By Justine Trinh
When we think of Asian American studies, neuroscience, and Greek mythology, we might consider them to be separate entities with no intersections. Yet the beauty of Eunice Hong’s debut novel, Memento Mori, resides in its ability to weave these supposedly disparate concepts together to tell a coherent narrative. Memento Mori is composed of nonlinear snapshots of an unnamed Korean American woman’s life as she tries to come to terms with familial tragedy. This book explores the temporality of life, grief, and memory loss. While these concepts are universal, their existence alone does not make it easier when we experience them. Hong uses underworld myths like those of Persephone and Hades or Orpheus and Eurydice to make these tough topics understandable to not only us as readers, but also to the narrator’s younger brother, M.
Memento Mori follows the narrator as she tries to connect with M. She addresses him in the narrative, recounting moments and observations of their family history and her life. These reflections and meditations are interwoven with memories of the narrator telling M Greek myths as bedtime stories and him interrupting the stories to ask questions. These myths are then recast “through the lens of a Korean American family.” In addition to her grandmother’s failing memory, the narrator alludes to a family tragedy that necessitates the narrator’s desire to connect with M, and she is grieving for this loss.
The novel begins with an invocation to the muse of grief before questioning the existence of one. The title, Memento Mori, is a Latin phrase meaning “remember you must die.” While death is an inevitable act that everyone must experience eventually, we generally do not live with a constant reminder of this fact every second of our lives. There is something human about forgetting the constant presence of death and the power it holds on to us until the possibility of it hits us right in the face. The narrator must face the reality of death with multiple members of her family whether that be through natural or accidental causes. Death has a hold on us as we grieve for those who have gone and those still with us. There is an impossibility of going back to what it was before, and the narrator must reckon with that loss, whether that be with her aging grandfather or her grandmother who is losing her memory and the grief that follows.
Although the narrator recounts the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, she constantly also looks back to her own past. The myth has Orpheus go down to the underworld for his wife, Eurydice, and there he makes a deal where Eurydice is allowed to go back to the living with him if he promises not to look back. Unfortunately, he does, and she is lost to him forever. Similarly, the narrator is warned in the beginning of the novel that “each time you access a memory, you change something” and “the best way to preserve a memory is not to think about it at all.” Yet throughout this book, the narrator recounts such memories to her brother, evidenced by clues when she states, “you weren’t born yet.” Based on this statement, we know that the narrator is telling us about the memory because it gives the reader a timeline. In the present, the brother is alive as the narrator is recounting to him the events but within the memory, he is not present or alive as he was not “born yet.” The narrator wants to remember familial moments and to connect with her brother, yet by looking back, she is losing a piece of the memory the same way Orpheus loses Eurydice.
When I saw Memento Mori, I wanted to read it so bad. During my undergraduate years, I decided to major in Asian American studies and classical civilizations, but I was told these two things will never go together by some of my peers. As time has gone by, I have found works such as Sajni Patel’s YA novel A Drop of Venom, as well as the play The House of Baluyot. While I thoroughly enjoyed those works, those were retellings of myths, whereas Memento Mori distinguishes itself by using myth to connect brother and sister but also tie the overarching themes such as death and grief to an everyday family dealing with loss and secrets. Most of us know these myths and the feelings they invoke, but Hong brilliantly superimposes these stories onto this family to show how ubiquitous grief is despite the fact there is no muse of grief.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.