I wanted to talk about Dogeaters and Dictée, so you’ll have to forgive me for not sticking to just Dictée. In hindsight, I probably should’ve posted something about Dogeaters earlier.

Going back to Dogeaters:
I was excited to finally read a) something other than stories about Japanese Americans, and b) something about the Philippines, but it wasn’t at all what I expected. I was hoping to relate to the book a lot more than I did. (If nobody’s figured this out by now, I’m half Filipino) The back of the book said the book was set in “Manila in the turbulent period of the Philippines’ late dictator,” which I took to mean that I would get to hear about what it was like living under Marcos (which my mom did, and I’ve been meaning to ask her more about it, so I’m doing that right now as well). While it was fiction, I wanted to hear some mention of Marcos or something. I also got kind of irritated with the Tagalog in the book because it wasn’t translated, so I only understood some of it, and I felt like I should have understood it all, but I didn’t. I did get a little personal satisfaction every time I understood something that wasn’t translated. That’s just a personal thing though. I was also kind of frustrated at the form of the novel, the fact that it kept switching between characters and times without telling the readers got on my nerves, because I really wanted to like the book and I found it hard to get into any of the stories because Hagedorn seemed to kind of pull away and start with another story once I began to immerse myself in one.

On Dictée:
With Dictée, form was an even bigger problem for me, and I had a really hard time seeing through the unconventional format of Cha’s book and understanding the story and message. Kim’s essay helped put it in perspective and clarify what Cha was trying to say, both specifically, in certain segments, and in general. I read Kim’s essay and noticed that at least one other person commented on her statement that by “refusing to be drawn into an opposition between “woman” and “Korean” or between “Korean” and “Korean American,” Cha creates and celebrates a kind of third space, an exile space that becomes a source of individual vision and power” (Kim 8) I don’t know to what extent you guys have had this experience of living in a “third space,” but I know I feel that way, to some extent, being hapa and having lived all over, I’m not fully Filipino, nor am I fully American, so I’m a little out of place everywhere—too Asian to be American but too American to be Asian.

Sidenote: I’d like to think that what Kim says on page 10 isn’t true- “most Americans cannot even locate Korea on a map of the world.”

Kim tells us that “Dictée is about negotiating the tensions between self and the world, the interior and the exterior, the body and language, the creator and the viewer, nationalist and female concerns.” (Kim 14) This summary of the book helped me understand some of the overarching themes of the book which were hard to make out because to do that we have to look through the form to understand the content and then see what Cha tries to say through all the different stories she tells. “By telling the women’s stories, Dictée disturbs established notions of history.” (Kim 14) What I got from this is that history has been written largely by men, and therefore, many women’s stories have been collectively forgotten, and Cha seeks to remind us of those stories and to remind us that history isn’t absolute, that it is merely “a set of lies agreed upon.” (I’m not sure who said that, but I know I’ve heard it before.) She also tells us about other tensions that Kim mentions—between interior and exterior, and the body and language, to name two. I saw the tension between the interior and exterior in the animosity Koreans who stayed in Korea felt for those who fled when they tried to return to Korea, and the tension between body and language is seen throughout the book in relation to the Japanese colonization of Korea.