7 Introduction: Framing Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s ‘Dictee’

Over the course of the last one hundred years, Korea has undergone radical geopolitical, cultural, and economic transformations that contributed to evolving conceptions of nation-state identity. From 1910 to 1945, Korea became occupied under Japanese colonial rule that subsequently uprooted understandings of Korean cultural identity and practices (Halliday 1979: 6). Following just two months of the 1945 liberation from Japanese colonial rule, the United States and the Soviet Union occupied the peninsula as “allied forces” and sparked geopolitical control leading to the Korean War (Halliday 1979: 7). With the peninsula split between the 38th Parallel as North and South Korea, under a stalemate armistice, the materializations of a hot-war further destabilized questions of nation-state belonging and reconfigured what it means to occupy the identity of being Korean (Halliday 1979: 8; Cha 1950: 71). Given the significant militarized impact the US has had on the Korean peninsula, it is worthwhile to consider the ways in which a war that has never ended becomes embodied by the Korean diaspora living outside of the US.

This paper will specifically examine ways in which the Korean diaspora, specifically Korean military brides, engage in memory-making practices of a Post-War Korea and maintain Korean cultural sociality in spaces of domesticity. Within this discussion, the term “diaspora” will comprise of Korean military brides living in the US from the 1950s to the present day era. Throughout this paper, the term “cultural practice” is used correspondingly as “memory-making practice.” Additionally, the term “domesticity” will more so broadly encompass spaces of interiority, the everyday, and the interpersonal. Towards framing an understanding of Korean diasporic memory construction, I will be primarily examining Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s experimental autobiography Dictee. Cha’s work weaves together canonical European mythologies and personal family histories to represent the disjuncture nature of language and memory as she relates to the Korean War (Cha 1950: 11). In doing so, she works with not only the thematic tension of her personal narrative with the gazed expectations of her family’s history but also plays with the structural format of the novel itself. The unfathomability and complex construction of Cha’s work engage in the creation of an intermediary where the nuances of her identity are mapped in a timeless poetic. Dictee uncovers what it means for the diaspora to negotiate conflicting tongues, memories, and notions of personhood as subjects displaced from war.