Dear Friend,
As I imagined, Dictee is unlike anything I’ve read before. In our introductory post on February 1st, I somewhat teasingly asked of this book, “is it cake?” That question was inspired by the many different ways I’d seen this book described and by my passion for something silly: illusion desserts. Turns out, I might have been on to something. So far, this book is poetry and reporting, history and personal journal, autobiography and memoir.
In the front matter, I was struck most by the intense focus on language and mimicry, especially something poignant about the pain of speech, both the attempt to speak, to learn a language, but also the act of speaking up. “If you did not speak so quickly,” Cha writes, “they would understand you better.” Is this book an attempt to speak slowly? To be understood? And if so, what does Cha want the reader to understand? Is it something about herself, or about her subjects? Or are these things the same?
There’s also an interesting section that reads almost like a journal, which felt appropriate to me considering how intimate speech can be. She begins this section with a short poem: “Tell me the story / Of all these things. / Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us.” Then, she seems to begin with her own musings, thoughts that are to be translated into French. Why? It’s unclear.
The first chapter is titled Clio, after the Greek Muse of History. It recounts the story of a woman named Yu Guan Soon. Soon was a young revolutionist who led student protests against the Japanese occupation of Japan. I hadn’t much familiarity with this part of history until about a year ago, when I read the magnificent novel Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. For all its breadth and power, though, Pachinko exposed the situation through the daily lives and experiences of its characters surviving the oppression, whereas Cha makes the politics and the resistance quite literal, and quite central. I didn’t know about the student demonstrations, for example, nor that the Japanese assassinated the Queen of Korea, just one year before Yu Guan Soon would be killed, at the age of 17, for her role in the fight for independence. (According to the book, Queen Min was assassinated in 1919, but other sources say this happened in 1895. Is this creative license? An error?)
This was a stark reminder of the nature of revolutions and how so very often they’re led by the young. A lot of us forget that even the American Revolution was led by a group of relatively young people, whom we call “forefathers” but who most of us might better recognize as our children.
The last bit of historical significance that struck me, and of which I was unfamiliar, is the “Petition from the Koreans of Hawaii to President Roosevelt,” which was an open letter, dated July 12, 1905, wherein the Koreans call on the U.S. President, and all Americans, to help them in their fight for independence. It’s a beautiful, solemn letter, made even more so in the immediate juxtaposition that follows: the recounting of Yu Guan Soon’s courage and her death.
“The ‘enemy.’ One’s enemy. Enemy nation. Entire nation against the other entire nation. One people exulting the suffering institutionalized on another. The enemy becomes abstract.”
The enemy becomes abstract. Isn’t that the goal, and the tragedy? How we lose our own humanity when we lose sight of the humanity of others. How we betray ourselves and our children, when we deny the right of others’ children to live and to be safe.
Meditation
“I want you to speak.” -Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
In love and peace,
~Adam
Contemplative Reading Project 
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