities write about this theme more or less consistently in almost every novel of this kind. No one explains to younger generations what it means for them to be 'Korean,' for instance, because it's sad to see your traditions and cultural rituals going away, so parents leave children to figure it out later, as adults.
The archetypal theme of killing one's father.
The sad part of Park's story is that he wants to be Korean, but just doesn't feel Korean enough to still consider himself a part of his father's culture. This is the archetypal conflict of father and son, and in many psychoanalytical theories, this phenomenon is described, that when a person's identity comes into question, there will be a conflict with the ghost of the father, the memory of the heritage and identity that was imparted into the person. By detaching one's self from that, a person becomes an individual, but that doesn't solve their identity crisis, and ultimately, they must go on to figure that out for themselves in the absence of the parent.
That is nearly identical to what happens to Henry Park and his relationship to his ethnic heritage.
Survival in a new economy might mean betrayal in another economy.
The economy of America leads Henry Park to a career as a private investigator, but really, he's a snitch. He works for people who want the worst for Korean Americans, by spying on his own people and giving the enemy dirt to use against his own people. This is possible because he doesn't even know if he identifies with his Korean heritage, but as the plot progresses, he is forced to come in close proximity with the truth. He has become a traitor of his own people, selling out his brothers to make a dime.
