April 3, 2003

A Gesture Life

 

            By the end of A Gesture Life, more information about Franklin Hata is provided to the reader.  Originally, it seems that Doc is an honest, respectable man whose biggest flaw is his preoccupation with reputation and keeping up appearances. His only failing seems to be that he tries too hard to influence his daughter’s success and thereby drives her away.  However, once the novel reaches its final chapters, we are faced with the most horrific events of Doc’s life and we learn more about the memories that follow him from the war and from Sunny’s adulthood.  Doc is still a good person, although the lengths to which he will go to maintain his “façade” is exposed.  His “gestures” are shown to be less a part of who he is as just a naturally private, polite Japanese person, and more a part of a person who has a lot of history he wants to remain private. 

            As quickly as K appears in the story, Doc’s relationship with her is developed.  K wants to relate to Doc as a fellow Korean, but Doc does not and will never identify himself as such.  Nonetheless, he does know the language, which is her main clue to his ethnic origin, although they speak mainly in Japanese. 

Doc’s true devotion to K is admirable—he is pistol whipped for his defense of her and later willing to kill for her, and to cover up the killing she commits to protect her.  While K appreciates Doc’s love, she does not believe it is true, but rather that it is youthful naivety and interest in her sex.  Because of their circumstances, K realizes that “true love” is not possible for them. 

Before Captain Ono’s death, he instills in Doc the fear that K is just using him.  In some ways she is using him—to stay alive, to continue to avoid the comfort house, to be treated humanely while she is supposed to be confined to a closet—but she does love him.  Her account is that she managed to save his life by offering hers in place of his to Captain Ono.  K would rather have died than have to serve in the comfort house, and although she repeatedly requests that Doc help her end her life, she is not uninterested in ways to avoid the comfort house and to continue to live.  When she eventually rejects their fantasies about traveling the world together, she does so for him, not for herself, as she anticipates a less than honored return from the war.

When K is taken away and murdered by the gang of soldiers, Doc witnesses the “tiny form”, perhaps the pregnancy that Captain Ono mentions and K denies.  Aside from witnessing the horrible site of his love’s body, he becomes aware of her dishonest denial and of the fact that she does not escape what she feared most (the work she was brought to do).  Instead she is put through the most extremely violent of that “work”, which ends in her brutal murder.

In all of Doc’s dealings with the comfort women and his story with K, Doc acts in ways so as to ensure everyone’s best interests.  The comfort women have no real way out of their situation, nor does Doc.  As a caregiver, Doc is gentle to them, doing his best to help them while knowing that they were up against certain violence and pain.  In caring for them he does as much as he can without putting them through more than they are already forced to face.  At the same time, he protects himself and encourages them to stay alive and as healthy as possible by not defying orders.  Remembrance of these dealings, however, seem lead to Sunny’s adoption later in Doc’s life.  Saving and raising up Sunny is not only a way for Doc to make amends with himself and his personal costs of war, but also to create for himself an American family—one that will fit in nicely in Bedley Run.  These faulty reasons are not clear until the near-end of the novel, when the first indication becomes clear. Sunny’s parentage is revealed as a disgraceful “wanton encounter between a G.I. and a local bar girl.”  Doc admits his hesitance and disappointment, his “blighted hope” in what Sunny is, so the troubles of their relationship begins with him at their very first meeting.

After Sunny leaves home she returns home pregnant.  This is Doc’s opportunity to make amends with his daughter and show that he really loves her. However, Doc could not bear to see his good name affected by his daughter’s pregnancy.  This is his betrayal of Sunny and his ultimate shame.  By pressuring Sunny into a procedure that is unsafe at her stage of pregnancy, by offering up his falsely concerned plea to the doctor for Sunny’s future, by offering a disguised bribe to the doctor, and by offering his own assistance in “the procedure”, Doc demonstrates that Sunny’s reputation’s effect on his own is more important to him than Sunny herself.  He only refers to the abortion as “the procedure”, as if it is a medical opportunity to repair a damaged Sunny. 

When the doctor warns of the gruesome reality of the late abortion, Doc advises him that he has seen “similar things”.  Those “similar things” from the war should be enough for Doc to understand what he later admits he is forcing Sunny to do, but rather they have simply prepared him and braced him for it.  The horrors that he sees in the war now appear to have desensitized him rather than taught him any lessons about human capabilities for vulgarity and violence.  Perhaps Doc does consider Sunny’s future, and the child’s, but any real concern is clouded by his desire to keep up appearances. What is in Sunny’s best interest is to be embraced and forgiven in her time of need and supported through the term of her pregnancy and thereafter.  But Doc’s history factors in his inability to see his chance to do that. 

In the novel’s present, Sunny sees the chain of events that lead to the birth of her son, Thomas.  She cannot regret the procedure because then Thomas would not exist, or would exist in a different way.  Doc has reached out to Sunny at this point in their lives, trying to apologize and make up for their turbulent relationship from earlier years and honestly wanting to be a part of Sunny and Thomas’s lives.  After Thomas almost drowns, Sunny is “amazingly calm”.  Even after such a scare, she has had a minor reconciliation with her father, and is pleased with his relationship with her son, who does not, like many people, know who “Franklin” really is.

© 2003 chadofborg@yahoo.com

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