Dear Memory by Victoria Chang
Review of Dear Memory by Victoria Chang
“My mother did so much for me. What I returned to her were empty containers.”
Dear Memory by Victoria Chang (2021). Published by Milkweed Editions.
The first time I read Victoria Chang was when I read poems from her collection Barbie Chang. I was a freshman in college majoring in business and was somehow the youngest person in a 480 level poetry workshop at my college, the highest creative class you could take at the school.
The rest of my classmates were seniors just getting ready to graduate, and, in a manner that I would say is very cocky, I could easily say I was one of the best writers in the class. But as I read Chang’s prose poems that day, I mentally stored her name away in my brain, which lead me to eventually buying a copy of Obit and absolutely loving it.
So when a playwright friend of mine posted on her Instagram story that she had bought a copy of Dear Memory at The Strand in New York, I lusted after it immediately. I requested my library buy a copy, and, an agonizing month later, I finally had the book in my hands. I sat and read all of it in one sitting the day I got it, which is a testament to how in love I was with this book. That being said, let’s begin this review, shall we?
In Dear Memory, poet and author Victoria Chang reviews the past through letters.
Chang’s last book to come out was Obit, a poetry collection that she wrote in the days after her mother had died. Recently, in 2022, her father has died as well, which is quite sad—I feel for her and the collective grief that she must be feeling right now.
Anyways, Dear Memory extends upon the themes she touched upon in her earlier collection, albeit it isn’t completely about her sadness and wallowing in memory. I’m glad she broadened her scope in these essays/letters because it makes it a larger conversation about how everything in life is connected.
The letters take on characteristics where the person isn’t always named, like a childhood friend or someone at high school. In cases like those, she merely starts the letters off with “Dear [Letter]—” and then doesn’t delve into the specifics of their identity.
I really found this an interesting concept because then she removes the agency away from the individual and really forces the reader to just look at the story as a whole and what it’s trying to say, which is unique for a letter. We often read letters to hear someone’s side of things or about their life, but Chang turns them into a medium of storytelling unlike something I had ever seen before.
Other key threads that run through the letters are her grandparents and ancestry. She includes documents like immigration papers, old photographs with poems edited onto them, and documents from the past in order to show where exactly she came from.
While she doesn’t contain the exact memories behind these documents, and the people who had them are now dead and gone, it asks the question about the significance of these sorts of items as they’re passed down. What happens to a memory when it’s never articulated properly? Does it become a new one, or does it just fade away into a meaningless void?
There are also the letters where she specifically refers to her parents, and this was also written after her mother’s death. Grief isn’t just about her mother dying, but it lingers in the corners of the pages of this book. A lot of these letters carry a lingering undertone of sadness for something that has been lost, whether it’s tangible or intangible.
The writing of these letters is absolutely beautiful as well. Sometimes you can read something and just know that someone is a poet whose spent years refining their craft, and that’s what you get here with Chang’s writing. It’s lyrical, it’s haunting, and there are so many moments that I wanted to highlight in this library book because I wanted to take them and never let go.
There are many literary references and broader cultural references, especially ones particular to the Chinese-American diaspora experience. Chang puts into words what many of us fail to express when it comes to what’s boiling inside of us. She notes that memory is a work in progress, but also that it has many limitations in what we can remember. She doesn’t remember or know everything about her family history, and so she is here trying to make sense of it.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a must-read book for any writer. I highly recommend picking this up if you’re interested in writing, grief, letters as a form of art, or learning how to heal.
Definitely couldn’t limit the demographic of this book’s audience just to writers, especially because it’s so beautiful, but I think writers truly can take this and learn a lot about hybrid work and beautiful writing just by studying it. It also has some interdisciplinary photography and poetry scattered about its pages, little mementos from Chang’s life, so it’s a good comparison to mark the context and content of the letters.
