Dictee

"Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee is both the ancestor and the future of all attempts to remember and rewrite--against the force of being dismembered and rewritten by--colonial/imperial histories and their reiterative, disfiguring shadows. I have, for that reason, the feeling, maybe also the fear, that neither the experience nor the revelation of it will ever come to an end."--Brandon Shimoda, PEN America Literary Award winner and author of The Grave on the Wall "You think you know what a book can do, then you read Dictee . A life is split by it. A text of multiple modes and languages, moving in a staccato accumulation through histories of war and displacement, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's postcolonial classic created ways and privacies where there were none. Unimaginable what literature would be today without it."--Solmaz Sharif, author of Customs " Dictee is part memoir, part history, part experimental meditation; a challenging, innovative exploration of Cha's life, her mother's difficult immigrant journey across East Asia and to the United States, the fractured immigrant experience, women warriors, and language itself. . . . An essential work for feminist writers, conceptual artists and Asian American authors and scholars."-- New York Times