Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee: Adoption Life Stories and Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life

Abstract

At the heart of Chang-rae Lee's 1999 novel, A Gesture Life, is an adoption story in which the protagonist and narrator, Doc Hata, recounts his struggles as an adoptive parent of a mixed Korean girl named Sunny. The ambivalence within the adoptive parent-child relationship can already be heard when Hata, in anticipating his adoption of Sunny, describes himself as a hopeful father of and sufficient means (73). The odd phrase likeenough race in particular raises, at the same time that it resists, the attempt to make adoption natural. Indeed, the phrase sits uneasily among the terms of contemporaneous debates between proponents of same-race (a policy of matching the racial background of prospective adopters and adoptees) or transracial (a policy of adoption based on the best interests of the child irrespective of race) adoption placements. The reference to some notion of racial compatibility only illuminates the inability to define both between two persons and within a single person. Hata himself is an ethnic Korean who was adopted by a Japanese family. Is he of like-enough so that his daughter can relate to him better, so that others will not see a difference between them, or so that the adoption can be approved in the first place? These dynamics of adoption in the novel unfold a series of psychic crises around the unsettlements of race, nation, and domesticity, which pervade larger issues in the representation of transracial adoption. The narration of Hata's adoptive relationship with Sunny links