46 pages • 1 hour read
Theresa Hak Kyung ChaDictee
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Calliope Epic Poetry”
This section begins with an uncaptioned photograph of a woman. The narrator then addresses her mother directly and describes her life story. Her mother was an exile who moved to China from Korea due to the Japanese occupation. She was a child, only 18, when she left home because she did not want to witness the suffering in Korea any more. Even though she has left, however, the past is still her present and “it burns” (45). She is not allowed to speak Korean in China, as it is illegal to do so; however, she does so in secret because her mother tongue feels like home to her. She waits patiently until she is able to retrieve a sense of belonging: She says that in her “MAH-UHM,” or her “spirit-heart” (46), she feels certain that one day she will feel able to sing the song of her mother tongue.
Her parents (the speaker’s grandparents) regret dying before Korea become independent again. Her job as a teacher in a small village in China began in 1940. She is the first woman teacher to come to the village in six years. Due to Japan’s occupation of China, Japanese was also the official language in China. She notes that even the Korean teachers all speak Japanese to each other. Her life in Manchuria is harsh. She feels ill, and falls into a deep slumber. She dreams she visits a house and a restaurant, and everything feels unfamiliar. Three women each offer her plates of delicious-smelling food, but she rejects their offerings. She awakens as her parents sit around her and they fear that she is dying. A page of untranslated calligraphy interrupts the narrative. The speaker describes being in America and becoming a naturalized citizen. She describes that even when her mother has become a citizen of America, she still feels like an outsider as she is constantly questioned by authorities who doubt that she is an American citizen. The mother’s sense of alienation in the US is contrasted with the mother’s sense of recognition and homecoming when she arrives at a unnamed location. The chapter finishes with an uncaptioned photograph of the same woman from the first photo of the chapter, the speaker’s mother, after she has aged several decades.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Urania Astronomy”
There is an image of a human body sketched like an anatomical drawing of the body parts, with the body parts labeled in an unidentified language. The first section of writing is a poetic description of a blood sample being taken in a medical office. The narrator describes in excruciating detail the process of the needle puncturing the skin. As the needle enters, the speaker notices a “near-black liquid ink” (64) that seemingly cannot be contained. The medical procedure of having blood taken is described in poetic language with depictions of membranes and the body simultaneously being filled while it is being emptied by the needle.
A poem with the words in French and English on opposite sides follows. The poem describes sounds that blend together in memory and dreams: swans, rain, and speech. The bodily organs involved in speech (tongue, mouth, throat, lungs) are described as composing a single apparatus, “all assembled as one” (67). The process of attempting to remember and feeling uncertain about one’s memories is connected with the difficulties of speaking, with the act of biting one’s tongue being mentioned twice alongside descriptions of emotional uncertainty. The poem then compares being silent to being in a void. An anatomical image of the lungs, throat, mouth, and vocal cords is shown, with each body part labeled in English. The poem continues with a stanza describing language that frequently starts and stops. The poem ends on a statement of doubt, as the speaker laments that she can never find the appropriate time “to rest” (75) when speaking.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Cha explores the ramifications of the Japanese occupation of Korea through a more personal lens in these chapters. Similarly to the previous chapter in which Cha sets up a certain expectation through the chapter title and then subverts it, the chapter entitled “Calliope Epic Poetry” instead discusses a small, personal history: the life of her own mother. Cha also creates continuity through using an uncaptioned photo of her mother, Hyun Soon Huo, as a young woman, similar to the uncaptioned photo of Yu Guan Soon in the “Clio History” chapter. Cha is seeking to suggest a continuity in the narrative, despite the several decades of time that separate the two women’s lives. Cha describes her mother waiting inside of all the other forms of sanctioned speech—the prayers, the recitations, the echoes of speech—to speak her unsanctioned mother tongue. It is the mark “of belonging” (46) that her mother secretly carries, and that Cha expresses a desire to retrieve through the act of recounting her mother’s life experiences of exile, displacement, and loss. Like Yu Guan Soon, Cha’s mother’s life was irreparably shaped by the political, historical, and cultural forces around her.
The style of this chapter is more traditionally narrative, with the speaker describing her mother’s difficulties as an exile first in China and then the United States. However, Cha still uses post-modern literary techniques, such as interrupting the text with untranslated calligraphy, including uncaptioned photos, and moving between more linear, narrative storytelling and a Modernist, stream-of-consciousness style in certain passages.
This leads into the more experimental “Urania Astronomy” chapter, which includes several anatomical drawings of the human body, one that appears to be from an English scientific textbook depicting the body parts involved in speech, and a medical chart on the body’s points of energy flow, known as chi in Chinese medicine, with the points labeled with Chinese characters. Beyond the images, this chapter is almost entirely composed of a lyric poem. The divergence in the style of these two chapters is indicative of the breadth of Cha’s creative vision. Cha’s abrupt switching between voices, stylistic modes, and visual and linguistic representations was inspired by her background in film, specifically avant-garde filmmaking, which includes abrupt switches that mimic the edits of experimental films.
Cha interweaves the dream sequence of her mother’s illness with the story of Jesus in the desert rejecting the Devil’s three temptations. The allusion emphasizes Cha’s view of the martyrdom of Yu Guan Soon, her mother Hyun Soon Huo, and the martyrs that are referenced later in the text (St. Therese of Lisieux, Joan of Arc, and Persephone and Demeter). The three temptations include performing miracles (such as turning stones to bread so that people will follow him), of bowing to the Devil for unlimited power, and of testing God. The symbolic parallel between her mother and Jesus emphasizes her mother’s martyrdom for her identity and her refusal to assimilate to the overwhelming power of colonial rule. Cha’s anti-colonialism is clear in her depiction of her mother’s silencing and fear in her unfamiliar surroundings in China. Cha references religious texts throughout the story, and this thread provides more of her autobiographical background, as she was educated in a Catholic school after moving to America at the age of 11.
Cha shows the contrasts between Western medicine and Eastern medicine via images of Chinese medical charts describing the “chi” or energy flow throughout the body, alongside the Western anatomical chart of the mouth, throat, and lungs. Cha is suggesting that speech is an act of both spirit and matter, which further illuminates her vision for this work: to retrieve a spirit that has been lost in her mother’s tongue and her continual experiences of displacement and immigration. The mother tongue cannot be discovered without the mother: Cha’s attentiveness to mothers and daughters and the relationships between them is a central motif throughout the book.
