Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(45)
During Japanese rule, Koreans were forbidden to use their language and even had to give up their names for Japanese surnames. Soon after independence, the peninsula was split in half and occupied by American and Soviet forces. Because of her nation’s colonial history, Cha treats language as both the wound and the instrument that wounds; hers is a language that conceals rather than reveals identity. In her art projects, she regards words, whether in English or French or Korean, as textural objects, rigid as a rubber stamp, arcane as a stone engraving, not as part of her, but apart from her.
The critic, schooled in the post-structural pieties of separating text from author, has been careful to emphasize that Dictee is a rejection of autobiography, a manuscript of missives washed up on the shore for her dissection. Her family has an altogether different reading. Cha sent a brand-new copy of Dictee to her parents a few days before she died, and the copy arrived the day of her funeral. John opened the package and flipped open the book to the first photo, a poorly reproduced image of graffiti by Korean miners who were trapped inside a Japanese coal mine. Scrawled in a childish hand, the graffiti translates to “Mother, I miss you. I am hungry. I want to go home.” Hearing Cha’s voice in his head, John was so disturbed he hid the book from his mother. Two months later, her mother read Dictee, and had to stop a number of times because she felt that Cha was speaking directly to her.
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When I emailed curator Constance M. Lewallen of the Berkeley Art Museum, asking if she could talk about Cha’s rape and homicide, she deferred with this short response: “We have always tried to focus on Cha’s amazing work and not to sensationalize her story.” Another scholar responded to my inquiry, saying that she also refrained from mentioning her death “out of respect for her family, not to overshadow the work, and I was trying to accommodate the personal in her work in a different way than a traditional biographical read.”
These are valid objectives. It was essential early on to foreground the importance of Dictee, to champion her innovations, while deflecting what happened to her lest the public became diverted by her appalling death. It was as if her minders had to protect the legacy of her art from the sordid forces of her rape and murder. But I wonder if their protectiveness may have been too effective. Right after her homicide, there was no news coverage except for a brief obituary in The Village Voice. This lack of coverage, I suspect, is because she was—as the police described her—“an Oriental Jane Doe.” But since then, despite court records that are available to the public, there has been no other story about her rape and murder, enshrouding Cha in mystery and hushed hearsay.
Cha, I should note, developed an aesthetic out of silence, making it evident through her elisions that the English language is too meager and mediated a medium to capture the historical atrocities her people had endured. It was more truthful to leave those horrors partially spoken, like Sapphic shrapnel, and ask the reader to imagine the unspeakable. In a way, the scholar is mirroring Cha’s own rhetoric of silence. By disclosing her death in the most abstemious manner (“In November 5, 1982, Cha was killed”), the scholar indicates that her homicide is too horrifying to impart through biographical summary and it’s up to the reader to imagine what happened. But where does the silence that neglects her end, and where does the silence that respects her begin? The problem with silence is that it can’t speak up and say why it’s silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.
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Joseph Sanza, twenty-nine years old, of Italian descent, was a serial rapist who was already wanted in Florida for nine counts of sexual assault. He fled to New York City and lived with his sister while working as a security guard. Puck Building management hired him simply on the grounds that “he knew English.”
Cha was one of Sanza’s many rape victims but his only known homicide victim. Contrary to common belief, Sanza was not a stranger to Cha. Because her husband worked at the Puck and Sanza worked there as security, he knew the couple enough to know where they lived. He knew the couple enough that there was even a friendly photo of them posing together. Unlike Sanza’s other rape victims, who were all strangers, Cha could therefore identify him, which was undoubtedly the motive for him to murder her and remove her body from the crime scene premises.
Cha’s body was found a few blocks away from the Puck, in a parking lot on Elizabeth Street, right by her home. Joseph Sanza dumped her body there, using a van that he borrowed from another security guard. After Sanza raped Cha in the sub-basement of the Puck, he beat her with a nightstick and then strangled her to death. A belt was found tightened around the broken hyoid bone of her neck, and there were lacerations on her head deep enough to expose her skull. Her pants and underwear were down around her knees. She was missing her hat and her gloves and one boot. When police found her at the parking lot after seven, her body was still warm.
Specificity is the hallmark of good writing except when too much detail becomes lurid, gratuitous, and turns Cha, after years of dedicated labor by her critics and curators, back into “Oriental Jane Doe.” Doubt creeps in as I write this. What do I add? What do I leave out? Do I include the rug in which her body was rolled, the straw in her hair that matched the straw in the van? The scrapes on her body that matched the pattern of abrasions on the floor of the elevator shaft? Detail, in this case, is also evidence. There is no room for indeterminacy.