Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(47)

“Theresa was not passive,” she insisted. “She fought back.”



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When Flitterman-Lewis told me about spotting Dictee displayed at St. Mark’s Bookshop, the day flared open for me. Until I talked to her, I could only imagine Cha’s New York as a shadowy abstraction of a city, a Gotham of unlit steel and windswept empty boulevards. But Flitterman-Lewis’s detail breathed life into the city, animating it to the city I know. I used to work nearby at The Village Voice, and St. Mark’s Bookshop, which later moved to Astor Place, was my ligament between events, killing the odd ten minutes between drinks, readings, parties, and dinner dates with friends. It was a beacon of downtown cosmopolitanism. When they displayed my second book of poems, Dance Dance Revolution, I was ecstatic. I was thirty at the time, a year younger than Cha when they’d displayed Dictee in 1982. Comparing yourself at the age when a young writer died drives home how early their lives were cut off, since likely you are thinking, But I was just getting started! I still didn’t know anything!

    Writing is a family trade like anything else: you are more entitled to the profession if your ancestors have already set up shop. By introducing me to Cha, my professor Kim established a direct, if modest, literary link: Cha, Kim, myself. Not only did they share my history, they provided for me an aesthetic from which I could grow. For a while, however, I thought I had outgrown Cha. I’d cite modernist heavyweights like James Joyce and Wallace Stevens as influences instead of her. I took her for granted. Now, in writing about her death, I am, in my own way, trying to pay proper tribute. But once, when I read an excerpt of this essay in public, someone asked if Cha would have written about her rape homicide in the fairly straightforward narrative account that I’m writing in. “Not at all,” I said. “But I’m just trying to write what happened. I found that formal experimentation was getting in the way of documenting facts.”

The younger version of me would have been appalled by this opinion and argued that biographical narrative is just as artificial as any other form. The younger version of me would have also been annoyed that I’m now imposing a biographical reading onto Dictee as if her life were an answer key to a book that refuses answers. Not only that, I’m imposing myself onto her, filling her in with myself as if I were some kind of cotton ticking. If her portrait is in danger of fading, I can interject, But here I am, at least, to compensate!

    South Korea is such a tiny country that its war and violent uprisings upended the lives of anyone who came from there. When Cha was in Busan as a refugee, my father, at the age of eight, was also a refugee in Busan, scavenging for half-eaten Spam tins from the U.S. military canteen. When Cha’s brother John was fighting with his mother to join the protest against the dictator Rhee, my teenage uncle on my mother’s side was in that same demonstration. My grandfather, worried sick, traveled to Seoul to search for him but was turned away because the militia shut the city down. My uncle was fine, but the next day, my grandfather died from a heart attack. “Run. Run hard,” writes Cha about herself as she ran to fetch the tutor so that the tutor could stop her brother from joining the protest. It reminded me of my mother’s memory of running to fetch the pharmacist after she saw my grandfather keel over. If she ran hard enough, she would save him. But by the time my mother arrived with the pharmacist, the white sheet was already draped over my grandfather’s body.

Maybe I am just tired of Cha’s ghostliness. If she’s known at all, she’s known as this tragic unknowable subaltern subject. Why hadn’t anyone reached out to Cha’s relatives earlier? Why hadn’t anyone looked at the court records? They’re not hard to find. In fact, they’re readily available online. But why hadn’t I bothered to find out about her homicide earlier? Didn’t I also type and then delete the word rape before murder when I wrote the review where I mentioned Cha? Rape burns a hole in the article and capsizes any argument. There is no way to continue on with your analysis, no way to make sense past it. You can only look at it or look away—and I looked away. But it’s not just because her death was so grim. I sometimes avoid reading a news story when the victim is Asian because I don’t want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention. I don’t want to care that no one else cares because I don’t want to be left stranded in my rage.



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    When you google Cha, the first author photo that comes up is the film still of her sister Bernadette from her video Permutations. This still of Bernadette is often confused for Cha herself. I can understand how someone would want the photo to be Cha. With her stoic symmetrical beauty, Bernadette looks haunted in that inscrutable way where the viewer could project any tragic story they want onto her.

Only one real photo of Cha circulates online. Cha has long hair and wears a black turtleneck and tight jeans. She is in profile, staring out the window of her Berkeley apartment in a studied pose. The crook of her elbow rests on that windowsill while her other hand is tucked into her jeans pocket by her hip. Her expression is guarded in the way many writers and artists are guarded when they’re aware they are being photographed. While this picture is used as her official photo, most readers imagine Bernadette when they think they’re imagining Cha. Even I thought that picture of Bernadette was Cha until a friend corrected me. I was upset. Asians are always mistaken for other Asians, but the least we can do to honor the dead is to ensure they’re never mistaken for anyone else again.