Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)

Composed by a young Korean-American performance artist who was killed far too early, this text brings together many of the pieces of her early visual and aural life. The reader is asked to follow the author's path in stitching together the sections in different languages and from different parts of her life: the religious stories that the Church tells her as a Catholic convert, the dictation that she must learn as a student under the teacher's watchful eyes, the stories of her family's coming to the United States, the words of many different immigrants scratched into the walls at Ellis Island where they are held. The book is hard to read, because Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's process of coming to America is hard and beset with all sorts of road blocks that she recreates here. If we have to stumble over language we cannot understand, it's because she had to do so in coming to the U.S. The images we can't readily identify show us how difficult it is to come to a new culture without an interpreter.… (más)