2021년 12월 26일 일요일
Native Speaker (novel) - Wikipedia
Native Speaker (novel) - Wikipedia
Native Speaker (novel)
 | |
| Author | Chang-Rae Lee |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Berkley Books |
Publication date | 1995 |
| Media type | Print (paperback) |
| Pages | 368 pp (first edition, paperback) |
| ISBN | 978-1573225311 |
| OCLC | 38863471 |
Native Speaker (1995) is the first novel by Korean-American author Chang-Rae Lee. It explores the life of a man named Henry Park who tries to assimilate into American society.
Synopsis[edit]
Plot[edit]
Henry Park, a young Korean-American "spook" for Dennis Hoagland, is
- assigned to infiltrate the camp of John Kwang, a Korean-American politician running for mayor of New York City.
- Henry struggles with the recent separation from his white wife, Lelia, due to the premature death of their son Mitt.
- Further, he develops a keen double consciousness, knowing that his actions will cause the ruin of a fellow Korean-American, and tarnish an exemplar of success for members of a "model minority" in America.
Characters[edit]
- Henry Park: An industrial spy who is assigned to be on John Kwang's pre-campaign team. His Korean name is Byong-ho.
- Lelia Park: Henry's estranged wife who is a speech therapist from a wealthy, Scottish-American East Coast family. She met Henry at a party during one of his initial assignments.
- Mitt Park : Henry and Lelia’s son who died at the age of seven.
- John Kwang: A Korean-American politician running for Mayor of New York who becomes a surrogate father to Henry.
- Emile Luzan: A Filipino-American therapist whom Henry spied on but ended up befriending. He helped Henry recover from Mitt's death.
- Sherrie Chin-Watt: John Kwang's PR assistant. Married to a European-American banker, but having an affair with Kwang.
- Mr Park: Henry's father, a strict man who was once an industrial engineer in Korea.
- Mrs Park: Henry's mother who died from cancer when Henry was ten.
- Dennis Hoagland: Henry's boss.
- Maid (Ahjuma): A young Korean woman who took care of Henry as a child.
- May: John's wife whom he met when she came from Korea.
- Sophie: Jack's Italian-American wife.
- Jack: Henry's best friend and coworker who is a Greek-American.
- Janice Pawlowsky: Henry's manager of John Kwang.
- Eduardo Fermin: A Latino man who idolizes John Kwang. He dies during a fire at Kwang's campaign headquarters. He's also a spy for Hoagland's spy firm, but John Kwang thinks he works for mayor De La Roos's reelection campaign.
- Pete Ichibata: A Japanese co-worker known for crude jokes and excessive drinking.
- John Kwang Jr: John's and May's son and Peter's brother troubled with school who reminded Henry of his son Mitt
- Peter Kwang: John Jr's brother and son of John and May
- Lelia's parents: Henry's in laws and Mitt's grandparents
- Molly: Lelia's friend and an artist. During Henry and Lelia's separation, Lelia stays in Molly's apartment.
Major themes[edit]
Henry is the quintessential Korean-American, as much of his Korean heritage resonates through his voice, personality, and beliefs. His Korean upbringing still shows up in his adult life. Like many American immigrants trying to find an identity in a foreign land, Henry is an "...emotional alien...stranger [and] follower..." who constantly feels isolated from the country in which he lives and also the country from which he came.
Even though he is American, Henry Park feels a constant alienation and sense of isolation. There are many challenges that come with fitting into American life because of the difference in culture, beliefs, behavior; and because of the desire to still hold on to one's heritage.[1]
Awards and nominations[edit]
- PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel
- Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award
- American Book Award
- QPB New Visions Award
- Oregon Book Award
- ALA Notable Book
References[edit]
- ^ "Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee". Penguin Books USA. Retrieved May 2, 2015.
My Year Abroad: Chang-rae Lee with Paul Yoon | The New York Public Library
My Year Abroad: Chang-rae Lee with Paul Yoon | The New York Public Library
LIVE from NYPL:My Year Abroad: Chang-rae Lee with Paul Yoon
Event Details
The award-winning author discusses crossing boundaries in his new novel.
Chang-rae Lee has been called one of the "20 Writers for the 21st Century." In his new novel, an American college student's life is turned sideways by a frenzied year-long trip across Asia led by a creative and wild Chinese American entrepreneur. As Lee alternates between the mind-boggling year, and the impacts of its aftermath, he explores the effects of cultural immersion, Western stereotypes, Eastern attitudes, global trade, mental health, parenthood, and more.
Lee will discuss his new novel and its explorations of our human capacities for pleasure, pain, and connection. Joining him in conversation will be writer Paul Yoon.
LIVE from NYPL is made possible by the support of Library patrons and friends, as well as by the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos, and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Public Education Endowment Fund.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Chang-rae teaches writing at Stanford University.
Paul Yoon is the author of two story collections, Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and The Mountain, which was a NPR Best Book of the Year. His novels include Run Me to Earth and Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from The New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Sanford, Florida, with his wife, the fiction writer Laura van den Berg, and their dog, Oscar.
GET THE BOOK
If you have a NYPL library card—or live in New York state and want to apply for one now—you can borrow My Year Abroad for free with our e-reader app SimplyE, available for iOS and Android devices. The title is available in accessible formats for community members who do not use standard print. Find out more at: nypl.org/talkingbooks. You can also request this book, and more, for pickup at one of our Grab & Go locations.
Readers everywhere who wish to purchase copies of My Year Abroad can do so at The New York Public Library Shop. Proceeds benefit the New York Public Library.
RECOMMENDED READING
Check out other titles by Chang-rae Lee and Paul Yoon:
- Aloft by Chang-rae Lee (catalog: ebook, audiobook; talking book; Bookshare)
- A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee (catalog: hardcopy, audiobook; talking book; Bookshare)
- Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee (catalog: hardcopy, ebook; talking book; Bookshare)
- On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee (catalog: hardcopy, ebook, audiobook; talking book; Bookshare)
- The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee (catalog: hardcopy, ebook; talking book; Bookshare)
- The Mountain by Paul Yoon (catalog: hardcopy, ebook, audiobook; Bookshare)
- Once the Shore by Paul Yoon (catalog: hardcopy, ebook; Bookshare)
- Run Me To Earth by Paul Yoon (catalog: hardcopy, ebook, audiobook; talking book; Bookshare)
- Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon (catalog: hardcopy, ebook, audiobook; Bookshare)
Chang-Rae Lee on Native Speaker - The John Adams Institute
Chang-Rae Lee on Native Speaker - The John Adams Institute - YouTube
Chang-Rae Lee on Native Speaker - The John Adams Institute
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On December 28, 2002, The John Adams Institute, in co-operation with Ambo Anthos Publishing House, was delighted to present an evening with Korean-born, U.S. raised Chang-rae Lee. He spoke about his first novel Native Speaker, which appeared in Dutch translation in February of that year.
Chang-Rae Lee on Native Speaker - The John Adams Institute
2,830 views
Aug 8, 2017
The John Adams Institute6.4K subscribers
SUBSCRIBE
On December 28, 2002, The John Adams Institute, in co-operation with Ambo Anthos Publishing House, was delighted to present an evening with Korean-born, U.S. raised Chang-rae Lee. He spoke about his first novel Native Speaker, which appeared in Dutch translation in February of that year.
Native Speaker (Moedertaal) received five major awards, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN and the American Book Award (1995).
Bas Heijne, writer and essayist for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, introduced Chang-rae Lee and moderated questions from the audience.
Native Speaker is a moving insight into the Asian immigrant experience in America, told through the story of Henry Park, a Korean-American industrial spy who is asked to investigate the campaign of a rising politician. His assignment challenges his loyalties, his relationship with his wife and his beliefs, in a tale of exile and identity which has placed Lee firmly on the level of other Asian-American writers like Amy Tan and Gish Jen.
