Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)

Composed by a young Korean-American performance artist who was killed far too early, this text brings together many of the pieces of her early visual and aural life. The reader is asked to follow the author's path in stitching together the sections in different languages and from different parts of her life: the religious stories that the Church tells her as a Catholic convert, the dictation that she must learn as a student under the teacher's watchful eyes, the stories of her family's show more coming to the United States, the words of many different immigrants scratched into the walls at Ellis Island where they are held. The book is hard to read, because Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's process of coming to America is hard and beset with all sorts of road blocks that she recreates here. If we have to stumble over language we cannot understand, it's because she had to do so in coming to the U.S. The images we can't readily identify show us how difficult it is to come to a new culture without an interpreter. show less

How to capture the strangeness of this book? It's haunted me since it was introduced into my consciousness by three unrelated people mentioning it to me in the same day. Inventive, resistant, curiously slippery. A challenge and a call to arms that is also a love poem. Funny, sly and deadly serious.

Reading Dictee was an arresting experience and the parts where I got confused, overwhelmed, engrossed all felt phenomenologically similar to attempting to take in a scene in complete detail in a moment, sensory overload. And the parts of Korean history I learned or had forgotten were a poignant reminder of the resilience of its people.

Needlessly complicated, this work tries diligently to transcend genre and linear trains of thought, but as a result becomes overtly abstract and difficult to follow. More of a collage than a coherent piece of literature, Dictee has interesting moments and movements....but, for this reader at least, it rang hollow and repetitive, more of an experiment than a completed work worth exploring and returning to.