Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence and Grief by Victoria Chang (Milkweed Editions, 2021)
★★★☆☆
A collection of letters/poems exploring grief, intergenerational trauma, writing, and identity, from the perspective of a Chinese-American daughter and parent.
In some ways, being born Chinese in America means not being born at all.
I felt a profound connection to the subject matter of this collection. Chang writes of her mother’s death and her father’s dementia; between her epistles, she collages her mother’s narrative of escaping Communist China against family photos and documents. Some of my own lines of inquiry have mirrored Chang’s: How did my dad’s family escape the Cultural Revolution? Who are these people whose graves I am visiting but have never met? I’ve found artifacts of my mother’s and grandmother’s lives after their deaths—certificates and passports, journals I can’t read—and my other grandmother lost her mind to Alzheimer’s. I’m affected by the peculiar forms of grief experienced by privileged children of Chinese immigrants, many of which Chang explores here.
Lucky people are supposed to live in the future. (…) The problem is that the space between how you really feel and luck is always shame.
On content alone, I’d give Dear Memory five stars. But, while I found some of the ideas and phrases biting, I was disappointed by the hesitation in Chang’s craft. She recounts the way a former teacher critiqued her poetry: “I’m waiting for you to write shorter + shorter + denser + denser + louder + louder poems.” I wanted likewise for Chang to express herself with more conviction here. Though I recognize a poet might eschew answers—instead “writing into and toward ambiguity (…) liv[ing] the questions, as Rilke says”—I felt like Chang did know what she wanted to say or strike at, but tended to qualify her ideas with maybes and perhapses.
Regardless, I appreciate that a book like this can be a personal project, not meant for me or anyone else. And I nonetheless take away a sense of being seen, and a drive to find better ways to express my own personal griefs. (If Chang can write a book of letters, can I write a book of book reviews?) I read Dear Memory on the heels of R. F. Kuang’s novel The Dragon Republic, the sequel to The Poppy War (which I reviewed here), so I can’t help but think about Kuang’s ever-searing essay “How to Talk to Ghosts.” And I’m still thinking, too, about what Ocean Vuong said when he spoke at Green Apple Books in 2019, about writers of color and the prehistory work we must do:
[48:00] Often when we think about learning ourselves, understanding ourselves, we think about just what we’ve done in our life. But for someone like us, people like us, and many of us, many folks, I think that negotiating a prehistory is one of the most vital things toward self-understanding and self-knowledge. (…)
[49:57] For a writer of color, what we’re confronting when we start to write is the war of mythologies. Washington is a myth. (…)
[50:33] In [Night Sky with Exit Wounds], I negotiated my prehistory, and the history of my parents and my grandparents in the Vietnam War first. I put them first. And then I talked about American life in the second section. And I organized [On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous] in the same way. I want them to speak first because I came from them. And I think that was— Often, we can look at that and say, oh, what a burden. That’s a burden of the writer of color, to re-educate the populace on what really happened because the myth is so powerful. The myth of the textbook erases you in two seconds, two pages.
But I don’t think that’s a burden. It’s a privilege. It’s a privilege to ask and inquire. So when a writer has to look and ask questions about where they come from, what happened before them, only incredible discoveries can happen. (…)
[51:36] And it’s rare for white folks to do that. Because there’s an anxiety. If white writers look back enough, they arrive at atrocious things, including slavery and genocide. But we have to. As a country we have to commit to looking back and seeing where we come from. We are not— America is obsessed with the phenomenon. The independent, rising phenomenon. The “young new star.” And I benefit from that, the debut and all that. But when we investigate on the level of the sentence, we owe it to ourselves as thinkers and artists to ask, “How did I get here?”
And when we ask that question enough, regardless of where, what color, shade we are, we arrive at incredibly traumatic, potent space. And then the question is, it’s so fraught, so difficult, we have to create an art that can serve it. We have to create an architecture that can serve it. And that kind of innovation that comes out of that investigation is what art is made for. Now the stakes are risen, the water is at the high-water mark. What will you do, what will you say, when it’s your turn to correct history?