| A Gesture Life | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Chang-Rae Lee |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Riverhead Books |
| Publication date | September 6, 1999 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 356 pp. |
| ISBN | ISBN 978-1-57322-146-7 |
| OCLC Number | 41488613 |
| LC Classification | PS3562.E3347 G4 1999 |
A Gesture Life is a novel written by Chang-Rae Lee, a South Korean author who has been living in the United States since 1965, which takes the form of a narrative of an elderly physician named Doc Hata, who deals with everyday life in a small town in the United States called Bedley Run and who remembers treating Korean comfort women for the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. He once owned a medical and surgical supply store and he has an adopted daughter, named Sunny. The relationship between these two is quite disturbed and leads to certain problems. All the problems with which Doc Hata has to deal can be led back to his experiences in the Japanese Imperial Army in the World War II.
Contents |
The whole story, told by the first person narrator Doc Hata, consists of flashbacks. The main story line reaches from the time he gives up his store in Bedley Run until he meets his adopted daughter again. The sub story lines show the reader about his time during the war and also about his time with a teenage daughter and how he experienced the time in which his daughter was very difficult.
At the beginning of the story, Doc Hata describes where he lives and how his situation is. He lives in a small town called Bedley Run, where he is first accepted from the other inhabitants as a decent shopkeeper, although he sold his store to a young couple from New York, and is now retired. He has problems to let his old life behind him and visits his old store nearly every day. At this point, i.e. very early, he mentions that he has a daughter who comes from Japan as well.
Then, he describes his house and the area he lives in. He also introduces Liv Crawford to the reader, who is a real estate agent and wants him to move and sell his house. Doc Hata thinks a lot about his past in Bedley Run but also about his past experiences in Japan. He gives a lot of insights into his daily routines, like going to his old store or going to swim every day in his own pool. He also thinks a lot about Sunny and how she arrived when she was a little girl. Later on, it becomes clear that Sunny was adopted and that Doc Hata was very fanatic about getting a girl and even bribed the relevant person to get what he wants. He remembers Sunny playing the piano and about the initial problems he had with her.
In the first flashback we can see how he remembers his time with Mary Burns, one of his neighbors. He remembers meeting her the first time during his gardening. She quickly becomes a kind of girlfriend for him and spends a lot of time with Sunny who does not accept her at all. Although Mary Burns works a lot on her relationship to Sunny, the young girl does not get along with her. In her first conversation with Doc Hata it becomes clear that he is not a real doctor but that everybody calls him 'doc' because of his store. Mary Burns is very impressed of him because of the fact that he lives in a house that would fit a real doctor and his salary. At the beginning, the relationship between Doc Hata and Mary Burns is very close but they start very early to argue a lot about Sunny and about how Doc Hata treats his daughter.
Doc Hata gives one piece of information about his relationship to his daughter after the other. He never gives all information at the same point. While the story is going on it becomes clear that a big fight between Doc Hata and Sunny took place awhile ago and parted them from each other. During a stay in the hospital, where he has to stay because he almost burned his own house, Doc Hata remembers what this fight was about. In hospital Officer Como's daughter visits Doc Hata and he begins to remember which problems Sunny had with Officer Como. Sunny was in trouble and she did not accept the authority of the police officer. This is just the beginning of the tragedy which is going on between Sunny and Doc Hata. At this point of the story, in the flashback situation, it becomes clear that Sunny runs away from home and that she meets with dubious persons.
Going on in the story, Doc Hata goes back in time a lot, he starts to talk about his time in World War II. He explains that most of the soldiers and also some officers had fun with abducted, young women, who were brought there for the pleasures of the soldiers. He talks in particular about one girl he thought about the whole time.
Before he comes back to the war situation he tells the reader about how he finds Sunny again and how this situation goes on and he also gives more background information on the conflict with Sunny. Then, he meets Sunny again on a regular basis. She has a son, named Thomas of whom Doc Hata takes care, but he does not tell him that he is his grandfather, because Sunny does not want her son to know that. For Sunny it is quite a comfort that her dad takes care of her child, because she can apply for a new job and does not need to find a new baby sitter or nanny.
When he speaks about his war time he talks most of the time about K and about their relationship to each other. K is a girl who was arrested by the Lieutenant Kurohata for special services. She was a kind of prostitute (comfort woman), but without getting any money for it from the soldiers, the young Franklin Hata tried to protect her from the treatment of the others. It seems that Doc Hata fell in love with K and he wanted to protect her from everything. While Captain Ono tried to rape her, she killed him, and she asked Hata to kill her too, but instead, he told the others that Captain Ono killed himself in an accident. In the end, Doc Hata does not say explicitly that K died after she is raped by 30 or more soldiers, but implicitly it is clear that she is dead.
At the end of the story, Doc Hata changes a lot. He stops following his rituals, he sells his house and he gets along with Sunny. So, it can be seen that he begins to handle his war experiences and that he is able to change.
The figure of Doc Hata functions as I narrator and tells every part of the story through his eyes. So, we can understand how he sees the events and not how the other characters see it. He tells us not only about his time in Bedley Run, but also very briefly about his childhood, then about his time in World War II, and also about his time with his daughter Sunny. He does not tell all these events in the chronological order but every time he thinks about his past, he talks about it. So, the novel is full of flashbacks which tell us more about Hata's life and his rituals.
Hata lives in Bedley run, owned a medical store and was a soldier in the World War II. His name is Japanese but originally he comes from Korea, was adopted by a nice childless couple and lived his youth on the south-western coast of Japan. He tells us that he was not a nice but a difficult child who was not generous to his foster parents who treated him as well as a real son.
