Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 book-length experimental text, is filled not just with words but also images: mysterious, decontextualized, often grainy pictures ranging from acupunctural diagrams, calligraphy, and photos of ruined statues to film stills, family photos, and handprints. The work feels at times like a contemporary art museum where the images have no wall text. The lack of context or sources—hard to imagine in a work today—prods the reader to look at the pictures closely. Use your eyes, the work seems to say.

For all the ink spilled about Dictee—which now, more than four decades after its publication, stands out as the period’s most towering achievement in experimental writing by Asians in the United States—the many articles and interpretive theories orbiting the work often say little about its images and much about its language. Even people who admonish that the images are important often fall into this trap.

But every Cha initiate learns early that she was not just a writer, but also a visual artist. Her extant work, which dates mostly from 1973 to 1982, includes textiles, photography, bookmaking, printmaking, collage, performance art, and film. Her MA and MFA both credentialed her as an artist; her early text Exilée first appeared as an exhibited piece; and it was as a teaching artist, museum assistant, and filmmaker that she made a living in the years before a rapist and murderer cut her life short in 1982. 

A new side of Dictee opens when we look at those pictures carefully, not just digging into what they depict, but thinking about how Cha might have found them, and why she might have included them. In doing so, perhaps unexpectedly, Dictee softens: images that look forbidding turn personal, philosophical, even wistful. The work’s enigmatic surface emerges from a world dense with private intellectual signification. Tracing the pictures backward offers glimpses, however fleeting, of Cha’s remarkable life and mind. 

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Each section of Dictee is named after a Greek Muse and her corresponding attribute. Section 2, titled “Calliope—Epic Poetry,” depicts Cha’s mother’s youth in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. She was born in 1922 and grew up in Yongjeong (today, Longjing), a city just across the Tumen River from Korea proper. The region had a huge number of ethnic Koreans, many of whom settled there in the preceding half-century to escape famine or Japan’s more intense censorship, surveillance, and language policy regime on the peninsula. After the Second World War, Manchuria became part of China, the Soviet Army occupied the northern half of the peninsula, and the United States Army occupied its southern half. Many families, especially Christians and landowners (Cha’s mother’s family was both), fled south. Cha’s mother had to leave behind her brother, whom she never saw again. The family fled south, first to Seoul sometime in 1946, and later to Busan in January 1951 after experiencing invasion and bombing in Seoul when civil war broke out on August 25 the previous year. Cha was born shortly after on March 4, 1951, less than a year after the outbreak of the Korean War, in a refugee community in Busan at the south end of the peninsula.

Naming Dictee’s sections after Greek Muses makes the book, metaphorically speaking, into a kind of museum, the Muses’s temple. Generally, though with exceptions, Dictee’s pictures appear at the beginning and end of each section. Images also frame the beginning and end of the book, its front and back covers. A photograph of Cha’s mother, whose name was Huo Hyung Soon, 허형순 (later in life, Cha Hyung Soon 차형순), opens “Calliope”: expression grave, hair drawn tightly back, wearing a dark jacket over a Western blouse in front of wallpaper patterned with flowers inside diamonds. Cha used the same image in her 1977 artwork, Chronology, an assemblage of family photos together with text. The intense love Cha felt for her parents frames much of her work: Dictee’s dedication, “TO MY MOTHER TO MY FATHER,” reads almost as a mission. In an untitled and undated artwork (one of her few to use Korean directly), she cut in large blocklike characters on paper a traditional sijo praising parents by the sixteenth-century poet Jeong Cheol. The middle line of the poem reads, “두분곧 아니면 이몸이 살았으려” (which friends of the Cha family translated for her catalogue as, “Were it not for the two of them, my life would not have been possible”). 

Cha wove her parents into Dictee through two different media: photography and calligraphy. One of Dictee’s few footnotes credits her father, Cha Hyung Sang, with the calligraphy featured in the book spread across two pages. The large characters 父母 (“father” and “mother”) in the middle of “Calliope” bridge, on one side, a passage referring to Huo Hyung Soon’s parents (“you come back to your one mother to your one father”), with the other side, a passage apparently addressed to Cha’s own parents: “I write. I write you. Daily.” The brushwork draws together two different generations, drawing a line from Cha’s maternal grandparents in the former scene to her own parents in the latter, almost like a dissolve between scenes of a film. The original touch of her father’s hand gives visual form to the characters that name mothers and fathers as key figures in Cha’s work.

