The quiet, however, is possibly just one of many reasons Dictée was neglected by a broader audience. The desire to dignify her death through silence may have been well intentioned. In focusing on her death, after all, one risks diverting attention from her life and the thrilling body of work she left behind, which spans performance, video, and the written word.

The impulse to skim over the grisly details of Cha’s murder is tempting, and this has been the preferred tactic for critics who grapple with her art.

Shortly after her death, Dictée went out of print. The paper made no mention of her art or writing. “A woman who was found slain in a Chinatown parking lot was identified yesterday as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 31, of 247 Elizabeth St.,” read a short item in the New York Daily News two days later. An initial police report described her as an “Oriental Jane Doe.” The public barely eulogized her. Sanza, who committed a series of rapes in Florida before relocating to New York, dumped her body in a parking lot blocks from the building. A security guard there named Joey Sanza raped and strangled Cha. On November 5, 1982, mere days after the book’s release, she traveled to Manhattan’s Puck Building to meet her husband, the photographer Richard Barnes, who was working on a project documenting the building’s renovations. The book signaled a step forward for her. “It is hard to say what I feel, how I feel, except that I feel freed, and I also feel naked,” she wrote her brother John Cha just months before the book’s publication. A resolutely avant-garde book, Dictée liberated Cha from her malaise.

Dictee sparknotes