Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow
Review of Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow
“Mommy: I have long known I’d never be able to truly know you. That knowledge came quick like a bolt of grief, until it just was.”
Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow (2021). Published by Grand Central Publishing.
I’d been waiting to read this book for so long. Although the trend in publishing right now, especially in memoir, tends to skewer towards dead mothers (I’ve read Crying in H Mart and Tastes Like War before this), I knew about this book since the beginning of the year. I remember it was on a list for books that are coming out in 2021 that you need to watch out for, and my eyes immediately gravitated towards the cover. And then I forget about the book—but I never forgot about the cover.
It was in a Barnes and Nobles, while wandering around with my sister, when we passed the memoir section and I saw the cover once again. And I knew I had to pick it up, although not then (I wish I could afford new books from Barnes and Nobles. What a dream!). So I put a hold in for it at my local library and called it a day when I drove over to pick it up.
Seeing Ghosts is a memoir about the death of Chow’s mother when she’s a teenager. We juxtapose scenes from past, present, and future in order to get the holistic picture, rather than just going through the story in a chronological order. It feels very natural and smooth, something that transitions between these eras quite seamlessly.
Well, I’ve said a lot already, so let’s dive straight into this review, shall we?
After her mother’s death, Kat Chow seems to find her mother in everything she does.
We often pin people to the location and era that we’re born into, which is something I found interesting in this memoir—it actually defies that expectation. Her father went to MIT and her mother was from Hong Kong, after leaving China during the 1950s, and somehow they ended up together in Connecticut, the United States, with three daughters. Kat is the youngest daughter, the only one still living at home when her mother dies. Her one sister is in medical school, the other in her final years of university. But it is Kat who is alone with their father in their grief, especially when he retreats back into himself and
Chow’s mother’s death was relatively unexpected, since the family often didn’t go to doctors it seems. Her mother’s brother ends up ultimately blaming Chow’s father for the reason why her mother didn’t go to the doctor, because he refused to let her go. The other story that we’re presented is that the mother didn’t go to doctors because she didn’t want to pay the money to go to one; a story thread that’s presented throughout the memoir is that the mother was the breadwinner of the family, while the father had a series of failed businesses.
Grief as an intergenerational culture in immigrant communities also plays an interesting role in this memoir. As mentioned before, Chow’s parents are both Cantonese-speakers who moved to the United States in an area where back then there weren’t many Cantonese speakers. There’s simple luxuries of going to a restaurant two or three hours away in order to get the food that tastes like home, but besides that, they seem pretty alone in this.
Chow’s father specifically has some trauma packed into his past. He had a father who migrated to Cuba in order to find a proper income, but when he was about six years old, his father died suddenly in Cuba. The father was buried there, the family left unable to claim the body, and years later, when Chow’s father was in the US, his mother died. And the same story happened again there: he was unable to go back to Hong Kong and bury her or go to her funeral.
Her mother, on the other hand, had a mother that died quite young of the same issue. Then Chow’s brother died a stillborn, which became an initial point of obsession for her about death. Her mother is buried with the brother, and, when she was dying, she said she was going to be reunited with him. Then we see how Chow’s sister has fertility issues towards the last half of the book, continuing this legacy.
I think what this memoir could’ve perhaps used is more expressions of what Chow was feeling in the moment. I think the writing style is effective overall, but I wanted to know more about the emotional impacts of what has happened. I feel at times it was told in this straightforward manner that was more journalistic. This doesn’t happen all the time in the memoir, and the prose really shines when we begin to see more of Chow breaking through and into the narrative emotionally. She took a big risk in not telling this in chronological order, but it works. She manages to weave the threads together in a way that manages to keep it all together, making it a seamless read.
Overall Thoughts
I didn’t think this memoir was bad at all. I thought some parts of it were weird, such as the mother’s ghost randomly appearing in the creepiest ways—I think the memoir would’ve been fine without these random scenes. They came across as a bit forced, something that I thought was very unnecessary. But all in all, it’s a good memoir. She conveys her story and her family’s story quite eloquently. I do think this would’ve had more impact if this were published in a time that wasn’t consumed by memoirs about dead mothers, but Seeing Ghosts holds its own at the end of the day versus the competition. I’ll definitely be looking more into Kat Chow’s work at NPR and for any more writing projects that she may publish in the future.
