A Gesture Life: Doc Hata

Complete dismissal of the acknowledgment of past events is often a way for people to move on into the future. Yearning to forget past events is something that many people will do, but never really succeed in doing. In A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee’s character Franklin “Doc” Hata strives to erase past events in his life in order to solidify his identity. He does this in the hopes of achieving a seemingly perfect lifestyle to the bystanders in his neighborhood. With this, Doc Hata builds a clean identity by removing the reality of his tragic past from his mind. Many of those who lived in the same town as Doc Hata, who were only exposed to the outer shell of his impenetrable life, come to know him as the kind, gentle Asian figure in society. They …show more content…
An especially devastating event that permanently damaged him involved the inhumane death of a woman he had grown strong feelings for while serving time in the military as a medical assistant. The sight of the barbaric rape by various men of the service and the horrific sight of her disoriented fetus was a climatic turning point in Doc Hata’s life. Hata explains the appearance of the lifeless fetus with phrases like, “tiny, elfin form,” “miraculously whole,” and explains the distortion of the premature baby when he says, “I could not see the figured legs and feet, the utter, blessed digitation of the hands…” (Lee 305). The vision of this horrific scene was the first time that Hata had ever felt that his identity could be changed by an interaction with another individual. His feelings for K had left him vulnerable and such a tragic occurrence had the ability to leave a permanent mark in his identity. Yet, Doc Hata chooses to not focus on the emotions that had surfaced when this event occurs. Instead, he chooses to erase the devastating emotional aspect and move forward by only doing physical acts that focus on the positive things he could take from this …show more content…
Doc Hata uses this adoption to make the negativity surrounding K more positive. Hata shows his eagerness when he says he “thought only of the moment of her arrival, which [he] had hoped would serve the recommencement of [his] days” (Lee 74). The adoption of this female child who is of Korean descent it is almost as if he is trying to replace K in some inconspicuous, strange way. Again, he aims to completely diminish the bad memories of K that plague his mind and replace them with new, cheerful ones of Sunny. Doc Hata’s decisions have a great impact on the events he strives to erase throughout his life. His acknowledgment of “recommencing his days” shows that he looks towards this as a type of new beginning in which the sadness of his past is gone from his mind. A crucial life decision that had a lasting impact on Doc Hata and his daughter Sunny was the decision for Sunny to get an abortion for her first pregnancy. This decision was made with the intent of maintaining a more traditional lifestyle for Sunny in addition the preservation of his American identity. This is a vital decision Hata makes in order to continue allowing the tragedy associated with the death of K and her unborn fetus to remain hidden in his mind. As Sunny is young when she becomes pregnant, it is as though she reminds Hata of K’s exact situation when she was murdered. Hata needs Sunny to have the abortion because the physical