In Hata’s narration, he always acts with sympathy towards others. When he shares his experiences with the comfort woman, the Hickeys’, and his adoptive daughter, however, there is a contradiction between what he tells and what actually has happened. In other words, what we read is actually only one side of the story because what Hata hides is more than what he reveals. In fact, Hata also oppresses the comfort women, and is the survivor of the traumatic experience but goes on to
construct a life of prosperity and happiness. As Hata’s adoptive daughter Sunny says,
“You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness. You are always having to be the ideal partner and colleague” (95). Hata never gives a confession. His narrative only provides “an acknowledgement of what happened without any real show of emotion when he tells you.”48
Studies on A Gesture Life mainly discuss the social and historical phenomena of comfort women; issues of gender, race, and nation; and
In this way, A Gesture Life does not only present the experience of comfort women and transnational adoption, but it also explores the aftereffect of one’s encounter with such an experience.
48 The opinion is from Lee’s interview with Ron Hogan, see <http://www.beatrice.com/
interviews/lee/>.
post-colonialism. For instance, in “Transcending Ethnicity: Diasporicity in A Gesture Life,” Young-oak Lee investigates the concept of diaspora and how it is applied in the portrayal of Hata.49
Kandice Chuh studies the representation of comfort woman in A Gesture Life and demands especial vigilance against “self-subalternization” in Asian American studies (8).
According to Lee, the novel not only deals with the theme of the development of Asian American identity and uses the metaphor of diaspora to heighten the trope of isolation in white society, but it also goes further to carry the meaning of diaspora to abstract and spiritual levels, instead of only physical ones. To Hata, the diaspora goes beyond physical realities such as nation, race or geographical boundaries and transcends everything, with which Hata becomes a stranger at home.
In another essay, “Gender, Race, and the Nation in A Gesture Life,” Lee delves into the layers of Hata’s ideologies to examine how his life is molded by his mental frameworks and studies the cultural codes that have constructed his subjectivity. She argues that in A Gesture Life, “the theme of national identity is interwoven and interconnected with the themes of race and sexuality” (157). Continually seeking approval, Hata is obsessed with the problem of blending into his adoptive societies.
He is actually both a colonizer and a patriarch because he makes his situation
politically advantageous and useful to himself by applying the mechanism of gender ideology in the traditional patriarchal society and through the practice of adoption.
50
49 Young-oak Lee applied Stuart Hall’s and Edward Said’s conceptions of diaspora to investigate the diasporic phenomenon in the novel. Lee defines that diasporic identity transcends the constraints of ethnicity, place, or homeland connections and refers to the status of an individual. It is characterized by a sense of displacement, aloneness, and permanent uprootedness. As Lee points out, “A person is diasporic when he refuses to be labeled and when his identity, due to repeated relocation, cannot be defined by political, social, and cultural attachments” (68).
According to Chuh, A Gesture Life promotes a certain kind of
historiography that articulates a dynamic relationship between past and present. In this
50 Self-subalternization refers to “a process by which the critic identifies with a position of
powerlessness in order, paradoxically, to claim a certain kind of academic power.” See Kandice Chuh’s essay, “Discomforting Knowledge, or Korean ‘Comfort Women’ and Asian Americanist critical practice,” page 8.
narrative, the “comfort woman” enfigures the history of the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea. As the novel explores the ways of remembrance, the story allows us to rethink how subjects of history are constructed. Through the emphasis on Hata’s memory and the history of the triad—Korean, Japan, and the United States, A Gesture Life does not relate the past to the present within a cause-and-effect paradigm.
In other words, the past is possibly one of the causes that underlie certain ends, but it is not a singular factor. Chuh argues that as Hata feels a sense of failure in his
attempts to save K, the adoptee Sunny serves as a second chance for Hata to “save.”
However, unlike K, Sunny is an enfiguration of U.S. military intervention in Korea.
Thus, according to Chuh, Chang-rae Lee’s representation of “Hata’s failed attempt at redemption through Sunny suggests that inadequacy of the U.S. hegemonic narrative that explains Korean freedom from Japanese occupation as gifted by U.S. forces” (16).
It means that while Hata’s self-identity might be shaped by past experiences, the act of narration, of breaking silence can not remedy both the past and the present. Hata’s experience with K might be part of the reason but not a definitive factor that causes his contemporary problems. Therefore, Chuh suggests that the narrative in the novel allows us to go a step further to reflect on Asian American production of knowledge about comfort women.
