I passed by this bush, you told me, and I saw this hand on the ground. The sun was higher than normal because you were late, and it reminded you to walk faster. You were on the precipice of danger, though I don’t know if, in your reality, you felt threatened. You were all alone on the path to school, which you’d ventured down many times before. That day you saw the dead body, mist rose off of the grass and dew collected on your shoes. There is something mischievous on your face, your gaze distant like you’re lost in thought. You are maybe four, and Yi Ma clutches your hand as if to keep you still. The water is a gray slant that stretches behind you. I’ve pictured your child self this way ever since I saw a photo of you on a beach with Yi Ma and a cousin. In my vision of you, your hair was cut short but long enough for your older sister, my yi ma, to pull into pigtails before you went to school. Now that I’m old enough to ask questions, I know that day when you found the dead body, you were likely living in Hong Kong. I swear to God or the gods or goddesses or whomever that eighty-five percent of my personality traits are yours that I saw and held on to as a kid, the remaining fifteen percent a result of the fallout of your death. Kids, so impressionable, always picking up the most subtle things, like the way you slurped your soup or sighed when stressed. Or maybe I saw it in a movie, some vague landscape with a pi-pa playing in the background. I probably lifted it from a story Daddy told me about his childhood. I know now that this specific image from my childhood is wrong. Gray, boxy buildings worn from decades of rain and sun sheets of green and beige beneath the fog: rice paddies and farms, overgrown grass reaching toward the pale sky.
I don’t know how you settled on this topic.Īs you spoke, I imagined you in a village somewhere in southern China. Caroline and Steph started to clear the table, chattering about whatever concerned high schoolers. We were at the kitchen table on a weekend afternoon with plates of mostly eaten cheung fun and bowls lined with the sticky residue of juk clustered in front of us. So let me begin with this: The first time you faced a dead body, you were a little girl. Like many of the ghost stories I’ve grown up with, this one needs to start with a death. Seeing Ghosts asks what it means to reclaim and tell your family’s story: Is writing an exorcism or is it its own form of preservation? The result is an extraordinary new contribution to the literature of the American family, and a provocative and transformative meditation on who we become facing loss. With a distinct voice that is wry and heartfelt, Kat weaves together a story of the fallout of grief that follows her extended family as they emigrate from China and Hong Kong to Cuba and America. A vivacious and mischievous woman, Kat's mother made a morbid joke that would haunt her for years to come: when she died, she'd like to be stuffed and displayed in Kat's future apartment in order to always watch over her.Īfter her mother dies unexpectedly from cancer, Kat, her sisters, and their father are plunged into a debilitating, lonely grief. She worried constantly about her parents dying-especially her mother. Kat Chow has always been unusually fixated on death. Recommendations from the African Diasporaįor readers of Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Alexander, an intimate and haunting portrait of grief and the search for meaning from a singular new talent as told through the prism of three generations of her Chinese American family.Workman Publishing Arrow Icon Arrow icon.Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Arrow Icon Arrow icon.Little, Brown and Company Arrow Icon Arrow icon.Hachette Nashville Arrow Icon Arrow icon.Grand Central Publishing Arrow Icon Arrow icon.
0 kommentar(er)
