Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(43)
It’s difficult to find reliable statistics on Asian American women who’ve been sexually assaulted. The Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence found that 21 to 55 percent of Asian women experienced physical and sexual violence, which is a rather broad range. Another survey discovered that among all ethnic backgrounds, Asian American women reported the lowest rate of sexual assault. Yet another excluded Asian women altogether because the “sampling size was too small.” I have a hard time trusting any of these findings. When I was dating, my mother used to ask, “You’re not doing anything bad, are you?” That was her euphemism, if you can call it that, for sex, which was otherwise never mentioned.
Growing up, I overheard stories of women who disappeared or who went mad. What happened? I would ask. Nothing, my mother would say, and then I’d be hushed. In every Asian culture, stories abound of women disappearing or going mad without explanation. The most that would be revealed was that something “bad” happened. In psychoanalysis, the pain that trolls your nerves detaches from your body once you talk about it. Naming that pain takes the sting out of the incident, makes it mortal, manageable, even extinguishable. But I grew up in a culture where to speak of pain would not only retraumatize me but traumatize everyone I love, as if words are not a cure but a poison that will infect others. How many Asian women would then feel bold enough to report sexual assault in their cultures of secrecy and shame? Denial is always the salve, though it is merely topical, since the incident mushrooms back in dreams and other deadlier chronic forms. I asked a friend who’s an Asian American scholar why he thought no one has written about Cha’s death. “They probably don’t want to retraumatize the family,” he said. After he said that, I couldn’t help but see Cha’s critics, including myself, as part of her story.
I think of Sylvia Plath, the titan of tragic female poets. A cottage industry of biographies has cropped up around her. Everyone, from the casual reader to the most devoted scholar, is a sleuth, trading gossip, poring over letters and journal entries to find that one stone left unturned about her life. Legal battles between her estate and scholars have been protracted. Casual friends have offered sniping perspectives in their own memoirs. But much of Cha’s personal life has remained sealed. The length to which scholars will argue how Cha is recovering the lives of Korean women silenced by historical atrocities while remaining silent about the atrocity that took Cha’s own life has been baffling. There has been important scholarship about Dictee, such as the compilation of criticism Writing Self, Writing Nation, edited by Elaine Kim and Norma Alarcón, and essays by scholars like Anne Anlin Cheng and Timothy Yu. But more often, Dictee is used as long-winded validation of the academic field of study the scholar happens to be in. The more I read about her, the less I knew. And the less I knew, the more I couldn’t help but regard Cha as a woman who also disappeared without explanation.
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Cha’s friends and family remarked that her voice was her most distinguishing feature. It was like breath; ethereal and serene, drawing them in like she was about to tell them a secret. Cha used her voice as both subject and instrument in her poetry and video art. In her 1976 video Vidéoème, her voice-over translates the French text that appears onscreen. “To see,” she says in a high, fluted, and feminine voice that is both fragile and chilling, tranquil and eerie—like wetting the rim of a water glass and rubbing the rim until you hear the glass sing.
Another Cha video, Permutations, which I managed to find online, is a flickering sequence of black-and-white headshots of her younger sister Bernadette made in 1976. Each frame of her sister lasts a few seconds. Her sister wears no makeup; her long, thick hair is parted in the middle and hangs loosely around her face. Her solemn expression is unchanging. Her features are classically Korean: dark defined eyebrows, narrow eyes, a nice-shaped nose, a mouth that is pursed and full and sensuous.
After six minutes of watching frames of Bernadette’s unvarying expression, I’m a little bored. Time is unforgiving on video, dating it faster than painting or photography. As technology ages, the medium thickens, taking over the subject. I notice the ambient white noise, the graininess of the optical texture. The artist Hito Steyerl writes about the “poor image” as a “copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. It is a ghost of an image…the poor image tends toward abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming…it often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright.”
Bernadette “tends toward abstraction” in that there’s something unspecific about her headshot. Her expression is unreadable; no ornament modernizes her; she could be anyone, anywhere, during any period, in Seoul as a war refugee or in the United States as a Bay Area hippie. I read an account about how one man saw Permutations at a museum and, mistaking the sister for the artist, fell in love. He bought Dictee but then fell out of love because he thought the book was unreadable. I myself saw Permutations at the Centre Pompidou and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it was part of a feminist exhibit. It’s always startling to come across Cha’s videos in the company of other artists, as if I’m seeing a relative whom I haven’t seen for years in a bright public space. But what are you doing here, I want to ask, where have you been?