It has long been unclear who the woman in the photograph that closes “Calliope” depicts, but I have a theory it may show Cha’s grandmother. Cha’s older brother, John Hak Sung Cha, writes in his book Annyeong, Theresa that their grandmother’s grave lay two hours north of Seoul, not far from the present Demilitarized Zone. Cha’s family had last visited her grave before emigrating in 1962. Cha may have made a point of visiting her grave during a 1979-80 trip to Korea on which she shot footage for her unfinished film White Dust from Mongolia. 

And that experience may be what Cha writes about at the end of “Calliope.” The preceding pages shift between the first and second person; at the start, Cha seems to address her mother, but at other times, she seems to be speaking to herself: “You return and you are not one of them, they treat you with indifference …” By the final page, the addressee is taking a train to the end of its line, having her baggage searched. The second-person “you” seems to shift again: Cha writes, “You open your mouth half way. Near tears, nearly saying, I know you I know you, I have waited to see you for long this long.” In these lines, it seems possible that Cha is imagining a spiritual reunion with her grandmother at her gravesite, and together on the page. “Calliope,” then, would reflect on history across three generations of women.

The family also honored this history after Cha’s death. John Cha writes that, two months before the verdict was handed down in the trial of Cha’s murderer, the family traveled to Korea. They found their grandmother’s grave and, as a memorial, burned Cha’s blouse.

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The Cha family seems to have returned to Seoul by 1958 so that Theresa’s brother John could start at the middle school where he had earned admission. Sometime over the following years, he participated in either or both of two political protests: those of April 19, 1960, against the autocratic president Syngman Rhee (as Cha’s mother and brother write in their books), or those in 1962 against the coup d’état of military strongman Park Chung Hee (as Theresa Cha seems to suggest in Dictee’s “Melpomene” section). The family, fearing reprisals, chose to seek asylum in the United States. Huo and her son, John, left first, then the rest of the family followed; Theresa would have been eleven or twelve when she emigrated. The family spent roughly one year in Hawai’i, where the children first began to use English names. In 1964, they moved to San Francisco, where Theresa attended the Catholic school that figures so prominently in both the start of Dictee and, earlier, in Exilée. 

The negative depiction of the school in “photo-essay” (collected in Exilée; Temps Morts), run by the Convent of the Sacred Heart, has tended to influence critics’ tendency to interpret Dictee’s references to Catholic material as parodic or subversive. That may well be the case, but the images surrounding the section “Erato—Love Poetry” speak to how the Catholic cultural touchstones Cha encountered in those years continued to follow her—including her English name. 

The picture at the beginning of “Erato” shows a white woman with long hair and a dress holding a rod. The photo’s graininess masks who it is: a woman dressed as Joan of Arc, holding a sword in her right hand and a flag reading “Jesus Maria” in her left, wearing costume armor over a skirt printed with fleur-de-lis. A shield with Joan’s coat of arms and a flower garland rest on the ivy to her right. The person dressed as Joan of Arc is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, whose spiritual autobiography, Story of a Soul, Cha incorporates in long passages throughout “Erato.”

Cha took a systematic interest in figures who shared her name: others named Theresa populate the pages of Dictee. Kyung-nyun Kim Richards, Dictee’s Korean translator, was a friend of Cha’s mother, and writes that the film described in the text of “Erato” was the 1979 film Retrato de Teresa, a work of the Cuban director Pastor Vega praising the empowerment of women workers in a socialist society to overcome sexism at home and in the factory. The film was screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in April 1981, and might well have been fresh in Cha’s mind as she composed Dictee for that reason; Cha lived in New York City at the time. The image of the woman at the end of “Erato” has long been recognized as a still of the heroine in Carl Dreyer’s seminal silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. The message, in short, is a braided vision of women as models of power, as well as martyrs—wrapped up with the name Theresa. 

Memories of her teenage years appear elsewhere in the work. Cha’s interest in Thérèse, Teresa, and Joan rhymes with the other young woman in Dictee who defended a country and became a martyr in doing so: Yu Gwan-sun (Guan Soon, in Cha’s spelling), who was killed at seventeen 1919 by the Japanese colonial government for her work demonstrating for Korean independence. Yu’s portrait opens Dictee’s first section, “Clio—History.” It is worth noting it is a visual rhyme, in pose and dress, with the portraits of Cha’s mother and (potentially) her grandmother that frame “Calliope—Epic Poetry.” We can trace Cha’s interest in Yu to Kim Richards’s notes to the Korean Dictee; she writes that Cha’s mother took her daughter to see a Korean film, originally made in 1959, about Yu’s life when it was screened in San Francisco. The film moved both of them to tears, establishing a lifelong image in Cha’s mind: that of the young woman martyred for a cause despite others dismissing her, especially women who led those invaded to resist their invaders. Dictee raids every corner of Cha’s memories for its visual language in doing so. 

