A Gesture Life
 Hardback cover | |
| Author | Chang-Rae Lee |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Riverhead Books |
Publication date | September 6, 1999 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 356 |
| ISBN | 978-1-57322-146-7 |
| OCLC | 41488613 |
| LC Class | PS3562.E3347 G4 1999 |
| Preceded by | Native Speaker |
A Gesture Life is a novel written by Chang-Rae Lee which takes the form of a narrative of an elderly medical-supply salesman 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. All the problems which Doc Hata has to deal with stem from his experiences serving the Japanese Imperial Army in the World War II.
Chang-Rae Lee won the Asian American Literary Award for the novel.
Plot summary[edit]
The whole story, told by the first person narrator Doc Hata, consists of flashbacks. The main story line begins 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 about his time with a teenage daughter and how difficult it was to raise her.
At the beginning of the story, Doc Hata describes his current situation and place of living. He lives in a small but affluent town called Bedley Run, where he is from the first accepted by the other inhabitants as a decent shopkeeper and later revered as the ideal citizen. His previous occupation is revealed to be that of a shop owner, as he formerly owned the pharmacy named Sunny Medical Supply, which he has sold to a young couple from New York. He has difficulty leaving his old life behind him and visits his old store nearly every day.
Liv Crawford is introduced, 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 many insights into his daily routines, such as walking by his old store and going to swim every day in his pool. He thinks a lot about his daughter Sunny and how she arrived when she was a little girl. Later on, it becomes clear that Sunny was adopted and that Doc Hata specifically wanted to a girl, and even bribed the relevant person to get what he wanted. He remembers Sunny playing the piano and 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 with 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 by him because 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 soon start to argue about Sunny and how Doc Hata treats her.
Doc Hata gives one piece of information about his daughter after the other, never giving all the 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 a while ago and separated them. During a stay in the hospital, where he has to stay for almost burning 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 of the whole time.
He is determined to find Sunny again from the information given to him by a police officer. He also gives more background information on his conflict with Sunny. He encounters her in a mall, where failure of business is imminent in all the stores except for the one Sunny manages. She now has a son, named Thomas. Doc Hata tries to reconcile with Sunny by offering to help her take care of her son, whom Sunny is too busy to pay attention to. Sunny also expresses her need to find new ways of employment, as her store will be closing soon.
In a flashback, Hata focuses on his relationship with K. She is a sex slave (comfort woman) from Korea. Originally, Captain Ono expresses a peculiar interest in her, and Hata as well; Ono tells Hata that she is to be kept away from the comfort house, where the other comfort women are staying, and also tells him to inform everyone that she is sick, signified by a kurohata (black flag), to make sure that only he had access to her. K grows close to Lieutenant Kurohata, because they are able to talk to each other in her native tongue. The two speak frequently of their backgrounds, and it is revealed that K is from a higher-class family that did not value their daughters, resulting in her "volunteering" to become a comfort woman. Kurohata finds himself thinking about her frequently, growing more anxious to see her in the evenings every day. He falls in love with her intelligent demeanor and ethereal beauty. He is overcome with desire and has intercourse with her without her consent. Later, Captain Ono tells Lieutenant Kurohata that he is going to have sex with K, and when he reports this to K, she begs him to kill her, saying that if he truly did love her, he wouldn't naively think that they could live together after the war. Kurohata refuses. When Ono arrives and tries to have sex with her, she stabs him in the throat, killing him. She asks Hata to kill her too with Ono's pistol, but instead, he fires his gun at Ono's corpse and tells the others that Ono was showing off his gun and accidentally killed himself. In the end, Doc Hata does not say explicitly that K died after she is raped by 30 or more soldiers, but it is clear that she dies. He admits that he has frequent hallucinations of her in his house in Bedley Run, draped with a black flag.
Doc Hata eventually changes for the better and appears to move on from his traumatic experiences in the war. He and Sunny grow closer again, and he is shown selling his house.
The characters[edit]
Doc (Franklin) Hata[edit]
The figure of Doc Hata functions as the narrator and tells every part of the story through his eyes. 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 chronological order but instead in sporadic episodes. The novel consists of several flashbacks which tell us more about Hata's life and his rituals.
