“If you love someone, let them go” Kahlil Gibran once said. This statement becomes all too literal in the relationship between Doc Hata and Kkutaeh, in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life. After getting to know Kkutaeh, one of the comfort women at the military base, Doc Hata falls in “love” with her. When she asks Doc to end her misery by shooting her, he instead pretends they might be able to have a future together even though he knows that it would be near impossible-- for she will most likely die from mistreatment. Even though he thinks he loves her, he fails to let her go, instead causing her to endure a tragic end. Doc Hata lives a life of gestures, simply floating by and ignoring the reality of issues such as: women’s rights, rape, and love itself, causing him great regret later in life. His relationship with Kkutaeh helps to display one of the larger messages at hand in the novel-- Don’t let life pass by aimlessly or the future will be filled with regret.
To begin, throughout the novel Doc has seemingly no interest in the other comfort women, one of the main causes of his many regrets. His ignorance of women’s rights and …show more content…
He views them only as another part of life, just a daily occurrence that keeps the rest of the base happy and running smoothly. Later on he mentions, “But with K, I was beginning to think otherwise, of how to preserve her” (251). Doc’s feelings about these women does not run very deep. If anything, his love for Kkutaeh is superficial and just a wave crashing over him while he is “protecting” her. Each and every one of the comfort women has minds and feelings, and the fact that he only recognizes one of them as important and worth saving is a tremendous ignorance. Later in life, Doc realizes this about his time spent in war, and how he wishes he could make it up to those women, but however it is too late. This again relates to one of the overall messages of the book-- to take action and to not let life slip
To begin, throughout the novel Doc has seemingly no interest in the other comfort women, one of the main causes of his many regrets. His ignorance of women’s rights and …show more content…
He views them only as another part of life, just a daily occurrence that keeps the rest of the base happy and running smoothly. Later on he mentions, “But with K, I was beginning to think otherwise, of how to preserve her” (251). Doc’s feelings about these women does not run very deep. If anything, his love for Kkutaeh is superficial and just a wave crashing over him while he is “protecting” her. Each and every one of the comfort women has minds and feelings, and the fact that he only recognizes one of them as important and worth saving is a tremendous ignorance. Later in life, Doc realizes this about his time spent in war, and how he wishes he could make it up to those women, but however it is too late. This again relates to one of the overall messages of the book-- to take action and to not let life slip