A beautifully introspective reckoning with death, Kat Chow’s memoir Seeing Ghosts also charts her parents’ migration from Hong Kong in a vain pursuit of the American dream
- Because she is only 13 when her mother dies, Chow worries she will forget her. In a vividly written memoir, she reconstructs everything she knew about her
- Chow lost not only a mother, but also the bonds of family and confidence in her Chinese heritage as she and her sister faced hostility as migrants to the US
Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow, pub. Grand Central Publishing
In the final moments of this deeply affecting, vividly written memoir, Kat Chow ruminates on what it means to grasp at the memory of someone who, having always been there, is suddenly gone.
She is thinking about her dead mother, the primary subject of this book, but her contemplations would be immediately recognisable to anyone who has ever lost a loved one – anyone who has ever grappled with the weightlessness of absence when what the grieving want is the hard substance of a person’s presence.
But death affords no such consolation, and the business of trying to keep those who have died with us as much as we can is more difficult than it seems. It is, to borrow from this book’s title, a perpetual seeing of ghosts: we see those we lose everywhere but we are not quite able to touch them before they disappear again.
Seeing Ghosts is a beautifully introspective reckoning with death: Chow’s mother’s, to be sure, but also the more symbolic death that happens to her family after her mother succumbs to cancer. Because Chow is only 13 when her mother dies, immediately she worries she will forget exactly who her mother was.