Hata lives in a grand house located in Bedley Run, owned a medical store, and was a medic in World War II. His name is Japanese, but he is an ethnic Korean and was adopted by a childless Japanese couple. He lived his youth on the south-western coast of Japan. He tells us that he was not a nice child, but a difficult one, who was not generous to his foster parents who treated him as considerately as a real son.
He is stationed in Burma in 1944 during the war. He is there as a paramedical officer, field-trained but not formally educated. He is referred to as Lieutenant Jiro Kurohata. In Burma, he is responsible for taking care of the comfort women, who are responsible for maintaining morale and "health". Not only is he responsible for their upkeep, but he also falls in love with one of the girls, Kkutaeh. At this time he thinks that Kkutaeh, referred to by Hata as K, is in love with him, too, but later it becomes clear that this love was unilateral.
In Hata's first years in Bedley Run, he owns a store called Sunny Medical Supply, named after his daughter. He adopts Sunny when she is a young girl. Although he tells everybody that he is a happy father, in reality, he has a lot of problems with her, as he is too generous and too frequently expresses his concerns with her future. He attempts to create a happy family when he meets Mary Burns, but Sunny disapproves. All these things induce Sunny to leave her father.
Doc Hata is a man who lives his life through rituals. He is not fond of the "retirement lifestyle", so he continues his routine day after day. His life motto is "Routine triumphs over everything". Eventually, he breaks his comfortable repetition.
Sunny[edit]
Sunny is the reserved and rebellious daughter of Doc Hata.
As a young girl, she is sent by a Christian Adoption Agency to Hata in the United States. She is immediately uncomfortable. She does not like Hata's house, and later, dislikes her adopted father's behavior. As a teenager, she becomes very difficult and is rarely home. She does not respect anyone, opposing Hata and Mary Burns and even the police. She spends her nights in a disreputable part of town with hoodlums. When Doc Hata becomes aware of her behavior, the two of them fight, and this causes Sunny to permanently leave the house. Sunny is sexually assaulted by one of the men she is living with, and her assailant is stabbed by another housemate in Sunny's defense. She revisits her home with Hata. It soon becomes clear that she and Doc Hata cannot repair their relationship as father and daughter. One event which makes their relationship more strained is when Hata forces Sunny to have an abortion. After this occurs, it is implied that Sunny leaves for good, never to see her father again.
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 son, named Thomas, who is almost six years old. Hata tries to do everything to help Sunny, including taking care of Thomas. 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.
Mary Burns[edit]
Mary Burns was Hata's neighbor and girlfriend during his middle age. (She dies before the events of the book begin, but much of the past is told in present tense.) She spends a lot of time in the country club of Bedley Run, where she is very socially active. She has two adult daughters who do not live at home and who rarely visit their mother. Her late husband, a doctor, is deceased as well.
She first meets Doc Hata while he was working in his garden. She mistakes Hata for a doctor, like her husband was. After their first meeting, Hata and Mary Burns develop an intimate relationship, as they provide each other company and go out frequently together. Mary Burns spends a lot of time with Sunny, but she fails in coming any closer to her. This and the fact that she is not happy about how Hata treats his daughter ends their relationship. She dies before the events of the book begin.
K[edit]
K, whose real name is Kkutaeh, is an intellectual Korean girl who is brought with her sister as a sex slave (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 mercy-killed by a soldier that takes pity on her, who is later executed. A senior officer and head doctor, Captain Ono, takes special interest in K. Captain Ono isolates her from the rest of the camp, locking her in a small storage closet at night. When K is not with Captain Ono, presumably servicing him, she is with Hata in the infirmary. Both men pretend that she is sick during this time so that she can avoid servicing the rest of the camp. Hata falls in love with her after spending a lot of time with her; when Hata tells her this, she accuses him of lying, saying he only wants her for sex. However, she sees Hata's "love" for her as an opportunity, and she asks him to kill her. He refuses to do so, naively believing that she will be able to survive all of this. He is also unable to kill Captain Ono whose attentions and intentions toward K are base in nature.
The love Hata has toward K is one-sided at best. He consummates his love for her while she is sleeping, which he clearly does not view as rape. However, he does hear her cry after he leaves her.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
Lee, Chang-Rae (1999). A Gesture Life. London: Granta Books.
