Beyond Loss: Exploring Family, Culture, and Memory

I miss my Literati Book Club - they used to have such great selections. I loved that if I didn't like the selection of the club I was in, I could switch to another club that month. There were many clubs - run by authors, celebrities, and athletes. The club ended last December, unfortunately. The company decided to focus on their children's book clubs. Good for them, but I miss the adult Literati Book Club's discussions that were available online and special interviews with the authors.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when my Literati book from Cheryl Stray’s Wild Reads Club arrived with Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir by Kat Chow. It sounded like a potentially scary memoir, but I was intrigued. I picked the book, knowing it was a memoir involving grief.

I have been in the thick of some of the hardest losses a person can experience in life. My mother died in 2021, my ex-husband and father of my two children died in 2022, and my father just passed away at the beginning of 2023.

I have been reading a lot of books with a grief theme these last few years. I find it has helped to read other accounts of how people are struggling to deal with the grief - like I have been. Reading Chow's memoir in ways was like reading a ghost story. It just wasn't scary. It was relatable.

Chow was haunted by images of her mother’s “taxidermic self,” picturing what her mother would be doing in situations after her death from cancer. They shared a fascination with death – a subject that many find uncomfortable to discuss, but Chow discussed freely with her mother.

My mother and I didn't discuss death - not until the very end.

Like many memoirs, she talks about family, loss, love, and grief, but the book goes far beyond exploring the process of her loss and grief. The mother-daughter initial focus of the story is just part of the larger story.

I was pleasantly surprised to find this book to be an intimate and poignant narrative about three generations of Chow’s Chinese-American family and how we are not just affected by death but how we can grow from it. Chow delves into her family’s history through her father’s plight to reunite the remains of his parents. Her extensive research of political and historical events shows how they directly altered the lives of her ancestors and millions of Chinese.

She touches upon her struggle with trying to learn Cantonese, the language of her ancestors and mother, and how essential pieces are lost in assimilating with the American culture. She shares the rituals she learned from her mother as a child, not realizing their importance until later in life(like many of us). She uses humor effectively in demonstrating the absurdities life will throw at you in the worst of times. Her story is raw in places, making you feel as if you are reading her diary as Chow processes her grief as she writes.

It's a great read and relatable in many ways, which surprised me a bit. I am a second-generation Greek-American struggling to learn Greek via an app. I know and have seen how, as time ticks by, cultural traditions are lost or fade and how the yearning to be able to speak the language of your grandparents makes you feel closer to them. Even if you never met them.

Chow's memoir Seeing Ghosts pays homage to her ancestors and her culture. At the very core, this book is about family and the relationships within a family, a story that almost everyone can relate to on some level. I highly recommend this book and rated it 4 Stars.