Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

"Early in her affecting memoir, Kat Chow writes, “It is not incorrect to say that for years, the way my family grieved my mother was to avoid acknowledging her altogether.” Seeing Ghosts is a corrective to that silence, wherein Chow writes her mother “into being” and excavates her family history. A founding member of NPR’s Code Switch, Chow’s interest in race, identity and cultural history drives her memoir’s larger project, tracing her family from southern China to Hong Kong, Havana and the United States. The result is a meditation on what we owe our ancestors, generational grief’s root system and the melancholia of loss."