returned to Korea after the country was emanci-
pated in 1945 from Japanese colonial occupation.
After spending her childhood in Korea during a
turbulent period of political struggle, Cha moved
with her family to Hawaii in 1962 and relocated to
San Francisco in 1964, where she attended a Cath-
olic school, studying French and Greco-Roman
classics. She studied briefly at the University of
San Francisco before transferring to the University
of California, Berkeley, majoring in art and com-
parative literature. She was influenced by Con-
ceptual Art, which was created during the 1960s
and early 1970s and connected to the rebellious
spirit of the era. She worked as an usher/cashier
at the Pacific Film Archive (1974–77), where she
saw numerous classical and experimental films.
She started performance/visual/installation art
shows around this time, and spent 1976 doing
her postgraduate work in filmmaking and theory
in Paris. In 1979 she made her first trip back to
Korea, and then again in 1980 to begin shooting
the unfinished film White Dust from Mongolia. She
moved to New York and married Richard Barnes,
a close friend since her graduate school days, in
May 1982. She was murdered in November 1982,
by an unknown assailant, a few days after Dictée
was published. In 1992 the Theresa Hak Kyung
Cha Memorial Foundation donated her art and
archives to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific
Film Archive.
Dictée is a complex and powerful work of art.
Its nonlinear narrative, fragmented structure, pic-
tures without captions, frequent use of the French
language, and many other obscure elements make
it nearly impossible for any reader to understand
the work completely. Due to these experimental
characteristics and an unusual blend of genres
and forms, the book has not been read widely for
a decade since its first publication; however, it is
now rapidly being canonized in the fields of liter-
ary, feminist, film, postcolonial, and ethnic studies.
The visual and spatial arrangement (for example,
one section requires a separate reading of right-
hand pages and left-hand pages) of the text resists
a linear reading, thus appealing to the increasingly
visual, multimedia-oriented young generations. In
2002 a Web site called “Dictée for Dummies” was
created with various hyperlinks to help readers
“who are having trouble with the text.” Ironically,
however, it is the troublesome aspects of the work
that generate new meanings for readers. Cha seems
to expect her readers to actively take part in creat-
ing meaning out of her text.
Dictée is composed of 10 parts, nine of which
are named after the nine Muses, except that the
Muse of lyric poetry, Euterpe, is changed to Elitere.
The juxtaposed and seemingly unrelated frag-
ments of each part may generate multiple mean-
ings, depending on how readers make sense of the
relationship between the classical genre of each
Muse and the fragments. For example, the first
part is made up of dictations (dictée in French) on
many levels—national, political, cultural, and re-
ligious. This part, which begins with the untrans-
lated Korean script in the frontispiece, can be seen
as a text about immigration, depicting the stutters
and misspellings of a second language speaker.
Like Cha, who was forced to learn English and
French as a teenager, Diseuse (“female speaker” in
French) is very self-conscious in learning a second
language. Not only does she feel the physical and
mental strains of pronouncing different sounds,
of remembering proper punctuation in the writ-
ing system, and of being occasionally unable to
speak, but she also experiences the mental colo-
nization involved in the acquisition of the domi-
nant cultural language. In other words, language
acquisition is not seen as a simple linguistic skill
development, but as a process of brainwashing
and subjugation to the national, political, cultural,
and religious values of the native speakers. Cha
demonstrates the ways in which the sentences in a
language textbook instill in the learner a sense of
national pride (“Do you know that there are about
ten thousand Americans in Paris, who would quit
to go to heaven?”); moral lessons (“Be industrious:
The more one works, the better one succeeds”); or
gender discrimination (“In the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen”).
Cha succeeds in transforming the passive act
of dictation into a space of active cultural com-
ment by making the reader acutely aware of theCha, Theresa Hak Kyung 33