Revisitation of Historical Memory and Ethnic American’s Unstable Positionality in A Gesture Life
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Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life is often discussed within the politics of memory and ethnic American’s positionality in American society. By using the particular historical subject, the comfort woman, Lee’s novel shows how the local memory of one historical event can affect one person’s life as an immigrant who has the memory in American society. It also suggests that the local memory of Asian country can be merged into the narrative of American history. While Franklin Hata, a war veteran who has experienced the tragic romantic relationship with a comfort woman Kkutaeh, attempts to live his life as a reputed American citizen with a stable identity, he suffers the ghost of the comfort woman represented as an epistemic bridge to his past in the present. He is also troubled with his adopted daughter Sunny who refuses to be her father’s idol when he dreams of building an ideal home as part of structuring the stable positionality as father and model minority in America. However, all his ideas are just delayed when he is confronted with the presence of Kkutaeh. In doing so, his local memory of the comfort woman works as a historical narrative which contributes to terminating Hata’s desire for becoming an American subject with stable positionality as a perfect model minority. In Hata’s life trajectory within Asia and America, the work suggests that the American immigrants’ adoptive memory of a historical event is no longer local when it becomes part of America but it also reduces them to the unstable positionality in present American life.
Abstract
Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life is often discussed within the politics of memory and ethnic American’s positionality in American society. By using the particular historical subject, the comfort woman, Lee’s novel shows how the local memory of one historical event can affect one person’s life as an immigrant who has the memory in American society. It also suggests that the local memory of Asian country can be merged into the narrative of American history. While Franklin Hata, a war veteran who has experienced the tragic romantic relationship with a comfort woman Kkutaeh, attempts to live his life as a reputed American citizen with a stable identity, he suffers the ghost of the comfort woman represented as an epistemic bridge to his past in the present. He is also troubled with his adopted daughter Sunny who refuses to be her father’s idol when he dreams of building an ideal home as part of structuring the stable positionality as father and model minority in America. However, all his ideas are just delayed when he is confronted with the presence of Kkutaeh. In doing so, his local memory of the comfort woman works as a historical narrative which contributes to terminating Hata’s desire for becoming an American subject with stable positionality as a perfect model minority. In Hata’s life trajectory within Asia and America, the work suggests that the American immigrants’ adoptive memory of a historical event is no longer local when it becomes part of America but it also reduces them to the unstable positionality in present American life.
참고문헌 (18)
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