External links[edit]
- Notes on A Gesture Life, Part 1 (Archived 2009-10-23)
- Notes on A Gesture Life, Part 2 (Archived 2009-10-23)
- The Asian American Literary Prize
Categories:
1999 American novels
Novels by Chang-Rae Lee
Novels set in Myanmar
Novels set in Singapore
Novels set in New York (state)
A Gesture Life 1
http://www.geocities.com/chadofborg/agesturelife1.htm
In Chang-rae Lee’s novel A Gesture Life, Franklin "Doc" Hata has lived what appears to be the American Dream. He is an immigrant from Japan who came to the United States, created a successful medical supply business, owns a beautiful home and yard, and adopted and raised a beautiful daughter. He becomes a well respected community leader, earning the nickname "Doc" even though he quickly dismisses any suggestion that he might be an actual physician. He is noble, honest and hardworking. But despite the success he achieves and the adoration he warrants from the suburban community of Bedley Run, his life, as his troubled daughter Sunny suggests, is a life of "gestures and politeness". Doc does not dispute this. He attributes it to being Japanese.
Doc’s first friend in Bedley Run, and eventual love interest, Mary Burns, also points out his life of gestures. Mary Burns had tried very hard to maintain a relationship with Doc, and with Sunny, but young Sunny’s dutifully spent time with her strains it. Doc is helpless to change his daughter’s feelings—that she is pleasant, polite and enjoyable in Mary’s company but quickly departs from it after “time served”. An additional strain between them is that Doc is passive and agreeable, and while Mary has trouble defining what it is she wants from him, he has even more trouble obliging it. Doc cannot return the intimacy and affection she shares with him, perhaps because of his untold story of life as a war medic.
The novel's present is the time of Doc's retirement. He has sold his business to the Hickey's, for whom it quickly begins to fail. Doc continues to visit them, and finds himself volunteering to sort out the financial documents and bank arrangements. He does this out of kindness, not guilt, although he does feel guilt for the Hickey's situation (complicated by the hospitalization of their son who is waiting on a donated heart) even though he knows he is not responsible for it. Mrs. Hickey loves Doc and expresses her sincere gratitude for his generosity and nobility, while Mr. Hickey, more frustrated every day, hates Doc, as he blames him for selling them a "lemon" knowing it was a doomed business. When Mr. Hickey asks Doc to stop coming around to help, Doc is hurt, not only because of his mutual admiration for Mrs. Hickey and desire to help her, but also for his need to keep busy.
Doc’s life has happened in three worlds: Korea, Japan, and the United States. In the present he has embraced America and American values, but his identity is still very much Japanese. When he left Korea to be educated and moved into his adoptive parents’ household in Japan, truly becoming Japanese was his struggle and his goal. Now, in America, he has also struggled towards the goal of fitting in. Renny, an Indian immigrant and friend of Doc, observes that a subtle bigotry has been rising in Bedley Run towards those in a “minority situation”. Liv, the feisty real estate power-broker and also a friend of Doc, points out that Doc has done quite well in his “situation” as an immigrant and a minority. While Doc has made it a point to fit in, and succeeded in doing so, he is reminded of Sunny’s telling revelation that, in fact, the word around town is that Doc is just a “good Charlie”.
Doc is haunted by his memories of war, but in many ways they mirror his present. His daughter, the Hickeys, Renny and Liv, Veronica and Officer Como, and other townspeople are constantly reminding him of the events that transpired. Even in the dangerous jungles of wartime, where victory, survival and attempts to achieve some level of comfort were the main interests of soldiers, Doc’s relationships with his superiors and his patients were formal, and carefully geared towards keeping the good reputation of a well educated medical officer. As a loyal officer he has little choice anyway but to follow orders and protocol, even when he witnesses cruelty, suicide, and manslaughter.
Doc’s “gesture life”, as revealed in the first half of this novel, is often a cover for the pain he feels in the present and remembers from the past. However, his gestures never seem insincere. His kindness towards the Hickeys, his compassion for the sexual “volunteers” and dread for what they endured, his desire to Sunny successful and happy (even though both his and her reputations are important to him), and his good rapport with everyone in town are examples of the good, if tortured, person that he is.