During the war, in 1944, he is stationed in Burma. He is there as a paramedical officer who is field-trained but not formally educated. He is called Lieutenant Kurohata which is his Japanese name and not his Korean one. Both names, Hata as well as Kurohata mean black flag which could be seen as his symbol for the war and the happenings over there. In Burma, he is responsible for the girls, who are there for the men's happiness and 'health'. Not only is he responsible for them, he also falls in love with one of the girls, K. At this time he thinks that K is in love with him, too, but following all events Hata is telling us about, it becomes clear that this love was unilateral. He loves her so much that he shoots Captain Ono to protect her.
In his first years in Bedley Run he owns a store, named after his daughter "Sunny Medical Store". He adopts Sunny when she is a young girl. He always wants a girl and is therefore happy to get one from a Christian Adoption Agency. He tells everybody that he is a happy father but in reality he has a lot of problems with Sunny. In the end he sees that he made a lot of mistakes with Sunny. He is for example, like every Japanese father, too overgenerous. He tries to have a happy family when he meets Mary Burns but this does not work with Sunny. All these things induce Sunny to leave her dad.
After a while, and after selling his store to a youngish couple from New York he meets Sunny after thirteen years without any contact again and gets to know her son, Thomas. He changes a lot and spends a lot of time with his grandson and also with his daughter. Doc Hata is a man who lives his life through rituals. He swims every day, he goes out for a walk to his old store but the retirement lifestyle does not immediately draw him, so he has never gone fishing or played bridge. He has never taken photos but of Sunny as young girl. His life motto was: Routine triumphs over everything. He lived his whole life in Bedley Run according this motto and first changes towards the end when he sells his house and when he changes his daily routine.
In the story Sunny changes from a young girl to a woman with a son and runs through different stages during the story. We do not get to know what she does while she has no contact with her father.
She comes from Japan and is adopted by Doc Hata. As young girl she looks skinny, has wavy black hair and dark-hued skin, and she likes word games very much. Besides what she likes it is said that she does not like the house and also not that she is expected to play the piano. As a grown-up she becomes very difficult, she does not treat neither Mary Burns nor the police with respect, and therefore Doc Hata throws her out of the house. At this time she meets strange persons and spends time in their houses, but she comes back for one night. In this night it becomes clear that she and Doc Hata would not stay together as father and daughter. One event which makes their relationship complicated is that Hata forced her to have an abortion after 28 weeks.
As an adult, Sunny works at the Ebbington Mall as a shop manager. She is 32 when she and Hata meet again. Sunny also has a boy, named Thomas, who is almost six years old. She accepts that Hata and Thomas spend a lot of time together but she does not want Thomas to know that Hata is his grandfather. The situation between Hata and Sunny improves towards the end and they talk a lot about things they both did wrong.
Mary Burns is a neighbor of Doc Hata. She spends a lot of time in the country club of Bedley Run. She is socially active and she organizes a lot of dances in the country club. She has got two daughters who do not live at home and who do not visit their mother very often.
She first meets Doc Hata when he was working in his garden. She told him about her dead husband who was a cardiologist at Deacon Hospital. She thought that Doc Hata was a real doctor as well. After their first meeting, Hata and Mrs. Burns meet a lot and she also tries her best to connect with Sunny. She spends a lot of time with her but she fails in coming closer to Sunny. This and the fact that she is not happy about how Hata treats his daughter ends their relationship. We do not get to know what she is doing when Hata and Sunny meet again.
K, whose real name is Kkutaeh, is a Korean girl who is brought with her sister as kind of slave-prostitute (comfort woman) to the camp in which Hata works as medical officer. At home she has two more sisters and one brother.
She is, like all the other girls, placed under Hata's care. Her sister is executed and the officers plan to execute K as well. The reason they named for this are that she had an infection and a disease. Before this, they isolated her from the other girls because she was said to be dangerous for the others. So, she spends a lot of time with Hata. Hata treats her differently to the other girls. It becomes obvious that he falls in love with her. Therefore, she asks him to kill (to shoot) her, but he refuses to do so and he leaves her to a more terrible death, by being raped and killed afterwords by many soldiers.
She has the biggest problem with Captain Ono, for example she smudges blood around her private area to make him think that she is menstruating. Her hate goes so far that she plans either to kill herself or to kill Captain Ono and succeeds in the end, although she suffers a terrible death.
The love of Hata towards K seems one sided, for she is not responding to his attempts and seems not to be interested in him or in a relationship anyways. She does not talk very much with him, when they have sexual contact, it seems that it is like a rape for her and at the end when she wants him to kill her so that he could not get into trouble, it seems that she does this only to escape the pain she is suffering in the camp.
The Asian American Literary Prize is a prize which exists since 1988. It is presented by the Asian American Writer's Workshop and it is awarded in the three categories of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. It is meant as an honor for writers of Asian-American descent whose works are published in English.
Chang-Rae Lee got the Asian American Literary Prize for A Gesture Life in the year 2000. The book deserves to get a prize because it shows the deeper meaning of integration and the remaining thoughts, feelings and memories of the past, which are still inside the immigrant and influence his, in this case Doc Hata's, acting towards other people immensely. The book gives an insight into an immigrant's life that no one could get just from seeing the outside.
It is not only about the insight knowledge we get from Doc Hata as an immigrant from an Asian country but also why he acts like he does it. This means how his past, especially the experiences he made during the war, influences his actions in the present time. It shows also how his routines help him to get along with what he experienced in the past and in the war. The novel shows a man who comes to terms with a lot of things from his past and who acts according to this, but who also changes towards the ending and breaks out of his routines. This changes and the fact that the flashbacks give us so much insight into a person who has experienced so much makes it obvious to give a prize to this book and also to this author.
This section needs to be cleaned up because it is an opinion outside of first paragraph.
Lee, Chang-Rae (1999). A Gesture Life. London: Granta Books.