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Cha was born in March 4, 1951, in Busan, South Korea, at the height of the Korean War. She was the middle daughter of five children. Her family, along with thousands of other refugees, had fled south to Busan from Seoul to escape the North Korean invasion. Her family, remarked her eldest brother, John, “was always on the run.” Their parents first went to Manchuria to escape the Japanese occupation, then to Seoul to escape the Soviet invasion, then to Busan to flee North Koreans, and finally to the United States to escape the South Korean dictatorship. Her parents hoped that in the United States, they would finally find peace.

    For a little while, the family had peace in Songdo, a tiny fishing village west of Busan, where they lived in a hut along the beach during the Korean War. Unlike Seoul, there were no bombs falling in the distance, no screams nor soldiers ordering them to lift sandbags. John remembers that time fondly, recalling the crash of waves, the crooked pine, and his parents talking softly amongst themselves while peeling sweet yellow melon on the wooden veranda. His first memory of Cha was in Songdo. At three, Cha was a withdrawn child who always frowned, who preferred to observe rather than play. She used to sit on the fence and watch naked boys dive into the gray surf and roughhouse on the sand. Singing to a tune of a nursery song about a rabbit, she changed the lyrics so it was about them: “Hey, naked boys, where are you going, hop hop—there you run away.”

John said that Cha and her mother were extremely close. Her mother wanted to be a writer too and told Cha and her siblings stories that are retold in Dictee. She taught them to love books and care for them by lining the covers with butcher paper. Dictee is primarily a book about her mother. In the chapter “Calliope,” Cha writes the history of her mother, portraying her as a homesick eighteen-year-old teacher in Manchuria. In other sections, Cha retells her mother’s shaman tales, like the story of the princess who was disowned by her father because she was not a son. The princess won back his affection by descending into the underworld to fetch the father medicine to heal him. But in Cha’s version, it’s the mother who’s sick, the mother for whom she fetches medicine.

    When Cha was twelve, in 1963, her family left Seoul and immigrated to San Francisco, and there Cha found her calling for art and poetry. Just two years into learning English, Cha won a poetry contest in school at the age of fourteen. No longer the withdrawn middle child, Cha opened up. She was caring and generous, and easily connected with people. She attended Convent of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic French girls’ school in the Bay Area, which she later used as a subject for Dictee and for a photographic series in graduate school.

Cha had a tenser relationship with her father, who, having once had the ambition to be a painter himself, opposed Cha’s desire to pursue the arts because of the hardships involved. As a graduate student, Cha often fought with her father, who couldn’t understand why she had to be in school for so long. In her poem “i have time,” there’s an unattributed quote that John wagers is probably from her father: “all the years you spent here all the literature courses you studied is this what they taught you I can’t understand a thing my dictionary has no translation of this.”

At Berkeley, where she acquired two bachelor’s and two master’s degrees in comparative literature and visual arts, Cha studied with Bertrand Augst, a dynamic and garrulous scholar who introduced her to French and film theory. Concurrently, Cha, mentored by the artist Jim Melchert, dove into performance and multimedia art. All were new fields back then, and Cha embraced them wholeheartedly. She loved Marguerite Duras and Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, and Carl Dreyer, whose The Passion of Joan of Arc had a profound impact on Cha. She was also inspired by Samuel Beckett and his use of “voix blanche,” which later inspired the flat narration in her video performances and Dictee. She worked tirelessly, practicing at what were then the formal frontiers of video and performance art, avant-garde poetry and theater, film and literary theory. Augst said, “Theresa assimilated many ideas to create something totally different, original, and new.”

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    After Cha died, Dictee quickly went out of print. Then, after a decade of silence, critical attention began to trickle in, first from avant-garde film critics and then from Asian American scholars who had initially ignored Dictee because it was too formally inaccessible. Now, Dictee, reprinted by the University of California Press, is regarded as a seminal book in Asian American literature and taught widely in universities, while her video art, sculpture, and photography, all preserved in the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, have been exhibited worldwide in major museums.

When I teach Dictee, I tell my students to approach the book as if they’re learning a new language, so that language is not a direct expression of them but putty in their mouths that they’re shaping into vowels. I say this because Cha writes as if she were still the Catholic high school girl dictating her story back in her broken English:

    First Friday. One hour before mass. Mass every first Friday. Dictee first. Before mass. Dictee before. Every Friday. Before mass. Dictee before. Back in the study hall. It is time. Snaps once. One step right from the desk. Single file.

    Cha’s use of the period is so aggressive it flattens her voice into a hard robotic drill. These stippling bullet points interrupt us from actually immersing ourselves in the story. If Cha is the driver, she is braking, and braking, the prose jerking forward and stopping, jerking forward and stopping. I find her style, while not exactly pleasurable, to be liberating because Cha—who was actually fluent in French, English, and Korean—made the immigrant’s discomfort with English into a possible form of expression.