The Return of the Repressed: Representing Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life

Abstract

This paper examines representation of trauma in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life. Creative writers have to tackle the contradiction arising from the relation between trauma and representation, in their attempts to embody trauma, often considered the unrepresentable, through the medium of language. This is the sense of difficulty and limitation Lee experienced, as he struggled to grasp and depict the trauma of comfort women. Interestingly, however, Lee’s experience of his inability to truthfully deal with comfort women’s trauma in his literary representation is where his creative act as a writer usefully intervenes in the process of (re)writing his novel so that his new approach to comfort women’s trauma can provide the reader with an opportunity to witness that trauma from a new perspective, from the perspective of a victimizer who was originally a marginal character in the first draft of his novel. Lee shows the ways in which Hata’s life is deeply influenced by and inescapably intertwined with the two women: Kkutaeh or K, the Korean comfort woman he encountered in wartime, and Sunny, his Korean adoptee. Hata represses the trauma he experienced in wartime in relation to K so as to forget it, yet this repressed and forgotten trauma returns belatedly in relation to another painful event—his failed relationship with his adopted daughter Sunny—that happened in other time and place later in Hata’s life. This belated return of the repressed is significant in that it serves as a rupturing and deconstructive moment in the novel by revealing what is repressed underneath the surface of Hata’s life as an immigrant, which is represented or disguised as a “model minority.” The existence and appearance of these two women—the return of the repressed—in the novel agitates Hata inwardly; they trouble Hata by challenging his identity so much that he has to painfully grapple with the questions of who he is and where he belongs throughout the novel. So Lee’s novel shows how deeply trauma, memory, and identity are interwoven in Hata’s life through his relationship with K and Sunny. By unraveling the entanglement of trauma, memory, and identity in—and particularly the interconnection among these topics in the process of producing—A Gesture Life, this paper intends to examine the ways in which the unwanted past—or trauma—once repressed in Hata’s life returns by means of the work of memory. In particular, the paper explores how the theme of identity and belonging relates to the topic of the relation between trauma and representation. The examination of this topic provides us with an opportunity to (re)consider the formation of identity, particularly minority identity in the United States. In relation to this topic, the paper considers the significance of Hata’s transnational or diasporic trajectory from Asia to America, since Lee draws attention to Hata’s life of transnational displacement: first from Korea to Japan (by means of adoption) and later from Japan to the United States (by means of immigration).