---
Cultural identity is further explored in Lee’s book, A Gesture Life (1999), which was translated in Dutch as Een leven van gebaren in 2000 by Ambo Anthos Publishing House. This novel explores the life of the perpetual outsider, in the story of an ageing Korean man who has spent his life trying to fit in – first in the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, and later as a businessman in America. In addition to his two novels, Chang-rae Lee (Seoul, 1965) he has also written Aloft (2004), The Surrendered (2010), and On Such a Full Sea (2014). He currently teaches at Princeton University.
2021년 12월 24일 금요일
Native speaker : Lee, Chang-rae : Internet Archive
Native speaker : Lee, Chang-rae : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Native speakerby Lee, Chang-rae
Publication date 1996Topics Korean Americans, Aliens, Aliens, Korean AmericansPublisher New York : Riverhead BooksCollection inlibrary; printdisabled; internetarchivebooks; delawarecountydistrictlibrary; china; americanaDigitizing sponsor Internet ArchiveContributor Internet ArchiveLanguage English
Korean-American Henry Park is a "surreptitious, B+ student of life, illegal alien, emotional alien, yellow peril: neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy ..." or so says his wife, in the list she writes upon leaving him. Henry is forever uncertain of his place, a perpetual outsider looking at American culture from a distance. As a man of two worlds, he is beginning to fear that he has betrayed both -- and belongs to neither.
Korean-American Henry Park is a "surreptitious, B+ student of life, illegal alien, emotional alien, yellow peril: neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy ..." or so says his wife, in the list she writes upon leaving him. Henry is forever uncertain of his place, a perpetual outsider looking at American culture from a distance. As a man of two worlds, he is beginning to fear that he has betrayed both -- and belongs to neither
Access-restricted-item trueAddeddate 2011-08-16 20:20:35Boxid IA142018Boxid_2 CH105601Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark IICity New YorkDonor friendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibraryEdition 1st Riverhead trade pbk. ed.External-identifier urn:oclc:record:858946996
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Native speakerby Lee, Chang-rae
Publication date 1996Topics Korean Americans, Aliens, Aliens, Korean AmericansPublisher New York : Riverhead BooksCollection inlibrary; printdisabled; internetarchivebooks; delawarecountydistrictlibrary; china; americanaDigitizing sponsor Internet ArchiveContributor Internet ArchiveLanguage English
Korean-American Henry Park is a "surreptitious, B+ student of life, illegal alien, emotional alien, yellow peril: neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy ..." or so says his wife, in the list she writes upon leaving him. Henry is forever uncertain of his place, a perpetual outsider looking at American culture from a distance. As a man of two worlds, he is beginning to fear that he has betrayed both -- and belongs to neither.
Korean-American Henry Park is a "surreptitious, B+ student of life, illegal alien, emotional alien, yellow peril: neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy ..." or so says his wife, in the list she writes upon leaving him. Henry is forever uncertain of his place, a perpetual outsider looking at American culture from a distance. As a man of two worlds, he is beginning to fear that he has betrayed both -- and belongs to neither
Access-restricted-item trueAddeddate 2011-08-16 20:20:35Boxid IA142018Boxid_2 CH105601Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark IICity New YorkDonor friendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibraryEdition 1st Riverhead trade pbk. ed.External-identifier urn:oclc:record:858946996
Extramarc NYU BobcatFoldoutcount 0Identifier nativespeaker00chanSHOW MORE
Full catalog record MARCXML
plus-circle Add Review
commentReviews
There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review.
1,382 Previews
10 Favorites
PURCHASE OPTIONS
Better World Books
DOWNLOAD OPTIONS
download 1 fileENCRYPTED DAISY download
For print-disabled users
14 day loan required to access EPUB and PDF files.
2021년 12월 9일 목요일
The Semblance of Identity by Christopher Lee - Ebook | Scribd
The Semblance of Identity by Christopher Lee - Ebook | Scribd
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The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature
By Christopher Lee
297 pages
9 hours
Included in your membership!
at no additional cost
Description
The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identityargues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity.
Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject," which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. He reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge. Harnessing Theodor Adorno's notion of aesthetic semblance, Lee offers an alternative account of identity as a figure akin to modern artwork. Like art, Lee argues, identity provides access to imagined worlds that in turn wage a critique of ongoing histories and realities of racialization.
This book assembles a transnational archive of literary texts by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa, revealing the intersections of subjectivity and representation, and drawing our attention to their limits.
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The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
by Christopher Lee (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
See all formats and editions
Kindle
$69.82Read with Our Free App
Hardcover
$98.23
1 Used from $220.007 New from $71.55
The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identityargues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity.
Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject," which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. He reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge. Harnessing Theodor Adorno's notion of aesthetic semblance, Lee offers an alternative account of identity as a figure akin to modern artwork. Like art, Lee argues, identity provides access to imagined worlds that in turn wage a critique of ongoing histories and realities of racialization.
This book assembles a transnational archive of literary texts by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa, revealing the intersections of subjectivity and representation, and drawing our attention to their limits.
Read less
Edition
1st
Publisher
Stanford University Press
Publication date
18 April 2012
Language
English
File size
711 KB
See all details
See all supported devices
Yale Top 30
Shop Top 30 bestsellers on Yale Books. Shop now
Product description
Review
Semblance of Identity is a learned and superbly crafted scholarly work. It draws productively on a broad range of critical theory and offers insightful, highly textualized demonstrations of the 'identity conundrum' in Asian American literature. The analyses of literary texts in each chapter authoritatively demonstrate how Asian American identity emerges in tension with the social. As Lee suggests, Asian American literature needs to be read through the persistent desire for identitarian thinking rather than only for the consolidation of Asian American identity.--Cynthia Tolentino "NOVEL"
The Semblance of Identity has a bold and original argument. Lee's conclusion that 'the pressing task is to scrupulously expose the dangers of identity politics while recognizing its critical potential' is surely one that will prove influential in Asian American studies and in ethnic studies more generally.--Theophilus Savvas "Modern Fiction Studies"
The Semblance of Identity makes an impressive contribution to Asian American studies by providing a fresh look at the field's uneasy relationship with the 'identity politics' from which it was born. Lee offers an elegant, theoretically sophisticated picture of what 'post-identity' Asian American studies might look like.--Timothy Yu "University of Wisconsin-Madison"
[W]hile Lee's study focuses on formal complexities in works that generally adhere to a realist aesthetic, its illuminating readings of those complexities could be extended into analyses of how more radically experimental works of poetry and prose engage with ethnic identity. In raising such questions--and in bringing aesthetic theory to bear on the 'post-identity' debate--The Semblance of Identity makes an important contribution not just to Asian American Studies, but to the larger fields of ethnic studies and 'New Formalism.'--Hsuan Hsu, Amerasia Journal
Christopher Lee's The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature stands out for its refreshing theorization of identity politics through competing Marxist paradigms of subjectivity . . . This is the grand provocation from Lee, which elicits much intellectual excitement but, more importantly, will call for response in the critical literature and most surely receive it.--Richard Langer "The Year's Work in English Studies"
Especially noteworthy is Lee's discussion of the work of Eileen Chang . . . His analysis, which works across Chinese and English materials and a scattered archive of sources, is a model of transnational and multilingual reading . . . The Semblance of Identity deserves to gain a wide readership in the field.--Guy Beauregard "Canadian Literature"
Lee's argument is built on the aesthetic theories of Kant, on critical theory, and most foundationally on Adorno--and performs a fresh and an invigorating approach to the debate over identity and identity politics that perennially grips not only Asian American critical discourse but all minority discourse.--Sue-Im Lee "Journal of American Studies" --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Christopher Lee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Product details
ASIN : B007PGNWW0
Publisher : Stanford University Press; 1st edition (18 April 2012)
Language : English
File size : 711 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 208 pages
About the author
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Follow
Christopher Lee
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The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature
By Christopher Lee
297 pages
9 hours
Included in your membership!
at no additional cost
Description
The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identityargues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity.
Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject," which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. He reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge. Harnessing Theodor Adorno's notion of aesthetic semblance, Lee offers an alternative account of identity as a figure akin to modern artwork. Like art, Lee argues, identity provides access to imagined worlds that in turn wage a critique of ongoing histories and realities of racialization.
This book assembles a transnational archive of literary texts by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa, revealing the intersections of subjectivity and representation, and drawing our attention to their limits.
Kindle Store
›
Kindle eBooks
Buying Options
Kindle Price: $69.82
includes tax, if applicable
Buy now with 1-Click ®
Deliver to:Your Kindle Library
Send a free sample
Deliver to:Your Kindle Library
Redeem a promotion code or gift card
Share
Follow the Author
Christopher Lee
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The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
by Christopher Lee (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
See all formats and editions
Kindle
$69.82Read with Our Free App
Hardcover
$98.23
1 Used from $220.007 New from $71.55
The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identityargues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity.
Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject," which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. He reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge. Harnessing Theodor Adorno's notion of aesthetic semblance, Lee offers an alternative account of identity as a figure akin to modern artwork. Like art, Lee argues, identity provides access to imagined worlds that in turn wage a critique of ongoing histories and realities of racialization.
This book assembles a transnational archive of literary texts by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa, revealing the intersections of subjectivity and representation, and drawing our attention to their limits.
Read less
Edition
1st
Publisher
Stanford University Press
Publication date
18 April 2012
Language
English
File size
711 KB
See all details
See all supported devices
Yale Top 30
Shop Top 30 bestsellers on Yale Books. Shop now
Product description
Review
Semblance of Identity is a learned and superbly crafted scholarly work. It draws productively on a broad range of critical theory and offers insightful, highly textualized demonstrations of the 'identity conundrum' in Asian American literature. The analyses of literary texts in each chapter authoritatively demonstrate how Asian American identity emerges in tension with the social. As Lee suggests, Asian American literature needs to be read through the persistent desire for identitarian thinking rather than only for the consolidation of Asian American identity.--Cynthia Tolentino "NOVEL"
The Semblance of Identity has a bold and original argument. Lee's conclusion that 'the pressing task is to scrupulously expose the dangers of identity politics while recognizing its critical potential' is surely one that will prove influential in Asian American studies and in ethnic studies more generally.--Theophilus Savvas "Modern Fiction Studies"
The Semblance of Identity makes an impressive contribution to Asian American studies by providing a fresh look at the field's uneasy relationship with the 'identity politics' from which it was born. Lee offers an elegant, theoretically sophisticated picture of what 'post-identity' Asian American studies might look like.--Timothy Yu "University of Wisconsin-Madison"
[W]hile Lee's study focuses on formal complexities in works that generally adhere to a realist aesthetic, its illuminating readings of those complexities could be extended into analyses of how more radically experimental works of poetry and prose engage with ethnic identity. In raising such questions--and in bringing aesthetic theory to bear on the 'post-identity' debate--The Semblance of Identity makes an important contribution not just to Asian American Studies, but to the larger fields of ethnic studies and 'New Formalism.'--Hsuan Hsu, Amerasia Journal
Christopher Lee's The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature stands out for its refreshing theorization of identity politics through competing Marxist paradigms of subjectivity . . . This is the grand provocation from Lee, which elicits much intellectual excitement but, more importantly, will call for response in the critical literature and most surely receive it.--Richard Langer "The Year's Work in English Studies"
Especially noteworthy is Lee's discussion of the work of Eileen Chang . . . His analysis, which works across Chinese and English materials and a scattered archive of sources, is a model of transnational and multilingual reading . . . The Semblance of Identity deserves to gain a wide readership in the field.--Guy Beauregard "Canadian Literature"
Lee's argument is built on the aesthetic theories of Kant, on critical theory, and most foundationally on Adorno--and performs a fresh and an invigorating approach to the debate over identity and identity politics that perennially grips not only Asian American critical discourse but all minority discourse.--Sue-Im Lee "Journal of American Studies" --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Christopher Lee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Product details
ASIN : B007PGNWW0
Publisher : Stanford University Press; 1st edition (18 April 2012)
Language : English
File size : 711 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 208 pages
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Follow
Christopher Lee
A Gesture Life Important Quotes | SuperSummary
A Gesture Life Important Quotes | SuperSummary
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A Gesture Life
Chang-rae Lee
A Gesture Life
Chang-rae Lee
53-page comprehensive study guide
Chapter-by-chapter summaries and multiple sections of expert analysis
The ultimate resource for assignments, engaging lessons, and lively book discussions
Featured Collections
Historical Fiction
Asian American & Pacific Islander Literature
Korean Literature
Summary
Chapters 1-3
Chapters 4-6
Chapters 7-9
Chapters 10-12
Chapters 13-14
Chapters 15-17
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
A Gesture Life Important Quotes
1.
“It’s no secret that the past proves a most unstable mirror, typically too severe and flattering all at once, and never as truth-reflecting as people would like to believe.”
(Chapter 1, Page 5)
From the start of the story, Hata understands that attempting to view the past through one’s own eyes will always be biased and never trustworthy. Despite the belief that the past can reflect the truth, trying to understand oneself by means of analyzing the past will prove too harsh and too flattering.
2.
“For I should say that I know from experience that the bearing of those in extreme circumstances can sometimes by untoward and even shocking, and we must try our best to understand what is actual and essential to a person, and what is by any indication anomalous, a momentary lapse that is better forgotten than considered time and time again, to little avail.”
(Chapter 1, Page 11)
Mr. Hickey acts malevolently towards Hata, as he believes he sold them a business while knowing it would go under. However, he foreshadows the telling of past experiences where he himself, or others close to him, have acted shockingly in extreme circumstances. He most probably has spent time considering such actions to no avail and has learned it is better to forget such anomalous acts.
3.
“I was more than grateful. And I knew even then as a boy of twelve how I should always give myself over to its vigilance, entrusting to its care everything I could know or ever hope for. My Sunny, I thought, would do the same. Not be so thankful or beholden to me, necessarily, but at least she’d be somewhat appreciative of the providence of institutions that brought her from the squalor of the orphanage—the best of which can be only so happy—to an orderly, welcoming suburban home in America, with a hopeful father of life-enough race and sufficient means.
(Chapter 4, Page 72)
The core of Hata’s life of gestures is a deeply embedded sense of gratitude for not just his adoptive parents but for the opportunities he has had throughout life. He seems to mistake an orderly and welcoming life for love and acceptance. Because of this, he expects Sunny to be as grateful as he was for being adopted into better circumstances.
4.
“You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness. You’re always having to be the ideal partner and colleague.”
(Chapter 5, Page 94)
Although Hata admits early on that many have said he seeks approval and consensus too keenly, Sunny confronts Hata directly about his nature and the kind of life he has set up.
Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life: The Recuperation of Identity Matthew Miller
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Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life: The
Recuperation of Identity
Matthew Miller
Miller-Chang-rae lee's A Gesture Life
Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life: The Recuperation of Identity
Matthew Miller
University of South Carolina Aiken
In Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, the elderly, wellrespected and fastidious Franklin "Doc" Hata begins an introspective journey toward a revitalized and reimagined identity. For Lee, this journey affords the
chance to address ethnicity and immigration under a unique transnational context. The novel chronicles how an identity can be recuperated (i.e. , healed) through personal and cultural reconnections to the body and to
memory. I purposefully use the word "recuperate" in both the traditional and theoretical senses. "Recuperation" results from Hata's moving back into his past to grow
forward in self. Simultaneously, he "heals" his self, physically and psychologically, from various "afflictions" he endures. By exploring Hata's various afflictions against the novel's ways to counteract these ailments, I will show how Lee's novel becomes a narrative of recuperation and identity change.
In his most powerful portrayal of the Asian American immigrant, A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee creates a
Ethnic Studies Review Volume 32.2 characterwith multiple levels of Otherness: a transplanted
Korean identifying himself as Japanese transplanted in America. These multilayered complications of identity make Hata 's character ex-centric to the familiar paradigms of Asian American theory. Indeed, Young-Oak Lee locates this character within a postcolonial diagram: Hata is at once a colonizer and the colonized in an American territory of conflicted identities. Not quite in and not quite out, Hata, the successful businessman and yellow invader, still does not belong to America. 1 Other critics and reviewers tend to evoke ideas of the limen when discussing identity and its construction in A Gesture Life. David Cowart describes Hata, a first generation American immigrant character, as living in an American limbo. He becomes neither "ethnic prima materia" nor "American alloy" (Cowart 80).2 In an interview from the New York Tjmes, Lee explains his artistic investment: " ' I ' m interested i n people who find themselves i n places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate-with all the attendant problems and complications and delight' " (Garner).3 Franklin Hata perhaps translates his out-ofplace existence into several physical and psychological maladies which hinder self-actualization. Consequently, one can imagine Hata's "vexed identity" as "a membrane stretched over chopped and broken shards-their edges constantly threatening rupture" (Cowart 80). Hata, at least in the novel's beginning, is a walking trauma.4
Lee, however, establishes that even a Franklin Hata can rectify past ills through explorations of memory and reconnections with history and family. Lee's novel uses memory to retrieve loss and provide a chance to discover and promote the healing of self. Shoshana Felman and
Dori Laub in Test;mony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History outline a similar process. Survivors tell stories or create testimonies that bridge the gaps in historical and personal memory. Through
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this telling the survivor bears witness: "The testimony is, therefore, the process by which the narrator (the
survivor) reclaims his position as a witness: reconstitutes the internal 'thou, ' and thus the possibility of a witness or a listener inside himself" (85). Although he is not the typical survivor, Hata's journey allows him to reclaim his self and provide history to a silent story. A Gesture Life shows that a character can move toward a fuller, healthier understanding of identity.
As a complicated diasporic figure, Hata cannot acculturate fully into either the adopted cultures of Japan and America, making him feel out of place in his environment. In both places, race is the limiting factor that impedes social acceptance. For instance, Captain Dno, his superior during World War Two, remarks that he knows Hata's Korean lineage even though Hata masks this identity in his Japanese life (222). While in America, his Japanese nationality gives a false sense of delight, exoticism, and a "town-affirming" mentality (2). Hata's role-playing both in Japan and America at times reflects the fractured and disjointed existence of some transnationals. Therefore, he feels at one point more "curious and unfamiliar to [him]self" (141 ). He also wonders if his home has made him shut off from others (193). Later, Hata summarizes what his life has become: "I feel I have not really been living anywhere or anytime, not for the future and not in the past and not at all of-the-moment, but rather in the lonely dream of an oblivion, the nothing-to-nothing drift from one pulse beat to the next, which is really the most bloodless marking out, automatic and involuntary" (320-21 ). Liminal and diasporic, Hata cannot live anywhere at any time; his traumatic and displaced experiences have made him lost to himself. Lee illuminates this reality through
three trends or ailments in Hata's psyche: empty social gestures, a prideful estrangement to others, and several attempts to erase his life through suicidal impulses and personal revisions.
Ethnic Studies Review Volume 32.2
Accordingly, all immigrants, especially those here through similar circumstances as Hata, encounter psychological difficulties assimilating in America. I mmigrants, as Hata confirms on one level, constantly are viewed, judged, and incorporated by the society at large. Hata explains this tendency, this political/visual
exchange from mainstream society upon the immigrant, through talking about his business: "[I]t was the generous attitude of the customers that drew me out and gave me confidence, and that every decent and good thing
that has come to me while I have lived here is due to some corollary of that welcoming, which I have never lost sight of" (4-5). Hata's identity is formed by his
customers' attitude. Subsequently, Lee's final line here takes on double meaning, for Hata never loses "sight" of them and they never stop their "sight" of him. Hata ponders after this admission whether he has "too keenly sought approval and consensus" (5). He concludes this thought, stating that "the past proves a most unstable mirror, typically too severe and flattering all at once, and never as truth-reflecting as people would like to believe" (5). Lee's concept of the "unstable mirror" is important because it symbolizes the immigrant identity that is reflected and refracted back to him/her. "Never as truth-reflecting, " this mirror (i.e. , a gaze) reifies that
slippery identity of those like Hata.
Lee gives an example of this existence when Hata sees another Japanese business man. Hata describes this meeting: "Once, I even met a Japanese gentleman
from the San Francisco Bay area, who owned a store that sounded much like mine, and had opened in the very same year" (20). This double makes Hata "think [that] we both brightened on sighting each other" (20). Seeing the other (man), quite figuratively seeing his own reflection here, instantly "brightens" Hata yet leaves him feeling "an unexpected awkwardness" (20). Socially these two Japanese do not fit in with each other: "You would think we would have plenty to discuss, being of like
Miller-Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life
race and age and occupation, but our conversation was oddly halting and strained. There was a difficult moment, on being introduced to each other when it was unclear whether we would shake hands or bow" (20). These men should be able to talk freely; however, they cannot and cannot even figure out an appropriate greeting-"as it happened, we exchanged only the mildest pleasantries"
(20). For Hata, this discomfort returns to the immigrant's "unstable mirror, " or the inability to belong in America:
I first wondered if he felt he wasn't Japanese enough for me, or whether I thought myself not American enough for him. But later on, after returning home, I thought perhaps it was that we felt different from everyone by virtue of being together (these two Japanese in a convention crowd), and that it was this fact that made us realize, for a moment, our
sudden and unmistakable sense of not fitting in. (20)
Hata and his double as members of an ethnic/ immigrant minority seem unable to integrate this double consciousness.