© 2003 chadofborg@yahoo.com
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April 3, 2003
A Gesture Life 2
http://www.geocities.com/chadofborg/agesturelife2.htm
By the end of A Gesture Life, more information about Franklin Hata is provided to the reader. Originally, it seems that Doc is an honest, respectable man whose biggest flaw is his preoccupation with reputation and keeping up appearances. His only failing seems to be that he tries too hard to influence his daughter’s success and thereby drives her away. However, once the novel reaches its final chapters, we are faced with the most horrific events of Doc’s life and we learn more about the memories that follow him from the war and from Sunny’s adulthood. Doc is still a good person, although the lengths to which he will go to maintain his “façade” is exposed. His “gestures” are shown to be less a part of who he is as just a naturally private, polite Japanese person, and more a part of a person who has a lot of history he wants to remain private.
As quickly as K appears in the story, Doc’s relationship with her is developed. K wants to relate to Doc as a fellow Korean, but Doc does not and will never identify himself as such. Nonetheless, he does know the language, which is her main clue to his ethnic origin, although they speak mainly in Japanese.
Doc’s true devotion to K is admirable—he is pistol whipped for his defense of her and later willing to kill for her, and to cover up the killing she commits to protect her. While K appreciates Doc’s love, she does not believe it is true, but rather that it is youthful naivety and interest in her sex. Because of their circumstances, K realizes that “true love” is not possible for them.
Before Captain Ono’s death, he instills in Doc the fear that K is just using him. In some ways she is using him—to stay alive, to continue to avoid the comfort house, to be treated humanely while she is supposed to be confined to a closet—but she does love him. Her account is that she managed to save his life by offering hers in place of his to Captain Ono. K would rather have died than have to serve in the comfort house, and although she repeatedly requests that Doc help her end her life, she is not uninterested in ways to avoid the comfort house and to continue to live. When she eventually rejects their fantasies about traveling the world together, she does so for him, not for herself, as she anticipates a less than honored return from the war.
When K is taken away and murdered by the gang of soldiers, Doc witnesses the “tiny form”, perhaps the pregnancy that Captain Ono mentions and K denies. Aside from witnessing the horrible site of his love’s body, he becomes aware of her dishonest denial and of the fact that she does not escape what she feared most (the work she was brought to do). Instead she is put through the most extremely violent of that “work”, which ends in her brutal murder.
In all of Doc’s dealings with the comfort women and his story with K, Doc acts in ways so as to ensure everyone’s best interests. The comfort women have no real way out of their situation, nor does Doc. As a caregiver, Doc is gentle to them, doing his best to help them while knowing that they were up against certain violence and pain. In caring for them he does as much as he can without putting them through more than they are already forced to face. At the same time, he protects himself and encourages them to stay alive and as healthy as possible by not defying orders. Remembrance of these dealings, however, seem lead to Sunny’s adoption later in Doc’s life. Saving and raising up Sunny is not only a way for Doc to make amends with himself and his personal costs of war, but also to create for himself an American family—one that will fit in nicely in Bedley Run. These faulty reasons are not clear until the near-end of the novel, when the first indication becomes clear. Sunny’s parentage is revealed as a disgraceful “wanton encounter between a G.I. and a local bar girl.” Doc admits his hesitance and disappointment, his “blighted hope” in what Sunny is, so the troubles of their relationship begins with him at their very first meeting.
After Sunny leaves home she returns home pregnant. This is Doc’s opportunity to make amends with his daughter and show that he really loves her. However, Doc could not bear to see his good name affected by his daughter’s pregnancy. This is his betrayal of Sunny and his ultimate shame. By pressuring Sunny into a procedure that is unsafe at her stage of pregnancy, by offering up his falsely concerned plea to the doctor for Sunny’s future, by offering a disguised bribe to the doctor, and by offering his own assistance in “the procedure”, Doc demonstrates that Sunny’s reputation’s effect on his own is more important to him than Sunny herself. [??] He only refers to the abortion as “the procedure”, as if it is a medical opportunity to repair a damaged Sunny.
