Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Life: The Recuperation of Identity (Critical Essay‪)‬

In Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, the elderly, well-respected 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 character with 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 Times, Lee explains his artistic investment: "'I'm interested in people who find themselves in 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-of-place 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)