Hata admits after this encounter that his comfortable lifestyle is wearing thin. After noting that "this happy blend of familiarity and homeyness and what must be belonging, is strangely beginning to disturb me, " (20), Hata begins to interrogate his relationships to his place and others. While initially proud of his rootlessness, Hata
comes to find that a problem, stating:
There is something exemplary to the sensation of near-perfect lightness, of being in a place and not being there, which seems of course a chronic condition of my life but then, too, its everyday unction, the trouble finding a remedy but not quite a cure, so that the problem naturally proliferates until
it has become you through and through. (289-90)
Ethnic Studies Review Volume 32.2
This "problem" that becomes "you through and through" corresponds to life as a transnational survivor, drifting upon the forces that put one "in a place [while] not being there. " Rationalizing this existence, Hata explains
that upon his "decision to leave Japan for good," he did not wish "to think at length about women and intimate relations and companionship, for [he] knew there would be myriad difficulties ahead for [him], in setting up [his]
small bit of commerce, and other things in life" (48).5
Through retrospection, Hata begins to see that this "chronic condition" needs a "remedy. "
Because he is socially incapable, Hata early in life believes that gestures provide substance in his life. However, asAnneAnlin Cheng notes, "social performance" acts as a "theatrical rather than substantive aspect of subjecthood" (559). For example, after exploring the entrails of a pig, he concludes that the soul resides in the flesh and not in the mind: "I have had the thought from time to time that indeed these [referring to a mutilated pig's quivering heart and lungs] were the vessels of the animal's spirit, and that perhaps our souls, too, reside not in our minds but in the very flesh of us, the frank, gray tissue which seems most remarkably possessed of the will to go on, to persist" (247). Preferring to believe that our bodies represent our souls, Hata relies on physical gestures throughout the novel's first half. Yet these formalities subsume his interpersonal connection to others. Sunny (Le. , his daughter) proclaims that her father, "make[s] a whole life of gestures and politeness" (95). Earlier in his life, Captain Dno says similarly: "You [ . . .] too much depend upon generous fate and gesture" (266). Accordingly, Dno explains to Hata that "[t]here is the germ of infirmity in you, which infects everything you touch or attempt" (266). Hata's gestures thus stemmed from a self-constructed Japanese identity that subverted a never fully realized Korean self. Striving to be always someone else, he manages only to become a simulacrum of identity-a Mr. Miyagi (Le. , Asian-American
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actor Noriyuki "Pat" Morita's famous stereotype) for suburban New York.6 In fact, in his American "home"town of Bedley Run, "Doc" Hata seems to embrace the stereotype-or as Hamilton Carroll labels, "a profound self-deception" (592)-of the "ideal minority": the respectable Asian other or wise old sage who fastidiously invests and "grooms" his life (1 37-8), gives calculating responses (1 30), prompts advice and wisdom (31 9), and makes America "orientally" exotic (1 04).1 More simply, Hata realizes that he has a developed "an unexpected condition of transparence here, a walking case of others' certitude" (21 ). Acting out empty gestures and rationalizing them, either for reputation or for adherence to perceived Japanese-Americanness, creates Hata's gesture life, one that limits his connection with others.8 His unyielding complacency to remain in the periphery prevents himself "to be part (if but a millionth) of the massing, and [ . . . to] pass through with something more than a life of gestures" (299). Standing on the sidelines of life, in other words, speaks to a latent problem on Hata's part of fitting in. Gestures are thus a means to mask his uncomfortable position in society.
Hata also is a disturbed character, one who at first prides himself on his estranged relationships-a quality that reflects another malady. The slow deterioration in his relationship with Mary Burns offers insight about this tendency. Mary Burns, a widowed, middle-aged neighbor, fosters changes in Hata, however brief. After he recounts their first conversation, he discovers a change emanating from his psyche: "[W]ith Mary Burns I seemed to forget the place where I was. [ . . .] It was an almost memorial sweetness, rising beneath me like a lifting wave, as if it were intent on transporting me, sending me to a place across oceans" (49). Unmoored by her gentle character, Hata does not allow himself to ride this wave to a new place. Instead, he quickly moves away from this liberal "sweetness" to prescribed gestures. Mary Burns fits into his plan for an American life (for the motherless Sunny, Ethnic Studies Review Volume 32.2 he claims): "My only real chance was to locate a childless
widow who might consider an opportunity for motherhood reason enough to leave her homeland" (51 ). He admits
that "it was obvious how nearly perfect Mary would be as a mother" (31 3). For Hata, however, his logical disposition does not overrule his socially prescribed gestures. One great example of this occurs during a love scene between Mary and Hata. Upon wandering off together on an "impromptu hike, " they begin to kiss "spurring ebullience that caught [them] both off guard" (31 3). Moving deeper into the nearby woods, they slip (due to Mary's urging) into "a small opening within a thicket, [ ... ] a lair that must have been used by deer" (314). Hata explains the passion that begins: "And we began to kiss, and eventually our hands were purposefully exploring
each other, lingering and caressing and soon enough undoing buttons, clasps. It would have been scandalous in town had someone caught us. But it didn't seem that
we cared" (314). Constantly posturing or concerned about society's view of him, Hata lets this awareness rest in the scene. However, a deeper hindrance surfaces,
for Hata cannot let himself make love to her despite her want, admitting, "I felt awfully young, touching her, and the wanting I had wished never again to know was rushing back to me, a disturbing shiver in my fingers and in my mouth and in my eyes. I stopped everything then" (31 5). He feels that his passion is "disturbing" and cannot continue. More problematic, they "never [speak] again of what had happened" in this scene (31 5). The Mary Burns relationship reveals that Hata cannot move beyond his psychological inhibitions or socially determined gestures. He would rather avoid intimacies and confrontations than foster a health relationship at that point in his life.
Similarly, Hata has trouble with Sunny, his adopted daughter, and avoids working through the fissures in their relationship. Lee illustrates this quality early when Hata restores her room after she abandons him:
Miller-Chang-rae lee's A Gesture Life
remember patching and repainting the ceiling and walls, making sure to fix all the mars in the plaster. There were larger pocks, into which I found it easy enough to spade the filler. But it was the smaller ones, particularly the tack holes, which seemed to number in the hundreds, [sic] that took the greatest part of my time. In the end, I found myself doing the work in half-foot squares, pressing in the paste with the tip of a finger, smoothing it out, and it wasn't until much later, as I'd drift over the surfaces, that the whole project was quite satisfactorily done. (14- 1 5)
Refashioning Sunny's room represents Hata 's denial. He avoids the conflict that made her leave in the first place. Feeling "the whole project" to be "quite satisfactorily done, " Hata's tone described above drives away the pain behind losing his daughter. By working "in half-foot squares, " Hata systematically blots/erases her out of his life. This act reifies an earlier desire he mentions: "I wanted to hide the real depth of the trouble, put it away not (as Sunny always contended) for the sake of my reputation or standing but so I could try to forget she was my daughter, that she had ever come to live with me and had grown up before my eyes" (98).9 He wants to erase her from his life.
Most disturbingly, Hata has several suicidal or psychotic impulses that are deep-seated attempts to separate hi mself from others-the last type of psychological ai lment. Hata's suicidal impulses and moments of erasure begin from the novel's opening sequence. He ponders, like John Cheever's protagonist in "The Swimmer, " the domestic, suburban repetition of life, and while believing he could be swimming in neighboring pools, Hata swallows some
water (22). Later he explains a desire to breathe water: "Some of us longtime swimmers often wish for ourselves that submerged, majestic flight, feel the near-desire to open one's mouth and relax and let the waters rush
Ethnic Studies Review Volume 32.2
in deep, hoping that something magical might happen" (277).10 Elsewhere Hata faints while visiting Sunny and describes the breathless sensation: "There's a feeling of something like purity again, a razing and renewal, as if
I might wholly banish all that I was just a moment ago" (207). For Hata, ending one's breathing allows a twisted vision of rebirth. Later, he wonders if he wants simply to kill himself or transmogrify into "a brand-new life, fresh and hopeful and unfettered" (277). These moments show Hata's latent impulses to end life and to find a "wholly different heart and shell and mien" (277).
It is important to remember that suicide never literally occurs in the book. Still Lee demonstrates other moments of erasure. The novel's early house cleaning scene appears minor at first look. After all, is not Franklin Hata, our narrator of twenty pages, just burning some old, useless documents to warm his chilled body after his morning swim? On the surface, he is doing just that. However, examining the contents and method of his burning reveals a covert act of erasure. Hata burns "the decades-old files and papers and other expired and useless documents" which includes "such stuff as canceled checks and mortgage and bank statements" (24). Although these items appear to be insignificant and the act itself normal and necessary, the narrator is erasing records of his existence, proof of his (American) residency. Similarly, this scene corresponds to the earlier one about Sunny's room. In both cases, Hata tries to get rid of evidence of life-perhaps he is exorcising a death wish.