The adopter-adoptee relationship and the adoption writing are studied in Mark C. Jerng’s psychoanalytical essay, “Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee:
Adoption Life Stories and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life.” Jerng elaborates Freud’s essay, “Constructions in Analysis,” and Lacan’s thoughts of transference to interpret the adopter-adoptee relationship. According to Jerng, based on his study on the
confusions of temporality and the ambivalence of address in A Gesture Life, “adoption is figured in terms of a transference: a relation in which the parent sustains the
adoptive relationship through taking the child as someone else” (45). In the
representation of transnational adoption in A Gesture Life, there is the question of recognition within the dynamics of adoption. It is “the difficulty of acknowledging each other and each other’s desires” that leads to the problem of addressing the other and of taking someone for someone else (53). As Hata often expresses his desire for a real father-daughter bond and a real family, the language he uses also conveys his willful ignoring of Sunny “as part of how he manages his ‘cherished relations’” (61).
In this way, Jerng argues that “the dynamics of adoption in the novel unfold a series of psychic crises around the unsettlements of race, nation, and domesticity, which
pervade larger issues in the representation of transracial adoption” (41).
My own reading focuses on the unreliability of Hata as a narrator. Since there is no confession to make and little emotion in the narration, the narrator in A Gesture Life only lets people know what has happened and let it sit there without expressing his true feelings. He tells all, but in a way, he also does not want to tell. This creates a great distance and drama between the terrible reality and the calm and placid way in which the story is revealed. In other words, Hata’s unreliability in his storytelling has to do with the feelings, emotion, and psyche that he hides. He feels the need to hide his emotion and to justify himself in order to be accepted. For example, to the Hickeys’, even though Hata knows that the business of Sunny Medical Supply is going down and that it would be difficult for the Hickeys’ to run the business, he keeps this information to himself. He is sympathetic towards the Hickeys’, but because he keeps the real condition of Sunny Medical Supply a secret, he is in fact part of what brings the “bad luck” to the Hickeys’ (125). In the novel, Hata justifies his actions by reminding himself about what he does for the Hickeys’ after selling them the store. In Hata’s narration, he shows that he is worried about the Hickeys’ by visiting their business often to help out. However, Hata’s actions are seen as
pretentious to Mr. Hickey. While Mrs. Hickey tells Hata that her husband wonders if
“you sold us a lemon, that you knew the business would only get worse but made out as if otherwise,” we learn that Hata in fact is probably not reliable (125). Confronted with the questions of Mrs. Hickey, Hata avoids admitting that he is a part of the “bad luck” by saying that people should “graciously accept all realities” (127). Thus we can see how he avoids his responsibility and attributes the situation to Mr. Hickey’s
refusal of his help.
Also, for the most part, the narration is about Hata’s concerns for the people around him, and how he offers helps and often gets rejected. However, the intention behind his concern is never discussed, and the truth is gradually revealed in what other people around him have said, rather than in Hata’s own narration. Therefore, it is in Mrs. Hickey’s question that we see how Hata is either deceiving himself or trying to avoid confessing his real motivation in helping people. Similarly, Hata is willing to offer help to the comfort woman, K, because he thinks he loves K. However, K turns the table on Hata by telling the truth “I never wanted your help.…You think you love me but what you really want you don’t yet know because you are young and decent.
But I will tell you now, it is my sex” (300). He attributes the sexual experience that he has with K to his youthfulness and the pure love that he has for K (296). But in fact, for K, Hata is not different from other soldiers in the army. Like them, all that Hata wants from her is just sex. The imagined idea of “love” makes Hata think that he himself is different from other soldiers. Yet as what K points out, he does not see her for who she is. Likewise, Hata insists that he helps the Hickey out of his real concern for the family even when he is confronted with Mr. Hickey’s doubts about his true motivation. In fact, when Hata intends to become the number one citizen in Bedlyrun, his concern for the Hickey is actually his alibi for the family’s terrible situation. And the Hickies is again a tool for him to become the one part of the society. While assisting the Hickeys becomes an act to prove his concerns for their family after he
sold them the “lemon,” similarly, Hata’s “love” for K turns out to be just his excuse for assisting in her oppression.
I submit that being an adoptee determines Hata’s identity as an outsider, and so he wants to be accepted. The need to be accepted, or the sense of un-belongingness, exists not only at the time when he is living in the United States, but also during his time in Japan. Critics connect Hata’s longing for recognition to his experience with K.
