第 7 章
Remembering Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
On November 5, 1982, thirty-one-year-old artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha left her job at the Metropolitan Museum's textiles department wearing a white angora sweater, red leather coat, and maroon beret. She traveled downtown to Artists Space gallery to deliver photographs for an upcoming exhibition before heading northeast. Though already tired of New York's art scene, which she found "disgusting" with its "dregs of morals, money, parasitic existence," Cha's career was gaining momentum with her newly published book Dictee and upcoming exhibition. Before meeting friends for a film, she planned to meet her husband Richard at the Puck Building where he worked as a photographer. Walking into the back entrance on Mulberry Street, she encountered security guard Joseph Sanza.
I first encountered Cha's Dictee as a sophomore at Oberlin in 1996, in Myung Mi Kim's poetry workshop. Though classified as autobiography, Dictee is a bricolage of memoir, poetry, essay, diagrams, and photography. Published in 1982 by Tanam Press, it documents Korean history through personal stories of Cha's mother and the seventeen-year-old martyr Yu Guan Soon, who died after being tortured by Japanese soldiers. Unlike other Asian American literature that felt inauthentic to me, Dictee spoke my language by acknowledging English as an imposition on consciousness rather than a true expression of it.
I first heard that Cha was raped and murdered by a security guard in Kim's class, but for years never investigated further despite teaching and writing about Dictee. When I finally researched her death, I was disturbed to find that scholars rarely mentioned it, or when they did, omitted the rape entirely. This silence parallels how Asian cultures often handle trauma-stories of women who disappeared or went mad circulate without explanation, as speaking of pain is seen not as healing but as spreading trauma. While Sylvia Plath's death has generated endless analysis, Cha's personal life remains largely sealed, even as scholars extensively analyze how her work recovers silenced Korean women's histories.
Born March 4, 1951, in Busan during the Korean War, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was the middle child of five in a family "always on the run"-from Japanese occupation to Soviet invasion to North Korean forces, finally emigrating to the United States to escape South Korean dictatorship. At Berkeley, she earned degrees in comparative literature and visual arts, studying French theory, film, and multimedia art, creating work that professor Bertrand Augst described as "totally different, original, and new."
After Cha's death, Dictee quickly went out of print. After a decade of silence, critical attention began to emerge, first from avant-garde film critics and later from Asian American scholars who had initially dismissed the book as too formally inaccessible. Now reprinted by the University of California Press, Dictee is considered a seminal work in Asian American literature, widely taught in universities, while her visual art is preserved in the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and exhibited in major museums worldwide.
Joseph Sanza, a 29-year-old serial rapist working as security at the Puck Building, knew Cha and her husband. Unlike his other victims, Cha could identify him, likely motivating her murder. After raping her in the building's sub-basement, he beat her with a nightstick, strangled her, and dumped her body near her home. Despite police efforts, it was Cha's brothers and husband who found the crime scene. After three trials-the first conviction overturned on appeal and the second ending in mistrial-Sanza was finally convicted of first-degree rape and second-degree murder in December 1987 when his ex-girlfriend testified he had confessed to killing someone.
The most widely circulated image of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is actually a film still of her sister Bernadette from Cha's video "Permutations." This misidentification troubles me, as Asians are always mistaken for other Asians, but the least we can do to honor the dead is to ensure they're never mistaken for anyone else again. In Cha's film "Permutations," after nine minutes of Bernadette's headshots, Cha briefly includes a single frame of herself-"Blink and you'll miss the portrait of the artist." This fleeting self-portrait shows Cha with "eyes present, alert, not haunted at all."
