Korean history punctuated Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s life: She was born in a refugee camp in Busan in the first winter of the Korean War to parents who had fled Kando at World War II’s end. She was a child in Seoul during the April Revolution and emigrated to Hawai’i, then California, as Park Chung Hee consolidated power. She returned to South Korea around the time of Park’s assassination and the Gwangju Democratization Movement. She called herself an exilée in the title of one 1980 work and understood her family’s history as a sequence of displacements from and within Korea.

In this illustrated presentation, Spencer Lee-Lenfield draws on Cha’s own artwork and her family history to reconstruct how she understood the forces that shaped her life—and how we might contextualize her work across Korean and overseas Korean history.

Spencer Lee-Lenfield is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including the Journal of Korean Studies, PMLA, Narrative, and Criticism. Lee-Lenfield is working on a book about literary translation among Korean and Korean American writers over the past century.