Earlier in life while invading with the Japanese army, Hata similarly denies or erases his Korean heritage and identity, which Carroll deems a "repudiation of his own heritage" (603). When the Korean comfort woman Kkutaeh explicitly states, "'You are a Korean, '" he replies, '''No [ . . .] I am not' " (234). Erasing his original background, he assumes a Japanese identity, stating proudly: '''I'm a medical officer of the Imperial Forces, and there's nothing else to be said. [ . . .] I spoke some
Miller-Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life
Korean as a boy. But then no more' " (235).11 He also denies his Korean name (235). On a practical level, this denial represents Hata's survival under the Japanese hegemonic regime. (After all, his birth parents inculcate an idea of Japanese superiority (235). To succeed in Japan, he has to deny his Korean identity. ) On a psychological level, however, Hata's dismissal of the Korean language represents a struggle to come to terms with his place in Japanese society. Because of his slippery existence as a
Japanese soldier and his even messier understanding of his Korean humanity, Hata cannot give in to himself and help Kkutaeh escape forced prostitution.12 Even when he is negotiating and trying to take a stand for her, he suddenly and unconsciously salutes Kkutaeh's tormentor, Captain Ono (264).
Hata holds long-lasting guilt over Kkutaeh's death and his culpability in it. To assuage this overwhelming pain, he adopts Sunny. Mark Jerng in his "Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee: Adoption Life Stories and Chang-rae
Lee's A Gesture Life" elaborates on the issue of adoption in the novel, noting that because of "confusions of temporality and the ambivalence of address" "adoption is figured in terms of transference" (45).13 Jerng continues and finds transference in the "ambivalent ethical relation between Doc Hata and K to the adoptive relation between Hata and Sunny" (53). Indeed, Hata explains to his adoption agent "how [he] always hoped for a daughter, the words suddenly streaming from [his] mouth as though [he had] long practiced the speech. [He]
found [him]self speaking of a completeness, the unitary bond of a daughter and father. Of harmony and balance" (74). An almost unconscious admission, his explanation speaks to his desire to (re)create a love with a "girl" (i.e. , Kkutaeh). Mary Burns notices this "transference, " to borrow Jerng's term: '''[I]t's as if she's a woman to whom you're beholden, which I can't understand. [ . . .] You adopted her. But you act almost guilty, as if she's someone you hurt once, or betrayed, and now you' re Ethnic Studies Review Volume 32.2 obliged to do whatever she wishes, which is never good for anyone, much less a child'" (60). Prophetic and accurate, this quote reinforces Hata's psychological replacement of Kkutaeh with Sunny.
Consequently, Hata's role in Sunny's abortion, the last major act of erasure, illustrates an extremely unhealthy attempt to reorder his past. Lee parallels Kkutaeh's mutilation and Sunny's partial-birth abortion to indicate further Hata's psychological conflation of the two characters. Jerng explains, "The double-movement of the narrative, oscillating as it does between looking forwards and looking backwards, acts out this model of transference in narrating the adoptive relation"
(55). For example, Hata expects Sunny to come from a "hardworking, if squarely humble, Korean family" (204) similar to Kkutaeh's (248). Even though there is evidence that Sunny is not Kkutaeh, Hata cannot move beyond Sunny's impure miscegenation, or her "blight. " According to him, Sunny's "hair, her skin, were there to see, selfevident, and it was obvious how some other color (or colors) ran deep within her" (204). He also wants Sunny and himself to have a "natural affinity" (204) much as he thought he had with Kkutaeh, "a special correspondence between us, an affinity of being" (263). Of course, Hata and Sunny have no such relationship. Even in parenting, Hata works against the image Kkutaeh presented of her father, who was indifferent, cold, and untouching (245). As a result, Hata tries to be the perfect father: "overgenerous, [ ...] extremely permissive and obliging, " and hands-on (71 ). Again, Sunny is not Kkutaeh. Sullen and rebellious, Sunny turns out to despise his lessons and overbearing style.14
Hata's largest attempt at psychological reconcilement with Kkutaeh is Sunny's abortion. He needs to erase his young mistake. Earlier in his life, Kkutaeh wanted Hata to kill her and end her misery as a "comfort woman"
(301 ). Hata failed to do this, and she was gang-raped and dismembered. Hata (dis)remembers finding her:
Miller-Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life
, could not feel my hands as they gathered, nor could' feel the weight of such remains. And I could not sense that other, tiny, elfin form I eventually discovered, miraculously whole, I could not see the figured legs and feet, the utter, blessed digitation of the hands. Nor could I see the face, the perfected cheek and brow. Its pristine sleep still unbroken, undisturbed. And I could not know what I was doing, or remember any part. (305)
Retracing his discovery through negation, denial, and avoidance, Hata cannot accept that his inaction causes Kkutaeh's most horrible reality: her fetus is taken from her.15 In the more recent past, Sunny's abortion (forced upon her by Hata) stands for another adoptive act of compensation for Kkutaeh and a covert attempt to erase guilt for Hata. The clinician Dr. Anastasia has tremendous reservations about performing Sunny's abortion (for she is well over twenty-eight weeks).16 Hata insists that the abortion happen, claiming that she has failed to finish high school, that she has no job, and that the father is a (black) drug addict (342). Beyond this insistence, Hata also assists the doctor (343). He does this in hopes that the "similar things" he saw earlier in life can be put right (344). Sunny's abortion, however, merely repeats the violence done to Kkutaeh.
Such a horrible moment would certainly leave the reader despising Hata. Yet Lee begins a redeeming process through physical and psychological recuperation. Hata's lung condition from the opening sequence proves ironically healthy. Presently Hata offers a self-diagnosis: "From what I know and feel, I'm almost certain that I'm pleuritic, as my lungs don't seem to be improving the way they should. My chest feels leaden and straightjacketed and generally out of sorts. [ . . .] And then there is the other, unrelated complication that has arisen, one far worse in my mind (and spirit-sapping), which is that I suddenly have an onset of the shingles" (67). Lee's
Ethnic Studies Review Volume 32.2 language of psychological/physical imprisonment (Le. , "straightjacketed, " "out of sorts, " and "spirit-sapping") indicates a transition Hata has into introspection. The smoke inhalation and its lung irritation closes Hata's active physical life; reflection and analysis replace fitness and action. One small example demonstrates Hata's change. Hata contemplates the theme from Cheever's "The Swimmer" and begins to identify himself with that character: "I suddenly have the thought that I ' m not swimming i n my own pool at all, but am someplace else, in a neighboring pool or pond" (22). Even though this reference has been explained earlier in this essay, Hata provides an exegesis of the story offering three interpretations: the swimmer engages in a quest only to find spiritual disillusionment, he is mad or drunk and swims to escape from the "realities of his fallen station, " or he metaphorically passes the "'seasons' " of his life through swimming (23). This literary guesswork opens a new way to see Hata's life. Hata's character moves from activity, or gesture, to reflection. In a way his lung condition affords time to contemplate his psyche. Unlike Cheever's protagonist, Hata is able to stop at the roadside and return home before it is too late.
Hata begins his own spiritual quest to promote a healthier, recuperated self. After landing in the hospital, Hata starts a recovery in mind and body. Through the return of repressed memories, Hata becomes a new
character, one who fully understands himself and becomes healed. Theorist Cassie Premo Steele, in her book We Heal from Memory, reminds us that "[i]t is memory, as both a problem and a promise, that forms and allows us to form our individual and collective identities" (2).17 In essence, by casting his mind into his darkened past, Hata tells both an individual story and that of
collective transnationals. Specifically, contemplating his relationship with Kkutaeh allows Hata to come to terms with his Korean heritage. Reconnecting with Sunny begins to resolve his guilt. Selling his house impels Hata into
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a new life. By the novel's ending, a whole set of new, substantive "gestures" usher in a new character.
