A Gesture Life [Paperback]

Never judge a book by its cover--or, for that matter, by its name. Otherwise you might overlook A Gesture Life, Chang-Rae Lee's fine if awkwardly entitled follow-up to Native Speaker. As he did in his debut, the author explores the dilemma of being an outsider--and the corrupt, heartbreaking bargains an outsider will make to adapt to his surroundings. The protagonist, Franklin Hata, has actually spent his whole life donning one variety or another of existential camouflage. First, as a native-born Korean, he bends over backwards to fit into Japanese culture, circa 1944. Then he attempts a similar bit of environmental adaptation in post-war America--more specifically, in the slumbering New York suburb of Bedley Run. But in neither case does he quite succeed, which gives the novel its peculiar, faltering sense of tragedy.

"There is something exemplary to the sensation of near perfect lightness", confesses this resident alien, "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. Such is the cast of my belonging, moulding to whatever is at hand.

A Gesture Life presents this chronic condition in two different time frames. In one, delivered via flashback, Hata is a medical officer in Japan's Imperial Army. Posted to a tiny installation in rural Burma, he's ordered to oversee a fresh detachment of Korean "comfort women", i.e., victims of institutionalised gang rape. At first he maintains his professional distance, not to mention his erotic appetite: "It was the notion of what lay beneath the crumpled cotton of their poor clothes that shook me like an air-raid siren". But soon enough he's drawn into a relationship with one of the women, whose bloody and horrific denouement leaves a permanent mark on the "unblissed detachment" of his existence.

The present-tense, American half of the story revolves around Hata's life in Bedley Run, where he adopts, alienates and finally forms a shaky rapport with his daughter, Sunny. We might expect this sort of material to pale in comparison with his wartime trauma. But oddly enough Hata's suburban melancholia is much more compelling--and the gradual disclosure of his past, which is supposed to ratchet up the tension, seems too crude a mechanism for a writer of Lee's superlative talents. (His truest tutelary spirit, in fact, might be John Cheever, who gets an explicit nod at one point.) None of this is to dismiss A Gesture Life, whose dual narratives are written with a rare, unhurried elegance. And if Lee's splice job lacks the absolute adhesion we expect from a great work of art, he nonetheless pulls off a remarkable, moving feat: he puts us inside the skin of a man who, "if he could choose, might always go silent and unseen". --James Marcus

Never judge a book by its cover--or, for that matter, by its name. Otherwise you might overlook A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee's fine if awkwardly entitled follow-up to Native Speaker. As he did in his debut, the author explores the dilemma of being an outsider--and the corrupt, heartbreaking bargains an outsider will make to adapt to his surroundings. The protagonist, Franklin Hata, has actually spent his whole life donning one variety or another of existential camouflage. First, as a native-born Korean, he bends over backwards to fit into Japanese culture, circa 1944. Then he attempts a similar bit of environmental adaptation in post-war America--more specifically, in the slumbering New York suburb of Bedley Run. But in neither case does he quite succeed, which gives the novel its peculiar, faltering sense of tragedy.

"There is something exemplary to the sensation of near perfect lightness", confesses this resident alien, "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. Such is the cast of my belonging, moulding to whatever is at hand."

A Gesture Life presents this chronic condition in two different timeframes. In one, delivered via flashback, Hata is a medical officer in Japan's Imperial Army. Posted to a tiny installation in rural Burma, he's ordered to oversee a fresh detachment of Korean "comfort women"--i.e. victims of institutionalised gang rape. At first he maintains his professional distance, not to mention his erotic appetite: "It was the notion of what lay beneath the crumpled cotton of their poor clothes that shook me like an air-raid siren." But soon enough he's drawn into a relationship with one of the women, whose bloody and horrific denouement leaves a permanent mark on the "unblissed detachment" of his existence.

The present-tense, American half of the story revolves around Hata's life in Bedley Run, where he adopts, alienates and finally forms a shaky rapport with his daughter, Sunny. We might expect this sort of material to pale in comparison with his wartime trauma. But oddly enough, Hata's suburban melancholia is much more compelling--and the gradual disclosure of his past, which is supposed to ratchet up the tension, seems too crude a mechanism for a writer of Lee's superlative talents. (His truest tutelary spirit, in fact, might be John Cheever, who gets an explicit nod at one point.) None of this is to dismiss A Gesture Life, whose dual narratives are written with a rare, unhurried elegance. And if Lee's splice job lacks the absolute adhesion we expect from a great work of art, he nonetheless pulls off a remarkable, moving feat: He puts us inside the skin of a man who, "if he could choose, might always go silent and unseen." --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A Gesture Life is a haunting, compelling exploration of the Japanese experience of the Second World War, and the fate of their 'comfort women'.

A Gesture Life is not the story I originally conceived and began to write after publishing my first novel. Originally, I worked on the story of a woman living in a ghetto of Seoul during the postwar years, who had been among the many thousands of comfort women conscripted by the Japanese military during WWII to serve as sexual slaves for their soldiers across Asia and the Pacific. After spending two years writing the manuscript (and nearly completing it), I decided--with much unhappy consideration and anguish--to abandon it and begin a wholly new narrative, which gradually became A Gesture Life.

I mention this because even now that first story still inhabits and haunts me. The subject of the comfort women is certainly an overwhelming one for anyone conducting research into their horrific history and experience. I was immediately taken by the oral testimonies I read in academic journals and monographs, and in the summer of 1994 I traveled to Seoul in the hope of meeting some surviving comfort women, a group of whom I heard were living together in a house donated to them by a sect of Buddhist monks. At the time, an organization was working on their behalf to garner a formal apology from the Japanese government, as well as modest monetary reparations for their suffering during and after the war. I was fortunate enough to meet the directors of this organization, and with their help I met and interviewed several survivors. It was a most unforgettable afternoon, and while listening to the womens accounts and memories, I decided I had to write their stories in a novel, or at least make my best attempt.

And so I did; and strangely, I found it wasnt as difficult as I expected. I had so much dramatic material, so much in the way of authentic detail and fact, that it seemed I merely had to recount my resources, tell them over in story-form, to make my way through the book. But soon enough, too, I found myself reconsidering the prose I had written, and in particular, the voice of my fictional narrator, which seemed real enough to me and yet was still somehow dissatisfying. Though she was mostly working, at least in the narrative sense, I couldnt help but compare her telling and recounting with that of the women I had spoken to, whose testimonies werent necessarily articulate and eloquent but devastating nonetheless, marked as they were with a startling human sadness, and beauty, and will. They possessed a singular poetry. And they were among the most dramatic stories I had ever encountered. In the face of what I had heard and seen, I began to feel that my character wasnt up to telling their stories, that I could never really capture enough of the truth of what had happened, or at least, the womens truths, which voiced themselves with every word and silence. At the same time, I was working on a section of the book that involved a Japanese medic who had befriended the narrator, and as I imagined his perspectives on her and their situation, and then thought of how he might look back upon the experience well after the war, what kind of life he might make for himself, how he would carry those days and certain others with him, closely and not, I began to see the world of another story, Hatas story, which was necessarily and entirely different but still connected. I began to write his life, moving backwards from the present time, asking at each moment and juncture the basic questions of who he was, how he got there, how he belonged. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.