You speak very softly, you speak in a whisper.

The mother says “the hearts of the people are measured by the size of the land,” but this has a false ring, followed by “As large and as silent,” and we learn that another language (Chinese? Japanese?) is “mandatory.” Yet in exile, the Korean refugees retain “MAH-UHM,” the spirit of the home country in their hearts, the “spirit heart” (45-46) and that they retain the language by speaking it together at night: “You speak in the dark. We learn that some Koreans escaped to China rather than live under Japanese occupation, but even in China, they were not allowed to speak Korean. We immediately know that the character will live to reproductive age, because she is a “Mother”– the first word of the chapter and one repeated plaintively throughout as a kind of keening refrain. The chapter starts, as “Clio” did, with a portrait of (who we assume to be) the subject, and it ends with an older photo of the subject, where “Clio” ended with a (false) illustration of the character’s death.

As with Yu, we have some sense, already, of what will happen to this character. “Epic Poetry” is the history of the mother, in contrast to the more general history in “Clio.” The stage set with the Japanese occupation of Korea, Cha zooms in on a personal character.

Dictee sparknotes