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Recognizing the transracial adoptee: adoption life stories and Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life.(Critical essay)

From: MELUS  |  Date: 6/22/2006  |  Author: Jerng, Mark C.

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 like-enough race and sufficient means" (73). The odd phrase "like-enough race" in particular raises, ...

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