Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(42)
Cha was already sick of New York. She had moved to the city two years earlier, in 1980, with her husband, Richard, to be part of the conceptual art scene. But the underground art world was already dead, taken over by a gilded era of art stars like painters Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente and David Salle. In a letter dated June 25, 1982, sent to her eldest brother, John, Cha writes that to be successful is to embrace the “dregs of morals, money, parasitic existence,” which she finds “in all honesty, disgusting.”
That night, Cha planned to meet her dear friends Susan Wolf and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis to watch a Straub-Huillet film at the Public. Despite her unhappiness with the city, her career was now going somewhere. She was in the group show, which was going to open in December, and her book Dictee, which she had been working on for the last few years, had just been published. In that same letter to John, she writes, “It is hard to say what I feel, how I feel, except that I feel freed, and I also feel naked; the manuscript never left my body physically, even when there was no time to work on it. I carried it around everywhere, I practically slept on it, and now, it is finished….I am always surprised when I see a completed work of something that I have done, all done piece by piece, and between jobs and breaks, in sleep, between arguments with Richard, all the maniac frustrations of these jobs, joblessness, poverty states.”
But before the movie date with her friends, Cha had to meet her husband at five in the Puck Building on Lafayette Street, where he worked as a photographer documenting the building’s renovation. The Puck is a massive red-brick landmark that covers a whole block in SoHo. Reaching nine stories, the building has arched windows and bright teal trim. At the building’s front entrance sits a gold cherub statuette of Puck in a top hat and a frock jacket, unbuttoned to expose his potbelly. Puck holds a fountain pen as his staff and a mirror in which he gazes lazily at his own reflection. Right after sundown, Cha walked into the back entrance of the Puck, on Mulberry Street, and saw Joseph Sanza, the security guard.
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I first discovered Cha’s Dictee when I was a sophomore at Oberlin in 1996. I was in my first poetry workshop, with a visiting professor, the poet Myung Mi Kim, whose intellect I admired and whose poetry I tried to imitate. Kim assigned Dictee and I was more intrigued by how Dictee looked than its content. Although it’s classified as an autobiography, Dictee is more a bricolage of memoir, poetry, essay, diagrams, and photography.
Published in 1982 by the now defunct Tanam Press, Dictee is about mothers and martyrs, revolutionaries and uprisings. Divided into nine chapters named after the Greek muses, Dictee documents the violence of Korean history through the personal stories of Cha’s mother and the seventeen-year-old martyr Yu Guan Soon, who led the protest against the Japanese occupation of Korea and then died from being tortured by Japanese soldiers in prison. In other chapters, Cha invokes Joan of Arc but as a character re-created by other women, such as the French nun Saint Therese of Lisieux.
Cha avoids traditional storytelling in favor of a structure that I can only describe as a script for a structuralist film. Scenes are described as stage directions. Poems are laid out like intertitles. Film stills are interspersed with blank pages that are meant to look like a refulgent white film screen. Cha doesn’t ever direct your reading of Dictee. She refuses to translate the French or contextualize a letter by former South Korean leader Syngman Rhee to Franklin D. Roosevelt or caption the photo of French actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. The reader is a detective, puzzling out her own connections.
At the time, I couldn’t relate to some of the Asian American fiction and poetry I came across. It seemed, for the lack of a better word, inauthentic, as if it were staged by white actors. I thought maybe English was the problem. It was certainly a problem for me. English tuned an experience that should be in the minor key to a major key; there was an intimacy and melancholy in Korean that were lost when I wrote in English, a language which I, from my childhood, associated with customs officers, hectoring teachers, and Hallmark cards. Even after all those years since I learned English, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that to write anything was to fill in a blank or to recite back the original. Cha spoke my language by indicating that English was not her language, that English could never be a true reflection of her consciousness, that it was as much an imposition on her consciousness as it was a form of expression. And because of that, Dictee felt true.
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I first heard that Cha was raped and murdered by a security guard in New York City in Kim’s class. I don’t remember how Kim presented it. I just vaguely remember the facts. Since then, throughout all the years that I reread Dictee, or taught it, or presented it for a talk, it never occurred to me to find out what happened. And yet, Cha’s death saturated my reading of Dictee, gave the book a haunted prophetic aura—Dictee is, after all, about young women who died violent deaths—although I would never admit to that interpretation in class or a talk.
A few years ago, when I was writing about Cha in a review, I decided to check on the date of her rape and homicide. Digging into Cha’s bibliography, I was surprised that no one wrote anything about the crime. If her homicide is mentioned at all, it’s treated as an unpleasant fact, acknowledged in one terse sentence before the scholar rushes off to write about narrative “indeterminacy” in Dictee. More disturbing is that no one admits that Cha was also raped, an omission so stubborn I had to consult court records to confirm that she was also sexually assaulted. Did they not know? Were they skittish? Murder has been desensitized to a crime statistic, but combine it with the word rape and it forces you to confront her body.