A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee Page B

intention, as I didn’t mind in the least what she’d said, but I had the urge to get up and dress and begin that Sunday like any other, although I had already slept through my swim time. Sunny had been downstairs for some time, warming up her hands with minor scales, up and down,in the dizzying series. I pulled on a robe and told Mary that I was going down to put the water on for our tea. I suggested she take a hot, soaking bath. She nodded, and from her weakened expression I could tell she wanted me to stay just a moment longer, that we might complete the conversation. But Sunny had begun playing intently and the night was done, and it seemed clear I should go downstairs and be present for her.
    There had been indications that Mary’s ever-increasing presence was disturbing to Sunny, as she had seemed to be practicing more fervently in the preceding weeks, particularly when Mary was over at the house. She took her warm-up exercises at an incredibly fast measure, running through them as though she were attempting to twist up her fingers. The pieces themselves she performed quite rudely, as if she would trounce them. She didn’t miss a note, but the feeling in the playing was utterly perverse to what it should have been, as though she were critiquing rather than exploring the compositions. Mary would comment again how talented and skilled Sunny was, how dexterous and precocious, and I never thought to correct her appraisals, even though the performances were in fact maudlin and probably insulting to her, as they certainly were to me. I found them quite shaming. And as much as I tried, I couldn’t inculcate the same sense in Sunny, as she pretended not to know what I was talking about.
    “I’m trying my very best, Poppa,” she’d say innocently, with her dark brown eyes gazing steadfastly up into mine. “You see that I am, don’t you?”
    Japanese fathers are famously overgenerous to their children (quite the opposite of what most Westerners would presume and wish to think), extremely permissive and obliging with their little ones, and so it was quite normal that I should be as well; thoughwith a girl like Sunny, I should probably have exercised more rigor and sternness. But as it often was, I let the issue go in favor of moving forward, to the next hour and day. My hope was that she would change as she grew into a young woman, and that the minor indications of willfulness would gradually fall from her like any child’s clutch upon a security blanket.
    I, too, had been a difficult child. For me, it was the heady time of adolescence that unmasked and clarified my sense of obligations, so much so that I now view that period as the true beginning of “my life.” This was when I first appreciated the comforts of real personhood, and its attendant secrets, among which is the harmonious relation between a self and his society. There is a mutualism that at its ideal is both powerful and liberating. For me, it was readily leaving the narrow existence of my family and our ghetto of hide tanners and renderers. Most all of us were ethnic Koreans, though we spoke and lived as Japanese, if ones in twilight. Of course, I didn’t leave on my own. No one of my family’s circumstance could expect to change his station, at least without a lifetime of struggle. But I was fortunate to score exceptionally high on several achievement tests, and was one of a few boys of my kind to be identified and enrolled in a special school in the nearby large city.
    I lived with a well-to-do childless couple, a gear factory owner and his wife, who treated me as well as a son, providing me with every material need and advantage. I remember being accompanied by them on the first day of school, in my new serge uniform with brass buttons that they had fitted just for me, and how the other boys had let us pass without even a murmur, this prominent family Kurohata (a name, as is self-evident, I’ve since shortened). I think of them most warmly, as I do