“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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