When the doctor warns of the gruesome reality of the late abortion, Doc advises him that he has seen “similar things”. Those “similar things” from the war should be enough for Doc to understand what he later admits he is forcing Sunny to do, but rather they have simply prepared him and braced him for it. The horrors that he sees in the war now appear to have desensitized him rather than taught him any lessons about human capabilities for vulgarity and violence. Perhaps Doc does consider Sunny’s future, and the child’s, but any real concern is clouded by his desire to keep up appearances. What is in Sunny’s best interest is to be embraced and forgiven in her time of need and supported through the term of her pregnancy and thereafter. But Doc’s history factors in his inability to see his chance to do that.
In the novel’s present, Sunny sees the chain of events that lead to the birth of her son, Thomas. She cannot regret the procedure because then Thomas would not exist, or would exist in a different way. Doc has reached out to Sunny at this point in their lives, trying to apologize and make up for their turbulent relationship from earlier years and honestly wanting to be a part of Sunny and Thomas’s lives. After Thomas almost drowns, Sunny is “amazingly calm”. Even after such a scare, she has had a minor reconciliation with her father, and is pleased with his relationship with her son, who does not, like many people, know who “Franklin” really is.
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The novel suggests that the desire for assimilation, first in his early life in Japan and then ... You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness.
=====
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/29/daily/083199lee-book-review.html
August 31, 1999
'A Gesture Life': Fitting In Perfectly on the Outside, but Lost Within
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
By Chang-rae Lee.
356 pp. New York:
Riverhead Books. $23.95.
t first glance, Franklin Hata, the hero of Chang-rae Lee's moving new novel, "A Gesture Life," looks like the living embodiment of the American Dream: an immigrant from Japan whose years of hard work and impeccable manners have seemingly erased his foreignness and made him a respected pillar of the suburban bourgeoisie. Doc Hata, as he is known, owns one of the loveliest homes in the lovely New York town of Bedley Run, and he is respected by his neighbors as the "living, breathing expression of what people here wanted -- privacy and decorum and the quietude of hard-earned privilege." As a local shopkeeper, he was revered by his loyal customers; as a retiree, he now enjoys "an almost Oriental veneration as an elder."As in Lee's first novel, "Native Speaker" (1995), however, belonging and assimilation come at a cost -- in Hata's case, the cost of self-knowledge and genuine emotional connection. As his adopted daughter, Sunny, observes: "All I've ever seen is how careful you are with everything. With our fancy big house and this store and all the customers. How you sweep the sidewalk and nice-talk to the other shopkeepers. You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness. You're always having to be the ideal partner and colleague."
Hata's "gesture life" has consigned him to a peaceful, but strangely lonely, existence in Bedley Run. His one romantic involvement -- with a widow named Mary Burns who lives down the street -- will fizzle out in a sad, Chekhovian drama of missed opportunities and unspoken emotions. And Hata will eventually resign himself to a "bachelor dotage of one-pot meals" and "one-log fires and the placid chill of a zone-heated house." Better not to risk being vulnerable, he thinks: with his practiced routines (his daily laps in the pool, his daily walks through town, his meticulous upkeep of the house), he can enjoy a perfectly serene life free of upset and potential pain.
Hata's concern with emotional decorum and his "good station" in the community has turned his relationship with Sunny -- a mixed-race girl whom he adopted, as a single parent, when she was 7 -- into a civil war of unmet expectations and festering resentments. He has pressured her to excel at school, at music, at sports, and as a teen-ager she has rebelled with willfulness and passion. She has turned sullen and sarcastic and has begun hanging out with a group of older boys who are constantly in trouble with the law. When she becomes pregnant at the age of 18, Hata insists that she have a dangerously late abortion -- less out of a desire to protect her options in life than out of a compulsion to preserve his own good name.
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As Lee cuts back and forth between Hata's current life in Bedley Run and his long-ago youth in Japan, the reader is gradually made to understand the roots of his emotional reticence and obsessive need for acceptance. Even in Japan, it seems, Hata felt himself to be an outsider: Korean by birth, he was adopted by a wealthy Japanese family who recognized his scholastic potential, and he struggled as a boy to be worthy of their sponsorship. When World War II began and he enlisted in the army, a similar desire to please his superiors -- and become the model soldier -- informed his every move.
