“Dictee,” the Korean American writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s masterpiece, was published in 1982. Just as it was released, Cha was raped and killed by a security guard. Before I ever encountered her writing, this is what I knew about Cha: she worked with language, video, performance, audio, and objects—and she’d died early. I’d heard other Korean American writers invoke her name as one might a patron saint or ancestor, so it was with great excitement that, a decade ago, I picked up a copy of “Dictee.”