For Hata, Kkutaeh and her memory link him to a silenced Korean identity. His description of Kkutaeh even suggests an infantile fascination: "After some time I turned to see that she had finally fallen asleep, her knees drawn up toward her chest. I stared at her for quite a long moment, taking in her figure and loosely fisted hands and the serene, pale oval of her face, when she slowly opened her eyes" (240). Kkutaeh's body becomes a substitute for the Korean motherland. Although he denied his knowledge of Korean earlier, he admits, before gazing at her, that Korean was his "childhood language" (239). The Lacanian gaze reinforces his out-of-placeness around her, as Lee extends. Hata's gazing upon Kkutaeh, or his La objet petit a, awakens a desire within him: he feels "a certain connection to her, not in blood or culture or kind, but in that manner, I suppose, that any young man might naturally feel for a young woman" (239).18 This "connection" with her transforms into possession, an unviolent sexual assault:
I crawled around and lay down behind her, so that our bodies were aligned, nestled like spoons. She was warm and still and I gently pressed my face into the back of her neck and breathed in the oily musk of her hair. And it was so that I finally began
to touch her. I put my hand on the point of her hip and could feel all at once the pliancy of it and the meagerness and the newness, too. I felt bewildered and innocent and strangely renewed, as though a
surge of some great living being were coursing up my arms and spreading through my unknowing body. [She remains still, faking sleep]. I kissed as much of her body as was bared. I kissed her small breasts, which seemed to spill a sweet, watery liquid. I gagged but did not care. [ . . .] And when I was done I felt the enveloping warmth of a fever, its languorous Ethnic Studies Review Volume 32.2 cocoon, though when I gazed at her shoulder and back there was nothing but stillness, her posture unchanged, her skin cool and colorless, and she lay as if she were the sculpture of a recumbent girl and not a real girl at all. (259-60)
This passage reveals many ideas about the protagonist.
First, he is sexually na"ive: he takes advantage of her, fails to recognize the obvious indication of her pregnancy, and associates this assault with love (saying "I love you" both in Japanese and Korean afterward). While he may feel "renewed" by his stealthy intercourse, she reciprocates nothing "as if she is a sculpture. " Secondly, Hata misunderstands the tenderness. The "enveloping warmth
of a fever" he feels, this slow-opening "cocoon"-a word that suggests a locked-up kernel of rebirth to himcorresponds to orgasm, not love. And though he notices her tears following the assault (261 ), he cannot console her then.
Years later, Hata revises his intentions. Slipping into third person, the protagonist finds a new chrysalis to open, stating, "He did not yet know it, but he hoped that if he could simply be near to her, near to her voice [or her language] and to her body-if never even touching her-near, he thought, to her sleeping mind, he might somehow be found" (240). A need to protect or preserve her, found through introspection and time, proffers the
chance to "be found. " Perhaps Hata wishes he could have been "outed" for his ethnicity and perish with her.
Hata is given an opportunity to mourn Kkutaeh and to reconnect with his Korean heritage through a metaphoric sequence of considerable importance. Lee provides an ethereal backdrop for Hata's grief: "Now and then, I sometimes forget who I really am. [ . . .] I lose all sense of myself. I forget what it is I do, the regular activity of my walk and my swim and my taking of tea, the minor
trappings and doings of my days, what I 've made up to be the token flags of my life. I forget why it is I do such
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things, why they give me interest or solace or pleasure" (285). Hata begins to analyze his gestures, or "the token flags of [his] life. " He continues and describes a journey: "Then I might get up in the middle of the night and dress and walk all the way to town, to try to figure once again
the notices, the character, the sorts of actions of a man like me, what things or set of things define him in the most simple and ordinary way" (285). In this fugue state, he finds himself defenseless, open to long-lost memories. Indeed, he admits following one excursion to town that
"K has finally come back for [him]" and that at "moment [ . . .] [he] feel[s] at home" (286). Lee ambiguously labels this apparition "K" to represent both Kkutaeh and Korea.19 Lee chooses to use "for" to suggest that this "K" will be provoking him homeward to her, to his past, to Korea. Hata remains surprisingly passive until he spurns a conversation with the "K" ghost: she asks, "'Will we be going away soon, Lieutenant?"'. He responds with "'Where would we be going to, K?"'. " ' I had hoped we would finally travel to all the places we have spoken of. To Shanghai, and Kyoto, and perhaps even Seoul. Or some other place, ' " she answers (287). Hata's fantasy indicates his desire to revise history, to reenact a wish fulfillment from his past.20 Shanghai, Kyoto, and Seoul, the cultural centers of their Asian identities, are the places these characters could journey "to try to figure once again the notices, the character, the sorts of actions of a man like [him], what things or set of things define him in the most simple and ordinary way" (285). Lee reminds the reader that Hata cannot find solace for his pain here;
after Hata and "K" end the conversation, she joins him in bed only to vanish.21 In an attempt to promote a lasting relationship with his past, Hata makes a gesture that promises change: he sells his house.
An object of pride, the house emblemizes Hata's
American life. Aside from its function in his multiple erasures, the house becomes a vestige of stagnant life,
"the penultimate trap of living, " according to Hata (287).
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Indeed, the house maintained through Hata's constant grooming and gestures reifies an unLived-in or (un) comfortable existence in America. He even finds later in life that his house is "a lovely, standing forgery, pristine enough and old enough that it passes most every muster"
(352). Lee further encourages Hata's recognition of this "forgery" after he returns from the hospital. Feeling displaced and estranged, Hata begins to see the house with its "showcase, immaculate, pristine and classic condition, appearing just as though I have not Lived there every day for the last thirty years of my Life" (1 1 9). Acknowledging this peculiar feeling of displacement shows Hata's growth through his medical/psychological recuperation. He learns that the house stands for an inner disconnection, a sign that there is something missing in his Life. Lee hints at this point early. Hata explains an alienation, "I keep
stepping outside my house, walking its grounds, peering at the highly angled shape of its roofs, the warm color and time-textured facade, looking at it as though I were doing it for the very first time, when I wondered if I would ever in my life call such a house my home" (22). Interrogating the idea of this house as a home, Lee anticipates the novel's ambiguous last Line- "almost home"-here (356). Hata's house, as it is constituted and maintained, is not a home but "a lovely, standing forgery" (352). Therefore, selling the house allows him to move on in life, to end his American malaise, and to pay off several symbolic, psychological debts.
Whereas Hata's selling of the house represents a moving forward, the repairs he forges in the relationships with Sunny and his grandson, Thomas, signify a moving backward, a final healing of his past. As we have seen, Hata and Sunny's relationship was dysfunctional from the start-based largely on Hata's ill-formed attempt to replace Kkutaeh. The late amelioration of this relationship plays an integral part in Hata's psychological recuperation. Thomas works as the catalyst that initiates the healing process. When Sunny states that Thomas has saved her "over and
Miller-Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life
over, a thousand times, " Hata affirms and realizes "a bloom of well-being is opening immediately and fully in [his] heart, the kind of pleasure [he has] hitherto only read about or imagined, what must be the secret opiate of all fathers and mothers" (283). As grandfather, Hata truly understands the benefits of fatherhood. Promises of rebirth seem to shine upon Hata, for he has a "hope of a
familial continuation, an unpredictable, richly evolving to be" (334). Aside from Lee's use of the infinitive here,
which suggests an unending existence, the author has Sunny carry a white paper bag. A figurative white flag of truce, this bag redirects the novel's motif of black flags, "banner[s] [that warn] of a contagion within . " Instead of warning of impending doom and "spreading death, " this marker signals a new beginning i n Hata's relationship
with his daughter (224).