It was during the war that the formative event in Hata's life occurred: he met and fell in love with one of the Korean "comfort women," who were coerced by army officials to service the men sexually. His doomed passion for K, as he calls her, and his failure to act persuasively on her behalf, will shape the rest of his life: forever after he will be on guard against the undertow of his own emotions; forever after he will regard his own passivity with a mixture of revulsion and regret.
Lee lays out these events in precise, elliptical prose that echoes Hata's own fastidious detachment. He conjures up, with equal authority, the brutal, acrid world of Hata's wartime service and the bucolic, Cheeveresque world of Bedley Run, using small, telling details to suggest each realm's complicated rules of social engagement. At the same time he allows the reader to see why Hata remains an outsider in both places: always trying too hard to fit in, always trying too hard to say the right thing.
Some of the people in the wartime sequences feel like one-dimensional pawns acting out overly melodramatic roles (an inebriated commander, a mercenary doctor, a psychotic soldier), but the people in Bedley Run, from Hata's gregarious friend, Renny Banerjee, to his realtor, Liv Crawford, are delineated with warmth and humor and insight. As for Sunny, she evolves for the reader from an inexplicably cold, ungrateful child into a conflicted young woman who shares Hata's sense of alienation and practiced instinct for survival. When she unexpectedly resurfaces in Hata's life after a long absence, she forces him to come to terms with their fractured relationship and his own secret past.
By creating two parallel narratives -- one concerned with Hata's current dealings with Sunny, the second with his encounters with K during the war -- Lee elegantly creates suspense out of the seemingly static story of a man trying hard not to feel. He has written a wise and humane novel that both amplifies the themes of identity and exile he addressed in "Native Speaker," and creates a wonderfully resonant portrait of a man caught between two cultures and two lives.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES'A Gesture Life': Fitting In Perfectly on the Outside, but Lost Within
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
t first glance, Franklin Hata, the hero of Chang-rae Lee's moving new novel, immigrant from Japan whose years of hard work and impeccable manners have seemingly erased his foreignness and made him a respected pillar of thehomes in the lovely New York town of Bedley Run, and he is respected by his neighbors as the "living, breathing expression of what people here wanted -- privacy and decorum and the quietude of hard-earned privilege." As a local shopkeeper, he was revered by his loyal customers; as a retiree, he now enjoys "an almost Oriental veneration as an elder."As in Lee's first novel, "Native Speaker" (1995), however, belonging and assimilation come at a cost -- in Hata's case, the cost of self-knowledge and genuine emotional connection. As his adopted daughter, Sunny, observes: "All I've ever seen is how careful you are with everything. With our fancy big suburban bourgeoisie. Doc Hata, as he is known, owns one of the loveliest "A Gesture Life," looks like the living embodiment of the American Dream: an==== house and this store and all the customers. How you sweep the sidewalk and nice-talk to the other shopkeepers. You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness. You're always having to be the ideal partner and colleague."
Hata's "gesture life" has consigned him to a peaceful, but strangely lonely, existence in Bedley Run. His one romantic involvement -- with a widow named Mary Burns who lives down the street -- will fizzle out in a sad, Chekhovian drama of missed opportunities and unspoken emotions. And Hata will eventually resign himself to a "bachelor dotage of one-pot meals" and "one-log fires and the placid chill of a zone-heated house." Better not to risk being vulnerable, he thinks: with his practiced routines (his daily laps in the pool, his daily walks through town, his meticulous upkeep of the house), he can enjoy a perfectly serene life free of upset and potential pain.
Hata's concern with emotional decorum and his "good station" in the community has turned his relationship with Sunny -- a mixed-race girl whom he adopted, as a single parent, when she was 7 -- into a civil war of unmet expectations and festering resentments. He has pressured her to excel at school, at music, at sports, and as a teen-ager she has rebelled with willfulness and passion. She has turned sullen and sarcastic and has begun hanging out with a group of older boys who are constantly in trouble with the law. When she becomes pregnant at the age of 18, Hata insists that she have a dangerously late abortion -- less out of a desire to protect her options in life than out of a compulsion to preserve his own good name.
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