Women, Writing, Theology: Transforming a Tradition of Exclusion

10. The Body, to Be Eaten, to Be Written: A Theological Reflection on the Act of Writing in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee

183 10 THE BODY, TO BE EATEN, TO BE WRITTEN A Theological Reflection on the Act of Writing in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee Min-Ah Cho Speaking in Two Tongues: A Story of Myself Writing. I do not know when it touched me or where I was when it arrived. I do not even know why I was so haunted by it. It is as though I have had a recurring dream, since it has always been a part of my life. When I write, I feel more. When I write, I feel beautiful. When I write, I feel I am finally partaking in reality. It is not because writing is something that I can do well or something that is easy for me. Writing is painfully difficult for me, and it always makes me feel inadequate. Writing is, for me, an experience of both love and hate. Being a “non-resident alien” in the United States and speaking and writing in my second language, however, has drawn me into a totally different experience of writing.1 As a second-language English speaker and writer whose mother tongue is Korean, I continually brace myself for a challenge that presses on me in every waking moment, at times even in my dreams. Struggling to express my thoughts and emotions as fully and fluently as I want, I have experienced deep frustrations because I do not speak and write in “standard English.” In my first couple of years in the United States, these frustrations were hard to 184 / Women, Writing, Theology bear. I wanted to speak, write, and communicate as I did when I spoke Korean, but I always failed. Moreover, the connotations and tropes of both literary terminology and everyday language were deflected and distorted before they reached me. The multiple senses that come to life in metaphors and similes—color, taste, texture, and smell—were lost somewhere between English and Korean. For quite a long time, these frustrations dragged me into the profound fear of uttering words.2 Years passed, and my frustrations and fears have been moderately alleviated, although I still have difficulties penetrating the cultural meanings of some English expressions. I have become accustomed to the reality that speaking and writing always involve a process of learning and being challenged. Interesting and unexpected experiences of writing, a practice which I am now undertaking, have emerged as I have gained some familiarity with English. The more I have developed the ability to catch the nuances in the English language, the more I have found new and unprecedented hunches in my understanding of the sounds and meanings of some Korean words that had never sounded strange to me before. The two languages clash and interact with one another. They take me into a “third space” where my ideas are challenged and my old convictions are dismantled.3 Stumbling over the two languages occurs not only in my literal and linguistic activities. I experience similar struggles as I study theology, yet in a more metaphorical way. My ethnicity and gender have been considered as a mark of “otherness” in the long history of Christianity , and the ideologically constructed images of the Western male God always make me feel impeded and abashed. As I speak and write, my speech and writing mumble with the language manufactured in the church tradition. Such alienation at times wears a very friendly face both in the church and the academy. I have frequently been asked to represent my ethnicity and gender, by delivering “authentic” knowledge of Korea (or “Asia,” more likely) and even just by being present as a marker of diversity. I feel uncomfortable with such an inquiry because I often sense that it assumes that I speak authentically and purely as a “Korean woman.” I really have no idea about being and speaking as an “authentic” “Korean” “woman.” I rather believe that my national and The Body, to Be Eaten, to Be Written / 185 linguistic identity is a product constituted by continual exchange with other human beings and social circumstances in public spheres, and that therefore it never settles down into a discrete identity. If my literal bilingualism is a trial that makes me uncertain of language , my metaphorical bilingualism is another trial that keeps me constantly questioning “truth.” And those two trials never separate from each other. As I fluctuate between two languages, both literally and metaphorically, unresolved questions...