Both in Japan and in America, Hata successfully attains a celebrated reputation and dignity in a hetero-cultural society by means of the ideology of model minority. In the meantime, the ideology affects his identity toward nation and race in both countries. In Japan, he chooses to identify with Japan because of three reasons. First, the Japanese and the Korean belong to Asian races, and it is
difficult to discern them apart simply by the appearance. As a result, he can easily assume Japaneseness without being easily recognized as an alien, just like what he claims confidently—“I am a Japanese!” (A Gesture Life 95). Second, due to the effect of the abandonment in childhood, he is very willing to discard his Korean identity, identifying with Japan. His resistance to Koreanness very much resembles Julia Kristeva’s exposition toward abjection. Kristeva points out as follows:
[l]oathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or drug. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and
muck. . . . Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. (2)
The function of food loathing is to safeguard the body by abjecting what is harmful. In terms of the above notion, the situation of food loathing is very similar to that of Hata’s rejection against his Korean identity, for the resistance to his Koreanness also safeguards his mind. The abjection for Hata not only
strengthens his identification with Japan, but also shields him from the disintegration of his inner world on account of being abandoned by his birth parents. Third, the internal colonization in Japan not only urges Hata to become a model minority, but goads him to identify with Japan more. This is because he turns into an individual of ethnic periphery, which further prompts him to accept and to be assimilated into the Japanese culture. To be well assimilated in the Japanese context, Hata must get rid of his Koreanness and force it into a state of invisibility, which resonates with Todd M. Lieber’s explication—“‘invisibility’
suggests the situation of a group stripped of its native culture and forced to adhere to alien standards and values while its own cultural qualities were
ignored” (86). On the other hand, with the help of the ideology, his Japaneseness becomes increasingly perceptible instead. For the sake of melting into a foreign nation and discarding the memories in Korea, he struggles to manifest his Japanese identity and to abject his Korean nationality. His excellent Japanese assimilation, nevertheless, is wavered because of K, the first impact on his life as a model minority.
After immigrating to the US, Hata still wants to identify with America by means of the model minority discourse, which seems to be hindered by his Japaneseness. Initially, he changes his name from Jiro Kurohata to Franklin Hata because he hopes to have a name sounding like an American. Nevertheless, everyone calls him Hata instead of Franklin. His surname, Hata, becomes an obvious token of his Japanese identification. As he narrates, “my name, after all, is Japanese, a fact that seems both odd and delightful to people” (A Gesture Life 2). Compared with the assimilative situation in Japan, the one in America appears much more different. This is because Asians are customarily and visibly different from whites, which corresponds to Young-oak Lee’s statement that in America the skin color of the Asian American still affects their identification as an American (146). In this regard, racial visibility and invisibility would be comparatively obvious than it is in Japan. When it comes to racial visibility and invisibility, Cheng has analyzed the issue as follows:
Involving a restless and often vexing interplay between perception and projection, recognition and disavowal, the values of racial visibility and invisibility can only emerge in relation to one another even as such appearance of meaning almost always immediately problematizes the signification against which it has defined itself. “White visibility,” for instance, relies on the invisibility and assumed normality of whiteness,
while “black invisibility” acquires its shape precisely through its very visibility as difference. (553)
That is, white ethnocentrism comes into being in comparison with other races (Stets and Burke 226). Under the circumstance of white visibility, as a result, invisibility of the ethnic minority is formulated due to comparatively obvious differences, such as the appearance. Similarly, it seems very possible for Asian Americans to live under a state of “Asian invisibility.”
The sense of Asian invisibility assists in molding Hata’s social visibility in America. Jan E. Stets and Peter J. Burke observe that “[o]nce in society, people derive their identity or sense of self largely from the social categories to which they belong”
(225). With a nonwhite identity, Hata is burdened by an internal fear that he is invisible and marginalized owing to his very “racial tag,” or racial difference (Bashi and McDaniel 669).17 In the beginning of the novel, Hata delineates his feeling toward Bedley Run, from strangeness to familiarity. As he says, “[t]here’s no longer a lingering or vacant stare, and . . . everyone here knows perfectly who I am” (A
Gesture Life 1). Stares and gazes in all directions frighten him, make him worry about
whether people pay much attention to his racial difference, and further push him into a state of Asian invisibility. Thus, to eliminate the menace (of a lingering or vacant stare), he takes advantage of the model minority discourse to manifest himself (so that everyone here knows perfectly who he is). This is because “[t]o not be noticed is to be known” (Cheng 559). In other words, with the help of the model minority ideology, Hata’s social visibility is strengthened and in turn overpowers Asian invisibility. In this way, his dread of marginalization stemming from racial difference would be removed transiently. Judging from the above explanation, Asian invisibility indirectly
17 Bashi and McDaniel further explain the term in their article that “[i]t is the racial label that delimits the extent of one’s assimilability in American society” (669).
induces his life as a model minority in America, which further makes him live in a state of social visibility. Moreover, Lieber indicates that “identity is to a great extent socially bestowed and socially maintained” (88). In Hata’s case, with the model minority discourse and social visibility, he believes that he can have others socially identify him as a local man in the US. However, his life in America has changed gradually due to the departure of Sunny, which is the second impact on his life as a model minority.
Based on the above analysis, accordingly, the ideology of model minority helps Hata to identify with the nation where he lives. Meanwhile, it also becomes a strategy to have others identify with him. With the ideology, he successfully makes his
Japaneseness more visible, and pushes his Koreanness into the dark. Through the ideology, he hopes to be regarded as a Japanese in Japan and a Japanese American in the US. He is firmly convinced that he can be treated like native people as long as he is thoroughly assimilated. Nevertheless, as Hamilton Carroll states, “Lee constructs a doubled narrative register in which the stories of Sunny and Kkutaeh consistently undercut Hata’s assimilation narrative” (593). That is to say, the demise of K and the departure of Sunny not only make him give up his model minority life, but change his viewpoint toward ethnic and national identity as well.