Chang-Rae Lee: A Gesture Life

PEOPLE KNOW ME HERE. It wasn’t always so. But living thirty-odd years in the same place begins to show on a man. In the course of such time, without even realizing it, one takes on the characteristics of the locality, the color and stamp of the prevailing dress and gait and even speech — those gentle bells of the sidewalk passersby, their How are you s and Good day s and Hello s. And in kind there is a gradual and accruing recognition of one’s face, of being, as far as anyone can recall, from around here. There’s no longer a lingering or vacant stare, and you can taste the small but unequaled pleasure that comes with being a familiar sight to the eyes. In my case, everyone here knows perfectly who I am. It’s a simple determination. Whenever I step into a shop in the main part of the village, invariably someone will say, “Hey, it’s good Doc Hata.”

The sentiment, certainly, is very kind, and one I deeply appreciate. Here, fifty minutes north of the city, in a picturesque town that I will call Bedley Run, I somehow enjoy an almost Oriental veneration as an elder. I suppose the other older folks who live here receive their due share of generosity and respect, but it seems I alone rate the blustery greeting, the special salutation. When I buy my paper each morning, the newsstand owner will say, with a tone feigning gravity, “Doctor Hata, I presume.” And the young, bushy-eyebrowed woman at the deli, whose homebound mother I helped quite often in her final years, always reaches over the refrigerated glass counter and waves her plump hands and says, “Gonna have the usual, Doc?” She winks at me and makes sure to prepare my turkey breast sandwich herself, folding an extra wedge of pickle into the butcher paper. I realize that it’s not just that I’m a friendly and outgoing silver-hair, and that I genuinely enjoy meeting people, but also because I’ve lived here as long as any, and my name, after all, is Japanese, a fact that seems both odd and delightful to people, as well as somehow town-affirming.

In my first years in Bedley Run, things were a bit different. Even the town had another name, Bedleyville (this my attribution), which was changed sometime in the early 1970s because the town board decided it wasn’t affluent-sounding enough. The town in fact wasn’t affluent at the time, being just a shabby tan brick train station and the few stores that served it, some older village homes, several new housing developments, and the surrounding dairy cow pastures and wooded meadows, nothing fancy at all, which was how I was able to afford to move here and open a business. There were perhaps a few thousand residents, mostly shopkeepers and service people, and the small bedroom community who were their patronage.

I’d read about the town in the paper, a brief slice-of-life article with a picture of a meadow that had been completely cleared for new suburban-style homes, just white stakes in the frozen ground to mark where the streets would be. It looked sterile and desolate, like fresh blast ground, not in the least hopeful, and yet I felt strangely drawn to the town, in part because of the peaceful pace of life that the article noted, the simple tranquillity of the older, village section that made me think of the small city where I lived my youth, on the southwestern coast of Japan. I had already driven through the more established suburbs nearer to the city and found them distinctly cold, as well as too expensive. I’d ask for directions at a garage, or buy some gum at a candy store, and an awkward quiet would arise, that certain clippedness, and though I never heard any comments, I could tell I wasn’t being welcomed to remain too long.

When I first arrived in Bedleyville, few people seemed to notice me. Not that they were much different from those in the other towns, at least not intrinsically. Fundamentally, it seems to me, the people in a particular area are given to a common set of conditions and influences, like the growth in a part of a forest. There may be many types of flora, but only the resident soil and climate provide for them, either richly or poorly or with indifference. I suppose it was because Bedleyville was still Bedleyville then, and not yet Bedley Run (though desperately wanting to be), and pretty much anybody new to town was seen as a positive addition to the census and tax base. It was 1963, and from what I’d seen during my brief travels in this country, everyone for the most part lived together, except, I suppose, for certain groups, such as the blacks, or the Chinese in the cities, who for one reason or another seemed to live apart. Still, I had assumed that once I settled someplace, I would be treated as those people were treated, and in fact I was fully prepared for it. But wherever I went — and in particular, here in Bedley Run — it seemed people took an odd interest in telling me that I wasn’t un welcome.

Did this suit me? I can’t be sure. I do know that once I decided to remain in this country, and to live here in Bedley Run, the question of my status mostly faded away, to the point it is today, which is almost nothing; and I know, too, that this must have been beneficial to me over the years, to have so troubling an issue removed from the daily turns of my life. I did have a few small difficulties from time to time, but it was always just the play of mischievous boys, who enjoyed making faces at me in the shop window, or chalking statements out front on the sidewalk, even going so far as to slather axle grease on the dumpster handles. I never reported the incidents, or confronted the perpetrators, and eventually these annoyances ceased. Later on, after the boys had grown up into men, some of the ones who settled in town would come into the store, to buy a bed tray, or a walker, or perhaps an ice bag for a feverish child, and they would speak to me as if they had never done the things I knew they had done, they would just make affable small talk and docilely ask my advice as they might from any doctor, their eyes wavering and expectant.

I should mention now that I am not a physician of any kind, and that I only ran a medical and surgical supply store in town, though for many patrons it came to be regarded as an informal drop-in clinic, the kind of place where people could freely ask questions of someone who was experienced and knowledgeable as well as open and friendly, a demeanor that quite a few doctors, unfortunately, no longer feature these days.

I say all this not to boast or self-congratulate, but to remind myself that though I was ever willing to help, it was the generous attitude of the customers that drew me out and gave me confidence, and that every decent and good thing that has come to me while I have lived here is due to some corollary of that welcoming, which I have never lost sight of. I know there are those who would say I’ve too keenly sought approval and consensus, and if over the years I’ve erred on the side of being grateful, well, so be it. I think one person can hardly understand why another has conducted his life in such a way, how he came to commit certain actions and not others, whether he looks upon the past with mostly pleasure or equanimity or regret. It seems difficult enough to consider one’s own triumphs and failures with perfect verity, for it’s no secret that the past proves a most unstable mirror, typically too severe and flattering all at once, and never as truth-reflecting as people would like to believe.

Indeed, I have long felt that I ought to place my energies toward the reckoning of what stands in the here and now, especially given my ever-dwindling years, and so this is what I shall do. My old store, Sunny Medical Supply, is now run by a youngish New York City couple who three years ago purchased it, with all the stock and inventory, and the two one-bedroom apartments above. They haven’t changed anything, really. A few weeks ago I noticed that the gold-leaf lettering I ordered when the town required all the village shops to put up the same rustic style of sign is now quite chipped and dull, and needs refurbishing. In fact the whole storefront is looking weatherworn, unlike the other shops immediately beside it on Church Street, the stationers and the florists, whose windows change regularly and have colorful sale announcements and displays of merchandise.