In “Traumatic Patriarchy: Reading Gendered Nationalisms in Chang Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life,” Hamilton Carroll argues that “Hata’s attempts to inaugurate his own nationally visible subjectivity are predicted on his abjection of K and Sunny” because Hata believes that the successful resolution to become a citizen is to lose one’s
uniqueness and to be incorporated into the new environment. Also, in “Colonial Naming and Renaming in A Gesture Life by Cang-rae Lee,” Keith Russell suggests that the shortening of Kkutaeh’s name to “K” could stand for the first letter of Korea.
However, as Hata “hoped that if he could simply be near to her, near to her voice and to her body—if never even touching her—near, he thought, to her sleeping mind, he might somehow be found,” the longing for recognition is in fact already there when he meets K (240). In fact, the sense of un-belongingness has never left Hata and it is also doomed to remain with him because of his past as a Korean adoptee in a Japanese family. Based on Chang-rae Lee’s study in Korean transnational adoption, the case of a Japanese family adopting a Korean child is “very unusual. It's probably happened as many times as the number of fingers on my hand. But I felt I wanted to have him right from the start be part of a family that he could never belong to and be a part of.”51
51 For the detail of the reply in an interview, see <http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/a.gesture.life.
In the novel, Hata starts the storytelling with the sentence, “People know me here,”
implying the compatibility between Hata and his environment (1). And he is also
html >.
careful about his language and does not express the sense of un-belongingness in his narration. This sense of un-belongingness is only symbolically conveyed in his eagerness to blend in. Hata is eager probably because, as Chang-rae Lee once said in an interview, Hata realizes that “he can never possibly really belong in the ways that we imagine that we can—that it’s always mitigated not just by one’s past but by who we are, that belonging really is a fiction that makes our lives happy and glorious.”52
Adoption novels are often about quests for lost biological origins because biological origins are believed to be helpful in finding out who the adoptee really is.
He struggles to belong his whole life and that is why Sunny said he makes “a whole life out of gestures and politeness” (95). To Hata, not only K, the letter and the comfort woman, symbolizes his origin and reminds him of his identity as an adoptee, the experience of being an immigrant in the United States also symbolically
reproduces his experience as an adoptee. The transnational adoption story in A Gesture Life corresponds to the Asian American experiences of immigration to the United States. In the history of Asia American immigration, the way that the immigrants are assimilated by the empire can be interpreted as a process of
adoption—immigrants being adopted by the United States—because the immigrants are not born in the country, but rather become a part of the country through
immigration laws. Being an adoptee and an immigrant, Hata is always trapped in the struggle for recognition as a citizen in the adoptive country and also in a constant struggle for the need to abject his origin in exchange for a new subjectivity, and to distance himself from his origins in order to fit in to his new environment.
53
52 See <http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/a.gesture.life.html>.
While most adoption narratives deal with the search for identity through a reunion with the birth family or country, there is not an original family for the adoptees to
53 See Margaret Homans’ “Adoption Narrative, Trauma, and Origins,” especially page 10.
trace back in A Gesture Life. For example, in The Language of Blood, the adoptee tries a variety of writing style to express her loss. To her adoptive family, she is a replacement for the child that her parents were never able to have. To the people in the United States, she is always an outsider, “nothing but a Korean in a white man’s society” (83). As Trenka says “it is all about where you find your love”; and she finds her love and her sense of belongingness when she is reunited with her birth mother. In A Gesture Life, however, there is a loss of origin. Hata’s narration has a conspicuous absence about his life with his birth family. Although being an adoptee is also a traumatic experience that influences Hata throughout his life, looking for the birth family does not play a key role in his adoption narrative. Instead, the narration focuses on how adoptees struggle for identity in their life after the adoption. When Hata talks about the past, it is much more like he is trying to deal with the present. Due to the sense of failure that he has kept with him based on the experience in the past, he has difficulties moving on and thus constantly has to relate the past to the present. For Hata, only by justifying his actions in the past could he be able to deal with the present.
Chang-rae Lee’s portrayals of the adoptee’s life does not focus on the adoptee’s relationship with his origin, but rather on his life at present. The eagerness to become the number one citizen, the unofficial mayor in the little suburbia town, a part of his neighborhood and a proper American citizen are what motivate Hata to adopt a daughter overseas. The transnational adoption is one of his “gestures” to achieve his goal of belonging. In the end of the novel, the great efforts that Doc Hata has made for assimilation are in vain because none of his gestures, including adopting Sunny, really helps him to build a home to return to. In the final words of the novel, what he can find is to “come almost home”(356). Chang-rae Lee describes Hata’s
situation as in “the dissonance between his life and the life around him.”54 The dissonance is “as home and homey as he could ever find.”55 In this novel, belonging is a fiction and it is impossible to get no matter how hard Doc Hata tries to become a part of where he is.