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Cathy Park Hong
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was a Korean American poet and photographer who published the influential book Dictee in 1982, just a few days before a security guard, Joseph Sanza, raped and murdered her. Her book, which is now considered foundational to Asian American literature, explores the intersection of political violence, womanhood, imperialism, and historical trauma by juxtaposing the stories of women like the Korean martyr Yu Guan Soon, Cha’s own mother, and Joan of Arc. Cathy Park Hong cites Cha’s work as a key inspiration for her own and explores the significance of her life, death, and critical reception in the essay “Portrait of an Artist.” In particular, Hong argues that Dictee’s careful use of language captures the psychological reality of immigration and colonization, and that its content captures how many Korean women and immigrants carry traumatic histories with them. Hong also uses Cha’s story as a case study to investigate what Asian American art really is and what it means to study it—including how to describe identity’s influence on art without entirely reducing art to identity, as well as how to “pay proper tribute” to the legacy of earlier Asian American literature.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Quotes in Minor Feelings
The Minor Feelings quotes below are all either spoken by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha or refer to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Bad English
Quotes
It was once a source of shame, but now I say it proudly: bad English is my heritage. I share a literary lineage with writers who make the unmastering of English their rallying cry—who queer it, twerk it, hack it, Calibanize it, other it by hijacking English and warping it to a fugitive tongue. To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Portrait of an Artist
Quotes
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.
[…]
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.
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. […] 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.
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.”
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Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Quotes in Minor Feelings
The Minor Feelings quotes below are all either spoken by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha or refer to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Bad English
Quotes
It was once a source of shame, but now I say it proudly: bad English is my heritage. I share a literary lineage with writers who make the unmastering of English their rallying cry—who queer it, twerk it, hack it, Calibanize it, other it by hijacking English and warping it to a fugitive tongue. To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Portrait of an Artist
Quotes
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.
[…]
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.
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. […] 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.
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.”