Hata has encountered his repressed memories and has tackled the overwhelming guilt he has had in his life. Lee, however, provides a concrete example to show Hata's change. Again, I return to the house. Selling his house becomes a secret philanthropic gesture: he gives money for the Hickeys' bankrupt business and their ailing son Patrick. Unlike earlier gestures in the novel, this gesture connects Hata to his community in a new way, not as flourishes of self-aggrandizing and conformity. Perhaps Cheng explains this point best: "We might call this final litany a choice for active passivity in the most earnest sense: not the passive aggression that motivated much of Hata's actions in the past [ . . .] but instead an active refusal to act any further in bad faith" (571 ). Moreover, the remainder of the profits will allow Hata to travel and address other ills. He ends the narrative with more promises: "Perhaps I ' ll travel to where Sunny wouldn't go, to the south and west and maybe farther still, across the oceans, to land on former shores" (355-6). Like his fantastic encounter with "K, " Hata ponders the possibility to return to Asia. Yet, he will not be fooled this time by false dreams. He says, "I won't seek out my destiny or
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fate" or "find comfort in the visage of a creator or the forgiving dead" (356). By this point, he realizes revisions and repressions will not change his past; a more simplistic life awaits him. The novel's last paragraph illustrates these points: "Let me simply bear my flesh, and blood, and bones. I will fly a flag. Tomorrow, when this house is alive and full, I will be outside looking in. I will be already on a walk someplace, in this town or the next or one five thousand miles away. I will circle round and arrive again. Come almost home" (356). This passage reverses many of the themes of transnational and psychological alienation and ailments throughout the narrative. Fulfilling his idea that the "soul resides in the flesh" (247), Hata now will own the corporeal properties of his life, leading to a spiritual health. Furthermore, he surely will fly a white flag to let the world know that there is no longer disease and destruction within him. Finally, he will journey, no doubt traveling the five thousand miles to Shanghai, Kyoto, and Seoul to fulfill Kkutaeh's desire, and arrive again. Significantly, Hata moves on from his house, which he detaches from his gaze. To "come almost home, " means Hata has found peace and place. This journey will reveal that he is not as lost as he once was.22
In some ways, A Gesture Life chronicles the awakening of a damaged man. Sparked by accident, Hata's recuperation opens a vast reservoir of loss and trauma in their various forms. Hata "arrives" by the narrative's end to have improved relationships with his daughter and grandson. He has worked through his role in the Kkutaeh fiasco. He has sold his house to provide opportunities for the future. We learn that transnational souls like Hata's can be recuperated to become new and healthier.
Notes
1 David Cowart explains, "Not comfortably Korean, Japanese, American, or Chinese, Franklin Hata is a casualty of the twentieth century[-]he can never [ . . .] escape the ugliness he has witnessed" (80).
Miller-Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life
2 On the other hand, Young-Oak Lee notes that Hata "[bJecomes an American citizen" (147)_
3 In another interview, Adrienne Mong notes that "Lee admits he feels the same way as his characters, out of place_" 4 For an extended discussion of trauma, see Hamilton Carroll's "Traumatic Patriarchy: Reading Gendered Nationalisms in Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Lite_ " Carroll makes this claim: "In A Gesture Lite, trauma functions as an alternative form of memory and history_ Understood as a disruption of nationally oriented referential history, the traumatic narrative orchestrates the production of a historiography that exposes the workings of gender and race that cut between and across the novel's doubled national locations" (595).
5 Hata even suggests that perhaps sub-urban America generally fosters this disconnection: "[AJs it mostly is in towns like Bedley Run, and particularly on streets like ours, being neighbors means sharing the most limited kinds of intimacies, such as sewer lines and property boundaries and annual property tax valuations. Anything that falls into a more personal realm is only tentatively welcomed" (44).
6 After all, his literary antecedent, Jay Gatsby, enacts a similar project to disguise his middle-western, working class roots.
7 This example references the odd encounter between Hata, searching for Sunny at a teenage party, and a girl behind a veiled bed. During intercourse, the girl fixates on Hata as she reaches climax to his image. The "exotic" I refer to here is largely based on Sheng-Mei Ma's The Deathly Embrace and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Both texts show how race (i.e. , Otherness) sexually attracts the majority.
8 Cheng agrees here, stating: "The novel features a protagonist named Franklin Hata, who has spent his entire life donning various forms of camouflage and whose life is structured by the struggle between guilt and desire, between self-erasure and self-assertion" (558).
9 Later, he even describes her as his "former daughter" (1 32).
1 0 In another moment of literary homage, Lee borrows language from Kate Chopin's
The Awakening. Specifically, Edna Pontellier's watery suicide reads, "The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The
water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its
soft, close embrace. [ . . .J She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again" ( 1 09).
11 Although he says this under public discourse as the medical officer, he privately speaks to her "in her own language" of Korean when she is checked into the camp (232).
12 Cheng elaborates this idea, "Fulfilling K. 's request would have meant breaking rank, transgressing not only military code but also his Japanese and masculine identifications" (562).
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\3 Jenrg anticipates my argument stating: "Two narrative drives co-exist uneasily within the text: Doc Hata's drive to belong and find closure for his life as an assimilated Japanese American in the suburban town of Bedley Run; and his constant returns to and flashbacks of the past, the traumatic events of his participation as a Japanese soldier in World War II- What connects these two narrative movements in Doc Hata's adoption of a Korean girl, Sunny" (51 -2)_
14 This behavior results from Hata's "continuation of a series of lifelong psychic struggles over social, ethnic, and sexual identifications" (Cheng 564).
15 Consult Cheng for another explanation, regarding the interpretation of Kkutaeh's body (563).
1 6 This peculiar name perhaps comes back to Jerng's idea of temporal confusion. Maybe Hata wants to filter this scene as both a fantasy and as anesthesia.
17 Steele argues that poetry allows victims and others to begin the process of healing.
18 See Cheng for an explanation of Lacan's Gaze (566-570).
19 Carroll also makes this point, "Symbolically [ . . .] the 'K' of Kkutaeh is the 'K' of Korea" (604).
20 Hata also superimposes northeastern Asia into this setting. For instance, he begins to smell the scent of "the sea, a warm and gentle southern sea" (288), and he sees his yard become a "broad continent" and his pool "a whole ocean" (289).
21 Lee gives another glimpse of this theory during the conversation when Hata objects to "K's insistence on being with him in "some other place." He asks, '''But I have to wonder, why being here is so abhorrent to everyone but me? We have everything that we require. And much more. We have an impressive house and property in the best town in the area, where we are happily known and respected. We have ample time and quiet and means. I have tried as hard as I can to provide these
things, and we have been welcomed as warmly as anyone can expect. Everything is in delicate harmony'" (287). She answers that '''nothing is wrong with it' " but that she '''cannot die here'" (287). She seems to know the importance of her cultural heritage more than he does at this point.
22 David Cowart suggests that Hata's use of "home" works as a "kind of absconding signified" in the last line (80). Cowart also suggests that America can be Hata's "almost home" (80), but I believe the where is not important for Hata's journey. What is more important is that Hata's elusive home does exist.
Works Cited
Carroll, Hamilton. "Traumatic Patriarchy: Reading Gendered
Nationalisms in Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life. " Modern Fiction Studies 51 .3 (Fall 2005): 592-61 6.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. "Passing, Natural Selection, and Love's Failure: Ethics of Survival from Chang-rae Lee to Jacques Lacan. " American Literary History 1 7.3 (Fall 2005): 553-74.
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