Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(48)
At least Cha had a sense of humor about being mistaken for other Asian women when she was alive. She wrote a poem called “Surplus Novel,” which she later performed.
they call me
they calling after me
hey yoko
hey yoko ono
yoko ono
yokoono
I ain’t your
I ain’t no I ain’t
your yoko ono
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There was a time, from the late sixties until the eighties, when every East Asian woman with long hair was catcalled or dismissed as Yoko Ono. When I was fourteen, I took guitar lessons, and my teacher’s friend, a baby boomer, remarked that I looked so much like Yoko Ono with my guitar. I was confused (Yoko Ono didn’t play guitar, she was the wife of a guitar player) and I was insulted (Yoko Ono was old). This was in the nineties, when Yoko Ono had already faded from notoriety as the dragon lady who broke up the Beatles.
From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion. This is most obvious in porn, where our murky desires are coldly isolated into categories in which white is the default and every other race is a sexual aberration. But the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion, in instances ranging from skin-crawling Tinder messages (“I’d like to try my first Asian woman”) to microaggressions from white friends. I recall a white friend pointing out to me that Jewish men only dated Asian women because they wanted to find women who were the opposite of their pushy mothers. Implied in this tone-deaf complaint was her assumption that Asian women are docile and compliant. Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.
In her book The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Bhanu Kapil asked South Asian women she randomly met a list of questions. Alongside pointed questions like “Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?” she asks the question “What is the shape of your body?” I myself can’t answer the question without betraying traces of dysmorphia that are left over from my youth like arsenic. In a triumphant feminist narrative, a woman reclaims her body, but I still warily regard my body at arm’s length: big head, minimal body, maybe once attractive, in a gamine, androgynous way; now, my body slackens from neglect; breasts a laptop rack while I lie prone on the couch, scrolling.
How would Cha answer that question? She grew up Catholic and Korean, so repression doubled down. In videos where she performs, she always wears white, a color that in Korean culture means death but in shaman culture means peace. When her mother was eight months pregnant with Cha, she fled to Busan with her family. It snowed that day, big white tufty flakes, like angora rabbits, and her mother experienced a rare moment of peace. Cha was less interested in the sensuous presence of her body than its erasure. She was fascinated with women who martyred themselves. But then, to look at it a different way, she was fascinated with women who gave themselves over to revolutions.
* * *
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When I asked Flitterman-Lewis why she thought there was no media coverage of Cha’s rape and homicide at the time, she said without hesitation, “She was just another Asian woman. If she were a young white artist from the Upper West Side, it would have been all over the news.”
I immediately came to this conclusion myself when I searched the news archives and found nothing except for the short Village Voice obituary. But I was reluctant to test this theory out loud because I knew that I, as an Asian woman saying it, would be dismissed as being conspiratorial. One can easily argue that hundreds of murders went unreported due to the high crime rate in New York during the eighties. And yet the lack of news coverage of Cha’s death was unusual enough for the prosecutor Jeff Schlanger to mention it to me when we talked. I asked if it had anything to do with the high crime rate.
“It should have been notorious because it happened in the landmark Puck,” Schlanger said. “And a rape homicide just didn’t occur there—even in those days.”
“Then why do you think there was there no coverage?”
Schlanger paused to think.
“That’s a good question,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
* * *
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This is what John told me about how they found the crime scene. Right after Cha died, her mother kept dreaming about her. In one dream, Cha was a little girl who led her to a number, 710. She kept pointing to the number but her mother didn’t know what it meant. The day of her funeral, her sister Bernadette also had a vision of three 7s. Cha’s mother often had peculiar dreams, some of which are retold in Dictee. In the chapter “Calliope,” her eighteen-year-old mother, feverishly ill, dreams of descending into the underworld, where like Persephone she is tempted by food offered by several spirits that she then rejects. In the final passage of Dictee, Cha offers a healing vision of her mother holding her up to a window:
Lift me up mom to the window looking above too high above her view….Lift me to the window to the picture image unleash the ropes tied to weights of stones first the ropes then its scraping on wood to break stillness as the bells fall peal follow the sound of ropes holding weight scraping on wood to break stillness bells fall a peal to sky.