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After graduating from high school in 1968, Cha studied at the University of San Francisco, then transferred to UC Berkeley, where she earned a first bachelor’s degree in comparative literature in 1973, then a second in art in 1975. Her French enabled her to take coursework in that language, which would fuel her intellectual outlook for the rest of her life. Both the late curator Constance Lewallen of UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and translator Kim Richards note that Cha was reading Korean poetry on her own, including the “modern classics” Kim So wol and Yun Dong ju. Cha arrived at Berkeley in 1969, after the Third World Liberation Front Strike and the formation of the Asian American Political Alliance. Because records of Cha during this time are so scarce, we can’t say for certain exactly how this atmosphere impacted Cha. But hints appear here and there in Dictee itself, especially in its use of images and texts from Asian countries other than Korea. 

One of the odd puzzles of Dictee is why it suddenly uses Cantonese—a language Cha didn’t, to the best of our knowledge, speak—to transliterate the list of Chinese characters that first appear at the beginning of “Terpsichore—Choral Dance” when she provides English translations of the characters at the end of the book. Cha was a serious student of tai chi—not just as physical exercise, but as a Daoist spiritual and philosophical system. While she probably did not know Cantonese, it is likely that teachers and friends such as Master Y.C. Chiang and Fu Teng Cheng did, and provided Cha with the transliterations. 

The environment that gave rise to “Asian American” as an aspirational political formation—a minority alliance that would cross national and ethnic lines—may have been part of Cha’s interest in the East Asian past, an interest that manifests in Dictee mainly in the form of material from traditional Chinese thought. The artist’s statement Cha wrote for her MFA thesis, “Paths,” repeatedly cites the Chinese expatriate philosophy scholar Chang Chung-yuan’s 1963 book Creativity and Taoism. Cha likely didn’t know the literary Sinitic in which the acupunctural diagram that opens “Urania” was written. But she did understand the underlying belief that meridians in the body correspond to the influence of the planets and stars, connecting it to the section’s title. Reading the text of the diagrams reveals that it condenses information from two Chinese medical manuals: the Han-era Nanjing, and the early Ming-era Shisijing fahui. 

Dictee’s enigmatic cover image, which seems at first glance to show a pyramid, actually depicts a distant, Han-era section of the Great Wall of China in the deserts of Dunhuang; the tower is a ruined beacon. Cha found the image on a Chinese postcard (when and how is unclear). Her interest in juxtaposing multiple civilizations of the ancient world—ancient Greece, ancient China, and the even more distant past—stands out in the context of years when the idea of an ethnic studies program was the subject of intense activism. The premodern Chinese texts and images, together with the multiple images of characters in calligraphy (which can be pronounced, and bear meaning, in any of the languages of East Asia), speak in part to the legacy of interethnic solidarity still novel in Cha’s formative years.

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Cha stayed at Berkeley from 1975 to 1978 for both her MA in art and her MFA, leaving in the middle to study abroad in Paris. Her interests in semiotics, psychoanalysis, and apparatus theory all seem either to have developed or intensified at this point in time. It also seems likely that Cha, during that trip, discovered one of Dictee’s main images of Korean history. The mysterious image of soldiers shooting at people in white clothes on crucifixes that closes “Clio—History” comes from an obscure French source: the December 2, 1904, issue of the photo magazine La vie illustrée, in a cover story titled, “Japanese Cruelty: Living Targets.” The reporter, Lyonel Perrache, describes with shock how Japanese troops documented themselves executing three Koreans on charges of sympathizing with Russians in the middle of the Russo-Japanese War, then sold the photos to the public. (The photo precedes by almost one year the date when Japan compelled Korea into becoming its “protectorate”; annexation as a colony ensued in 1910.) 

In an era well before Internet searches, when working artists had to file images by hand in their studios, the range of archival origins for the pictures in Dictee proves unusually eclectic, drawing a story of the kinds of places Cha may have found them. It’s possible she may have amassed these materials for some years before the beginnings of Dictee. The image that opens “Elitere—Lyric Poetry,” a photo of Koreans in front of a traditional building, came from a Japanese newspaper, the Ōsaka Asahi Shimbun, published on March 3, 1919, in the days following the outbreak of independence demonstrations across Korea. Cha cropped the photo to remove identifying marks from the building, but the original image reveals the inscription 紀念碑殿 above its pillars, the name of a pavilion in central Seoul commemorating the fortieth anniversary in 1904 of Korea’s final king, Gojong, taking the throne. (The Japanese forced Gojong to abdicate in 1907, and he died on January 21, 1919.) Cha may have found a reproduction of the image during her filming trip to Korea in 1979–80. 

