There will be many like me who cannot help but compare Lee’s writing with Ishiguro’s; there is such precision, decorum, formality, and elegance which characterises the style and pace of both. A Gesture Life is a joy to read, a massive literary accomplishment, and a performance which is extremely poised and polished. The glowing blurbs are, for once in a way, entirely correct, in calling this book beautiful, tender, solitary, haunting, compelling, absorbing, intelligent, “a work of psychological acuity and compassion”, “a writer of immense subtlety and craft”; it is all that.
One of the blurbs in fact provide an excellent synopsis of the novel: “You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness,” Sunny tells her adoptive father, Franklin Hata. Franklin deflects everyone with courtesy and impenetrable decorum, becoming a respected elder of his small, prosperous American town.” The protagonist is Kurohata, or Franklin Hata, a man who grew up in a small village in south western Japan, an ethnic Korean, who naturalised as a Japanese, and who later served as a Japanese medical officer in the great Pacific war, stationed in Singapore. The novel moves back and forth in time, between Hata’s time in Singapore, and his later decades in a small town in the US. We learn that he carefully and deliberately selected Bedley Run to settle down in, having seen a picture and read of it in a newspaper, and feeling drawn to it. Hata bought a medical store which he ran for many years, supplying the town’s residents and making a niche for himself as a respectable citizen of the town:
[I] have always wished to be in the situation like the one I have steadily fashioned for myself in this town, where if I don’t have many intimates or close friends, I’m at least a quantity known, somebody long ago counted. Most everyone in Bedley Run knows me, though at the same time I’ve actually come to develop an unexpected condition of transparence here, a walking case of others’ certitude…” (p21).
For all his ardent desire to fit into his new hometown seamlessly and in harmony with the place, Hata makes no secret of his intrinsic difference, at the deepest and most intrinsic levels of values and cultural reference points. When an attractive neighbour becomes close to him, he says of the gracious Mary Burns:
at that time I didn’t fully know how to look at a Western woman and immediately appreciate what should be beautiful and prized. They all seemed generally tall, and with narrow faces, sharp and high about the nose, which seemed to lead them all about. I know that I had my own conceptions of female comeliness… (p48).
Lee’s writing beautifully captures that exact experience surely anyone who has been transplanted across continents and cultures also undergoes – that complete lack of reference points, that feeling of being totally lost and not knowing how to judge or place or pigeonhole because one does not understand yet “what should be beautiful and prized”, and knowing full well one lacks that appreciation as well as gauging ability, while also holding one’s own conceptions, which one is equally aware is not currency in that new place. Lee’s writing explores and deconstructs with such quiet elegance the being a perpetual outsider, even if one appears to have metamorphosed into an insider after long decades of residence in an adopted country. Hata makes every effort – even to his adopted daughter’s disdain – to be a model citizen, to fit in, to avoid calling undue attention to himself, to provide his fellow citizens with a constancy of good behaviour and decorum and courteous mien, and yet internally, he remains someone in self-chosen exile.
Hata longs for a sense of belonging so much that he applies for adoption to create a family, even though as a single man, he knew he was unlikely to be considered. However, he is given an unwanted child, whom he hoped would look like him enough for them to seem to naturally be kin, but immediately he sees the girl is of mixed descent, and he surmises is probably the unwanted offspring of a GI and a bar girl. To his credit, he never once allows this fact to alter his feelings towards her or his treatment of her. If he had been a distant, and yet too-strict parent, it was never due to lack of commitment or attachment. Hata himself clearly had a slightly compromised childhood – it appears his parents were poor people (tanners) who gave him up in hopes of a better life for him,
my real parents, who, it must be said, wished as much as I that I became wholly and thoroughly Japanese. They had of course agreed to give me up to the office of the children’s authority, which in turn placed me with the family Kurohata (p235-6).
Later, when in his posting in Singapore, and he is placed in charge of one of the ‘comfort women’ who he and everyone else is told has ‘volunteered’, one of them turns out to be a high-born Korean woman, Kkuteah, who immediately recognises him as a fellow-Korean, even if he denies it, and he even denies his birthname when she asks him. When he falls in love with this Korean woman, he muses on their changes of station, that he of modest background, even if the Kurohatas had tried to give him every advantage they could, should now be in charge of this girl of aristocratic birth and noble household. In the course of unfolding the dire conditions of a Japanese military encampment, Lee also subtly signals how Hata is taunted by his superiors for his lowly birth, and clearly class and birth are issues of great importance in Japanese society (at least in the mid 20th century, even if this may have been changing).
Lee’s depiction of the treatment of Japanese soldiers and even officers within a Japanese military camp, are grim and stark, and entirely in keeping with non-fiction accounts of the harshness of the officers, the abuse of their own men, the expected discipline, the casual violence and brutality of day to day encounters. Needless to say, the comfort women are terribly abused, and not expected to long survive their violent treatment, if they are not physically killed first in some punishment or other. Amazingly, apparently many of the men choose to believe or continue deluding themselves, with the notion that these women have volunteered in service, when it is immediately obvious they are trafficked, prisoners, and sex slaves. That said, not unusually, Kkuteah’s story is that her parents traded her sister and herself, to protect their only son from conscription, sending their daughters to a truly vile and shortened life of sexual degradation and abuse and starvation. Kkuteah’s sister had the great good fortune of having her throat slit by a chivalrous young soldier, who paid with his life for his act of mercy; while Kkuteah envied her sister’s escape.
The horrific conditions of the camp and all that Hata experienced seems to have been held by him in abeyance once he left that part of his life behind him; it is incredible to think what a contained, gentle, quiet, peaceful life he crafted for himself thereafter, and how he never seemed to allow the traumas of that military life to affect his gentleness towards everyone he encountered. Perhaps that is why he is inordinately (but in an entirely understated manner) pleased and proud of what he had managed to make of himself in Bedley Run: “I was perfectly suited to my town, that I had steadily become, oddly and unofficially, its primary citizen, the living, breathing expression of what people here wanted – privacy and decorum and the quietude of hard-earned privilege” (p275). His rebellious teenaged Sunny at first finds her adoptive father’s values and priorities unacceptable to her, and leaves home before she is eighteen. Father and daughter do manage to work out a tensed but genuine reconciliation later on, when in retirement, Hata actually manages to form new, meaningful, intimate relationships which allow people to actually get past his reserve and become closer to him. It would seem that perhaps it was only very late in life that Hata dares to explore this part of himself, to allow himself these relationships, perhaps when the earlier and deeply buried trauma has finally receded a little, or perhaps which time has healed a little.
The pleasure of this book is in following Hata’s life and mind and responses to the events in his life, in getting a seemingly privileged insider’s glimpse of such a private, dignified man and mind. The language of the novel in no small part facilitates this charming experience; I shall definitely be looking for other Chang-Rae Lee books.
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