기억과 역사

Memory and History: Yu Guan Soon in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE

Theresa Hak Kyung Ch‘’s DICTEE has been silenced and invisible, especially to Korean readers, since its publication in 1982. Its inattention results partly from the fact that the writer Cha, a Korean American woman, died too early just after it was published. Besides DICTEE is too complicated and new for conventional readers as it questions the notions of representativeness of authentic identity and the established boundaries of existing genres. It ‘performs’ with fragmented tales, pictures, (un)official documents, maps and apparently irrelevant language exercises. It is undoubtedly amazing that there appears Yu Guan Soon as a main subject in the chapter of Clio-History in this post-modern work, considering it was first published in the United States of America for the sake of being read for American readers. Cha shows that Yu is a representative woman who strived and suffered under the adversity of Korean history. However, Yu, like other women figures in DICTEE, is forgotten or neglected in the chronicles of colonialist and patriarchal history, though her struggling was a self-sacrificial devotion to her country. Therefore, Cha tries to revive and restore Yu’s name, path and actions not for or in the conventional history but in her artistic work. In reconceiving Yu in DICTEE, Cha eternalizes and reconstructs the missing narrative of Yu Guan Soon with the Korean American women subjects.