Other images help chart Cha’s range of interests as she developed as a thinker and artist. The image at the beginning of “Thalia—Comedy” turns out to be a Roman fresco of a Muse carrying a frowning theatrical mask. The Getty Villa in Los Angeles acquired that fresco in 1970, meaning Cha might have seen it in person on a trip to the area. Similarly, the image of pillars in a desert that opens “Polymnia—Sacred Poetry” comes from a source mainly known to historians of photography: an 1857 album of ancient Egyptian ruins along the Nile taken by the Victorian photographer Francis Frith. The Getty Center, like a number of other major museums, holds a reprint of this book and its plates. Cha might have come across it on a  visit to the Getty as a potential source of material for her collages and assemblages, including small, cheap reproductions in the form of postcards (as in the case of the book’s cover). 

One final image points not just backward to Cha’s process, but forward to the work that she might have made had she not been killed. The handprint that closes “Elitere—Lyric Poetry” has a pattern of cracks that matches with a hand from cave art in El Castillo, Spain, that dates back roughly 27,000 years. At the time that Cha was working, these caves were the oldest human art then known (though that record has now been superseded). Cha’s friends and colleagues all knew, and later noted in the earliest printed biographical sketches of her life, that she was working on “an aesthetic and anthropological study of cultural differences using hands as a metaphor” at the time of her death. It’s likely that the “Elitere” handprint overlaps with material collated for that project—which includes contact sheets of hands in paintings and statues from various museums and catalogs. In the context of Dictee, the El Castillo handprint pushes back the work’s range of visual reference to the very dawn of our records of human art-making. Cha’s interest in the ancient past ran far before ancient Greece, Han China, or ancient Egypt, all the way into the Paleolithic Age. She was interested in deep, long scales of human time. 

Cha ascribes special significance to stone in “Terpsichore”:

From stone, A single stone. Column. Carved on one stone, the labor of figures. The labor of tongues. Inscribed to stone. The labor of voices. … Render voices to meet the weight of stone with weight of voices. 

Rock’s ability to endure spoke to Cha as a metaphor for the human ability to endure pain. Long after the suffering of the body that forms a carving, inscription, or statue dissolves, the stone itself endures. The sign can speak, at least to those who listen. And so Dictee’s images of the ruined watchtower on the Great Wall, the eroded sphinxes, and the Korean etchings speak together: the most primeval form of visual art intersects with the history of pain and subjugation at the origins of modern Korea. What Cha saw in image-forging was the nature of human resilience. 

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One old, influential strand of thinking about Dictee, running back to Anne Anlin Cheng’s famous 1998 article, “Memory and Anti-Documentary Desire in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee,” argues that Cha’s work avoids and parodies the work of autobiography to resist American culture’s expectation that minorities tell an easily followed life story that’s “representative” of the national or ethnic group from which they hail. That may be true. But at the same time, much of Cha’s unusual, daring, too brief life does percolate through the oddest and most difficult corners of Dictee. She anonymized the work’s images, made them more difficult to trace and identify. She chose not to caption or even footnote this material for a reason. But she was also interested in something like a collective unconscious, and the idea that products of the personal imagination might suddenly arise and resonate in the cultural memories of others. Dictee is filled with descriptions of human picture-making: ink on a page, pigment on a wall, the cinema in “Erato,” the photo darkroom described in “Elitere.” To trace why and how the pictures featured in Dictee thread together is to weave a not-too-simple story that runs through and around Cha—what she remembered, what she found interesting, how she saw. It means making room inside oneself, and inside our shared culture, for these traces.

Among the mysteries in Dictee I continue to puzzle over is its final page. Cha leaves us with a brief prose poem. It opens with a child asking, “Lift me up mom to the window.” The image begins as “a blur now darks and greys mere shadows lingering above her vision.” Gradually, after the child repeats the request, the view comes into focus, described in ever more lyrical detail: “early dusk or dawn when light is muted, lines yield to shades, houses cast shadow pools in the passing light … The ruelle is an endless path turning the corner behind the last house.” The child repeats her request a third time: “Lift me to the window to the picture image.” It is impossible to know whether Cha is writing about an imagined character, or about one of her own memories. But either way, what we read at the close of Dictee is an origin story: on the level of the individual life, the first moment at which a viewer is gripped by a visual impression, and works hard to feel it, remember it, see it. That third and final vision the child beholds is of bells ringing, enormous, harmonious, and loud—a vision as ecstatic and clamorous as the end of Ulysses or The Waves: 

… 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.