She spent a year in Paris, studying French, filmmaking and film theory and developing a fascination with filmmakers like Carl Dreyer, Chris Marker and Marguerite Duras. She spent time in North Beach, ensconced in an artistic crowd, and studied with the artist Jim Melchert and the scholar Bertrand Augst. She earned four degrees, in art and comparative literature, while working as a cashier at the Berkeley Art Museum.
“I find her style, while not exactly pleasurable, to be liberating,” she wrote, adding that Cha had “made the immigrant’s discomfort with English into a possible form of expression.”Īfter attending a Catholic school, she enrolled briefly at the University of San Francisco before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley. “The reader is a detective, puzzling out her own connections,” she added.īut the power of a Korean American woman writing in an unapologetically avant-garde form has particular resonance for Hong. “I tell my students to approach the book as if they’re learning a new language,” Cathy Park Hong, a professor at Rutgers-Newark University, wrote in her 2020 collection of essays, “ Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” in which she devotes a chapter to Cha and “Dictee.” The opening image in the book is of graffiti scrawled by Korean coal miners it translates to “Mother, I miss you / I am hungry / I want to go home.” Little is made explicit, and the structure is enigmatic: In places, sentences are reduced to fragments sections in French and Korean go untranslated pictures and diagrams are presented without captions. Language, and the deconstruction of it, are essential to the book.
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