By Audrey Fong
When I first saw Kat Chow’s debut memoir, Seeing Ghosts, at Barnes & Noble, I picked it up because of its startling cover – blocky white letters sitting starkly against a black background, a salmon-colored fish with its eye crossed out in cyan. I like ghost stories. I like fish. It made sense to purchase it.
When I discovered it was about Chow’s mother’s premature death from cancer, I expected it to be much like Michelle Zauner’s Crying in Hmart or Grace M. Cho’s Tastes Like War – a meditation on grief and the abundance of sacrifices a mom makes for her children. While Chow lives with a persistent grief (“I feel like I always miss Mommy,” Chow tells her sisters) and there are many examples of her mother’s deep love (her mother dips into her retirement savings to pay for Chow’s horseback riding lessons and purchases space in the local newspaper to say happy birthday to Chow each year), Seeing Ghosts is different. It’s a deep dive into her family as a whole, learning about relatives she’s never met and getting to know her father as a person. It’s a preservation of her family’s history.
The book introduces us to her mother – the funny face she makes at her daughters, the “hide-and-seek in the darkened rooms of [their] house” during thunderstorms she instigates. She jokes to Chow once that she’d like to be taxidermized when she dies. This joke sticks with Chow. Even after her mother has been buried, Chow sees her mother’s taxidermized body everywhere, picturing her mother’s body constantly keeping watch over her. Throughout the memoir, she speaks to her mother directly, searching for answers about both her life and death – “Why was it you avoided going to the doctor all those years? I know these are not answerable questions – that there is likely not just one answer, but I still want to ask: Was this a problem of money? Or dread? Had you sensed, with trepidation, something shift within your body?” As Chow looks back over her mother’s life, she confronts the ghost of the person her mom used to be, before kids, before marriage, and even before immigrating to the U.S. from Hong Kong.
While the impetus for the book was losing her mother, her mother is not the only ghost in the story. This is where Chow’s memoir departs from other grief memoirs. While Crying in Hmart and Tastes Like War both touch on other family members, their memoirs are still largely focused on their mothers; the other relatives and friends present in the memoirs serve as secondary characters. In Seeing Ghosts, Chow writes detailed histories of many other family members, who haunt her life almost as often as her mother’s ghost does. In telling the story of her mother and her death, Chow meets several other ghosts in her family: her maternal grandmother, who died a few years after her mother’s birth; her older brother Jonathan, who died an hour after his premature birth; her father, a man she grew up with but who remains a mystery; and her paternal grandfather, who lived and died in Cuba far from his family back in China. These ghosts, remembered after Chow’s mother’s death and rescued from the detritus of the past, are the “ghosts” of Chow’s title.
These explorations into her family members’ lives function as mini history lessons for the Chinese diaspora, sharing a few of the reasons why we ended up where we are today. For example, Chow’s parents both first came to the U.S. for higher education, similar to many relatives on my mom’s side. Desperate to enter the country and to achieve the American dream, they entered the U.S. through universities since Chinese students often viewed the U.S. as a space for more freedom of speech and more advanced academic knowledge. Meanwhile, Chow’s paternal grandfather moved to Cuba and worked in restaurants, hoping to improve his family’s financial status back in China. For me personally, one of the most interesting parts of the memoir is when she visits Cuba with her father and older sister to find the remains of her paternal grandfather. During this trip, she learns about the history of Barrio Chino, the Chinese neighborhood in Cuba, and how Cuba used to have thousands of Chinese residents until Fidel Castro restricted Chinese immigration.
Migration and the struggles associated with immigration and achieving the American dream are central themes in the memoir. As Chow grows older, she better understands how her parents’ frugality was a symptom of their financial struggles in the U.S. She questions why her parents aimed for survival and not more, wondering, “Why stop at survival? I wish I could ask you. Why not want something more, like joy? But maybe this is what you thought you couldn’t have; maybe this is what you wanted your daughters to have as our legacy.” This jump within two generations’ ways of thinking – from aiming for survival to striving for joy – reflects a shift not only in thinking but also of a generational gap in financial comfort. Now that she and her sisters have more comfortable, stable, professional jobs, they can look beyond survival and aim for joy. Even more so, it’s representative of their differing views of the American dream. For her father, he views their house and possessions as signs of their having attained the American dream; for Chow, she views their constant struggles as a sign that the American dream has let them down. Through conversations with her father about the American dream, she gets to know her father better and to better understand his worries and motivations. This difference in view serves as a good starting point for readers to debate what the American dream really is or should aim to be, what it should guarantee, and what one needs to thrive in a country.
While Seeing Ghosts is a meditation on grief and an introduction to Chow’s mother as a person, it’s also a look at the history of the Chinese diaspora and a reflection on what it means to succeed in a country. It questions the U.S. and its assumption of being a country of plenty and it begs the U.S. to do more to help its people achieve the American dream – a timely topic given the economic insecurity many U.S. residents face today.
Seeing Ghosts is available from Barnes & Noble, Grand Central Publishing, and Loyalty Bookstore.
Audrey Fong is a writer, interested in food, coming of age stories, and Asian American narratives. She earned her B.A. in English from UC Irvine and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.