Wishing for a Home: Race, Class, and Global Capitalism in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and Se-Hŭi Cho’s A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf

1. Two Dislocations, Two Desires

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (2000) begins with a photograph of an anonymous wall carving, which reads in Korean: “Mother, I miss you, I am hungry, I want to go home to my native place” (front.).¹ And Cha finds her mother (Hyung Soon Huo) grappling with the desire to “go home.” The reason she desires it is because her family’s exile to Manchuria (to escape the Japanese occupation) and her birth there have effectively located her far away from her home, Korea. Her obligation to speak in “mandatory language” (Japanese), in particular, is taken to be indicative of her dislocation. “It is not your own. . . .The tongue that is forbidden is your own mother tongue” (45), Cha says. What Cha wants to suggest, however, is that her mother, although she is suffering from “the knowledge” “of having left,” nevertheless can find a way to satisfy her “yearning” for “being home,” proving that she “has not left” (45–46).² The way she does so is to speak her mother tongue “very softly” “in a whisper,” virtually “in secret” (45), by which Cha means not that her mother can speak it covertly but that her use of it is “the mark” of her being home. When she utters the Korean word “MAH-UHM,” she produces a thing that she can “carry” “in [her] chest”; it is not just a word that means “spirit,” it is her “spirit-heart” (46).³ Thus, the mother tongue she speaks in secret is a tongue that can serve as her home rather than merely refer to it. This is why Cha calls it “the mark of belonging” (46).

Going home is of special importance to Cha, who immigrated to the United States at an early age and assimilated into American culture. Cha, like her mother, raises her “voice” to “connect” herself to her home at a “distance” (56). “Bits of sound” she produces are “not hollow” and “not empty,” since they are “chips of stones” that can bear a material record of her home (what Cha calls its “dust” “particles”) (ibid). But here, Cha’s urge to return home is possible only “here” in the United States (a place, that is, “so far away from home”) for which she has left.⁴ For it is only when she “leave[s]” home (when, as Cha says, she becomes “American” and her nationality is replaced by “the other one”) that Cha first has a “will” to “come back” home (57). Cha desires both to stay “the same” and to make “the difference” (56). Indeed, she cannot return home unless she already leaves home. For Cha, the spatial rift caused by immigration is conceived as a gap that grounds the possibilities of both leaving and returning home, or, in her own terms, as a “void and space surrounding entering and exiting” (ibid).

Se-Hŭi Cho’s A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf (2000), too, radiates around the desire to go home. A dwarf (Bul-Yi Kim) and his family who have lived in an “unauthorized dwelling” on the hillside of “the Hangbok Zone 3 Redevelopment Area” in Seoul and have received a “condemnation notice” are in danger of losing their home. “‘So, finally,’ Mother said. ‘They’re telling us the house has to go, aren’t they?’” (81). The only choice left to them is to “sell” their “apartment occupancy rights” and “move” out of the town.⁵ Yong-Ho and Yong-Hŭi, the dwarf’s son and daughter, however, express a wish not to leave their home and ask their father not to sell their rights: “We’re going to live right here. This is our home,” they say, “We’re not leaving. We’ve got no place to go” (84). Yet despite their earnest request, the rights are sold to “a man in a [black] sedan” at a little above the market price (“Two hundred fifty...