Christina Cha at The New School
Written by Kyra Assibey-Bonsu
I briskly pushed the elevator up button of New School’s Eugene Lang building and waited. While I watched the numbers descend, I glanced around the floor with students milling around between classes. When the elevator doors opened I entered and leaned over to push the door closed button. Within seconds I was whisked up to the fourth floor, then proceeded to speed walk towards room 407, I was late, yet again. The illustrious room 407, is scene to so many of the New School’s Creative Writing’s most impactful events led by literary leaders and icons alike. But today was different; this event was set up as a literary function of my 2024 Fall Poetry and Prose class, taught by the thoughtful and renowned Dr. Margaret Rhee. My classmates and I had the opportunity to read Theresa Hak Yung Cha’s Dictee; a story that posthumously received wide acclaim after Theresa was tragically murdered a few weeks before the book’s debut. Dictee was sent to me to read by a fellow writing colleague I admire, who ironically is a comrade of Dr. Rhee’s. So reading this book felt like a full circle moment for me, connecting my literary present with my literary past. In my first interaction with Dictee, I was initially hesitant, nervous about the various storylines, characters, and languages. But I realized I exist in multitudes of storylines and languages and it’s my job as a writer, to share it and interpret others.
When Theresa Hak Yung Cha passed, it was November 1982 in New York, the weather was cold enough that Theresa had been wearing a scarf and a coat. The US elections had occurred a few days before and Reagan won a second term. Only a few months prior, a young Christina attended her Aunt Theresa’s wedding as the flower girl. Simultaneously, the world was being ushered away from the Cold War detente of the 70s, into an escalation of tension between the US and the Soviet Union, coupled with Israel’s invasion of Beirut.
Right before my father’s death, I had just come back to New York from a triumphant prodigal return from Spain and France in September of 2022, when his health took a turn. Biden was president, the Congo was deep within a humanitarian crisis spurred by Western influence and after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, there was an energy crisis causing inflation worldwide. As I write this, the Congo is still in a humanitarian crisis and the US has bombed Iran while keeping inflation at bay, for now. Every era shares a common trope of political violence, international economic instability, and repetition of history.
And it makes me wonder what would the images of global suffering look like then and now.
This film screening and performance by Christina Cha, took place in October of 2024, a precursor to the US elections where Trump would assume presidency through a majority win and almost one year after the beginning of the War and genocide in Gaza. After poignant introductions by fellow classmates Hijab Ahmed and Nelliane Bateman, detailing the career and life of Christina Cha. Christina stands as an example of making time and space to grieve and reflect on her Aunt’s existence in the world and as students we were tasked with the same homework. In our Poetry and Prose class, we had the opportunity to dissect what grief means to us and how it manifests in our own writing. Each student was asked to write a letter to a loved one, calling out to them as if they were in the room with us (maybe they were).
Here’s part of my reworked letter:
Dear Dad,
I convinced myself that we would have more time together, even though your ailing health said otherwise. I know now even in your last moments you wondered where I was and a little piece of me breaks every time I think of you layingponderingwondering where your daughters were and why they aren’t there. I imagine you worried about the world you were leaving me in, single and childless, to your chagrin. I know that so much of the trauma that you dealt with as an African immigrant living in America left you pleading for more than what this nation promised you and you didn’t want that for me. For as long as I can remember,I have carried this knowledge on the American Lie with me, it has also felt like a backpack of trauma that I can never unload. But I’m unloading it now.
Letters like these are living lessons on how the trauma suffered by our loved ones after they have passed, passes on to us. They stand to remind us that intergenerational trauma can bloom from the wounds of grief and as time continues for some of us we become more comfortable by addressing it. In Christina Cha’s piece, Raped and Murdered, she shares how her family is haunted by her Aunt Theresa’s death much like we are all haunted by the passing of a loved one. Grief emanates through her family in their dreams and day-to-day, this harps on the brazen grief-link that bonds all of us. I know for me, since my father’s passing, reminders of him are not ephemeral but perennial. I smell him in his clothes that I kept as a relic, prompting scenes from my own memory bank, which remind me of who he was and my own existence in relation to him and the world around us.
After my class watched clips of Christina Cha’s movie, You Are My Audience (2023) co-produced and co-starring Christina. We also had the pleasure of watching an audio and visual amalgamation (re)Dictee (2023) by filmmaker Linden Renz, about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s symbolic book Dictee spoken through germ of speech. Both films were capstones portraying the symbolism of shared narratives across cultures. We had the opportunity to ask Christina pointed questions on reliving the story of her Aunt’s death. She replied honestly, that it doesn’t get any easier, that she still has a frank distaste for Manhattan, the city where her father constantly searched for the truth when she was a child, and that took her Aunt Theresa from her. One student even asked if she felt like she conjured up her Aunt Theresa every time she wrote about her. I think you know the answer to that.
What was remarkable about You Are My Audience was how each storyline depicts how a memory can be shared across cultures, even if there is no apparent link, passion can create a tie. For the Cha’s, Theresa’s art is a keepsake for her family, just like Jason Brinkenoff’s, a titular character from You Are My Audience, searches for kid portraits, which evoke a common emotion of vulnerability found in Jason’s childhood photo. Jason was mourning his mother’s abandonment and Christina was mourning her Aunt Theresa’s sudden death. This quote from Raped and Murdered encapsulates this:
From here I see you, in a ghost-shock of a dream, post-murder, pre-teen. You kneel at the base of the stairs, bowing away from me, in a funeral white dress and long, black braid against your back, to your waist.
Theresa’s passing also leads the family to band together to solve her crime. As a result of Christina’s own father’s dreams/nightmares, Christina’s father and Uncle James were propelled to go on a fact-finding mission that led them to Theresa’s original crime scene, where the police refused to search even though the dogs knew. If it wasn’t for the Cha family’s dedication to believing in themselves through their haze-filled grief, there would not have been a break and solution in the case; a testimony to the powerful symbiosis of grief.
The event ended with Christina reading an excerpt from her new book, Dreaming of a Unicorn, set to release this summer. The students who didn’t have the opportunity to ask Christina questions were emboldened to tell her what her work and Dictee meant to them. I rushed at the chance to share with Christina that her work reminded me that loss and grief are formless, however, it’s your interpretation of it that dictates what it exemplifies to you. What I believe we all experienced in this event was our collective humanistic bond of grief and loss. Now as artists and writers, we get to shape it.
