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.