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A review by kristinana
A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee
4.0
This was a beautifully-written book, and Lee does a wonderful job depicting memory and trauma, and the way we manage our pasts, try to spin our stories to make ourselves seem like better people. Hata seems disconnected from his feelings and unable to see the connections between his past and how he currently acts, and at least some of this seems to come both from Hata's inability to talk about the war in his current life and his inability to reveal himself to be Korean. He has embraced both a kind of polite reserve in his life and also an upward mobility that comes with claiming Japanese identity and a successful business. He is excessively concerned with appearance, for sure, but he is also motivated by a sense of knowing he doesn't really belong anywhere. In order to achieve an appearance of success, he must hide himself, and in order to uphold a sense of propriety, he must sacrifice feeling.
The scenes during WWII are extremely compelling and disturbing, and Lee has a brilliant way of introducing Hata's past bit by bit -- the striking way, for instance, that when he is in the hospital visiting a boy who needs a heart transplant, he remembers seeing his supervising doctor kill a man and then re-start his heart by massaging it by hand. Hata also seems to lie to himself so completely that it comes out in small ways as well, even down to whether or not he drinks or plays piano -- he baldly denies what other people have seen him do, in order to keep up an image of himself. Hata starts to talk of himself as a bad luck charm, and even this is a way of organizing the world and making himself look good. He tries to make it seem like this is a bad thing about him, but it takes any blame or agency away from himself and his actions, and (even as he recognizes this) it places him at the center of the universe, like a child.
Ultimately what I found most striking about the book is that it is about how men attempt to control women's bodies and sexuality. Hata considers himself a good person, someone who tries to protect women. He is disturbed by the fact of the "comfort women" and by men's violent control of women. But it's obvious that this impulse to protect is something Lee is also critiquing, as it leads Hata to attempt to control these women "for their own good." He doesn't view women as fully human, despite his protestations that he cares more for them than other men do. With K, he indulges in a fantasy of escape in which he rescues her. He rapes K and imagines she has "given herself to him" because she loves him, and only him. He judges his daughter's sexuality and then uses extreme measures to remove the evidence of it. He is attracted to Mary but seems turned off by the fact that she is in touch with her own desires. He is in love with the idea of rescuing women -- from violence, from poverty, from loneliness -- and yet this is more about his desire than the women's. He clearly wants women to fit into a model of feminine innocence and purity, and I believe Lee does a wonderful job of depicting these women as full of their own motivations and desires, even as those confound Hata. I think this is also about how Hata considers his Koreanness to be shameful, a secret, and so when he connects with K and his daughter (and even the earlier comfort woman he encounters), it is through a sense of shame and secrecy that he wishes to distance himself from. But ultimately it's about a kind of male "good guy" ness that attempts to control women and see them as not-fully-human by placing them in an undesirable and impossible role of purity.
There were times when I really loved this book, though I did feel a bit disappointed by the ending; it seemed like it was about to end multiple times, and Hata's obsession with some of the people in the town just got tiresome toward the end, plus there were a million accidents (some deadly, most not) that it started to feel like the kind of suburban melodrama I really dislike. Which is odd, when the rest of the book was so carefully paced. In any case, I really liked how the book made the reader work; I felt challenged in a good way by it, and I hope to read more by Chang-rae Lee.
The scenes during WWII are extremely compelling and disturbing, and Lee has a brilliant way of introducing Hata's past bit by bit -- the striking way, for instance, that when he is in the hospital visiting a boy who needs a heart transplant, he remembers seeing his supervising doctor kill a man and then re-start his heart by massaging it by hand. Hata also seems to lie to himself so completely that it comes out in small ways as well, even down to whether or not he drinks or plays piano -- he baldly denies what other people have seen him do, in order to keep up an image of himself. Hata starts to talk of himself as a bad luck charm, and even this is a way of organizing the world and making himself look good. He tries to make it seem like this is a bad thing about him, but it takes any blame or agency away from himself and his actions, and (even as he recognizes this) it places him at the center of the universe, like a child.
Ultimately what I found most striking about the book is that it is about how men attempt to control women's bodies and sexuality. Hata considers himself a good person, someone who tries to protect women. He is disturbed by the fact of the "comfort women" and by men's violent control of women. But it's obvious that this impulse to protect is something Lee is also critiquing, as it leads Hata to attempt to control these women "for their own good." He doesn't view women as fully human, despite his protestations that he cares more for them than other men do. With K, he indulges in a fantasy of escape in which he rescues her. He rapes K and imagines she has "given herself to him" because she loves him, and only him. He judges his daughter's sexuality and then uses extreme measures to remove the evidence of it. He is attracted to Mary but seems turned off by the fact that she is in touch with her own desires. He is in love with the idea of rescuing women -- from violence, from poverty, from loneliness -- and yet this is more about his desire than the women's. He clearly wants women to fit into a model of feminine innocence and purity, and I believe Lee does a wonderful job of depicting these women as full of their own motivations and desires, even as those confound Hata. I think this is also about how Hata considers his Koreanness to be shameful, a secret, and so when he connects with K and his daughter (and even the earlier comfort woman he encounters), it is through a sense of shame and secrecy that he wishes to distance himself from. But ultimately it's about a kind of male "good guy" ness that attempts to control women and see them as not-fully-human by placing them in an undesirable and impossible role of purity.
There were times when I really loved this book, though I did feel a bit disappointed by the ending; it seemed like it was about to end multiple times, and Hata's obsession with some of the people in the town just got tiresome toward the end, plus there were a million accidents (some deadly, most not) that it started to feel like the kind of suburban melodrama I really dislike. Which is odd, when the rest of the book was so carefully paced. In any case, I really liked how the book made the reader work; I felt challenged in a good way by it, and I hope to read more by Chang-rae Lee.