User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
All the stars! The highest rating! A very good book, from a very, very biased reader.
Rating: really liked it
when i first started
seeing ghosts, i was slightly worried by the unfortunate timing of its release, as it shares a number of unlucky similarities with the well-loved 2021 memoir
crying in h mart: it's a life-spanning memoir written by an east asian woman as she struggles to find a foothold in the midst of her mother's cancer diagnosis (and subsequent death). but these are only surface-level similarities.
by contrast,
seeing ghosts is steeped in ambiguity. for most of the mother-specific memory unraveling, details are unspecific, insubstantial hypotheticals—sometimes total creative conjecture about reanimated spirits—so that readers are constantly inundated with phrases like, "i imagine..." and, "i can picture..."
while this threw me for a loop for the first 50 or so pages, i grew to really enjoy this little idiosyncrasy. i think it does well to subvert memoir conventions of accuracy and creative embellishment. it also feels true to chow's diasporic experience of her lineage. over the course of the memoir, she tries to fight the facts of her and her family's existence into submission by locating them. at times, this task is impossible. at times, it requires guesswork. at times, the task is impeded by language barriers, or cultural history, or the death of essential members of her family who she hadn't thought to seek out for questions like these until it was too late.
this narrative ambiguity is sometimes set beside conversations chow transcribes verbatim, videos she's taken and written out, documents or research she's discovered to aid in her memory reconstruction. i think that was one of the most enthralling parts of this memoir.
and while the deeply personal portrait of a daughter's grief seems like an unlucky publishing parallel to michelle zauner's early 2021 release, it is by no means explored in a similar fashion. here, chow's father—in all his eccentricities—takes center stage. he is lovingly wrought, even as chow grapples with the part he's played in her own suffering, and his own journey to rediscover his roots near the end of
seeing ghosts was particularly engaging. i loved the cuban-chinese history weaved through the narrative, i loved the slowburn characterization of chow's sisters and father, and though the grief surrounding her mother was puzzlingly obscure, there was a certain relief—and an even starker kind of grief—to the notion of not knowing enough to detail the last moments of your mother's life.
this is a memoir you have to wade through slowly to understand its full effects. it's gorgeous once you do, and illuminating, and mournful, and also beautifully free.
Rating: really liked it
Audiobook….read by the author Kat Chow
…..9 hours and 54 minutes
Kat Chow, Chinese-American journalist, has written a beautiful debut memoir about the loss of her mother — a profound debut examining love, loss, and grief
We learn about her relationship with her father, sister, and the death of a brother during a premature birth, as Kat struggles to comprehend her mother’s death.
Kat’s mother was born in China and immigrated to America to attend college where she met her father.
Kat shared about how lonely and isolating it felt after her mother died of cancer, because each of their family members grieved privately and quietly.
The audiobook was terrific—
Kat Chow’s stories were ruthless and honest…
They were funny parts.
Sad parts.
Her voice was easy to be with.
It’s so well written and ‘read’ —I was left with much love for Kat Chow….
wanting to thank her for telling her stories…. her grief… her truths.
It’s also impossible not to reflect on our own losses….parents, family, joys struggles, infractions, regrets of the past.
Emotions are restrained enough — but we feel them anyway - to make this audiobook a wonderful walking companion.
Rating: really liked it
Thank you to Grand Central Pub and NetGalley for my advanced reading/listening copies of this book.
I highly recommend the audio if you love listening to authors reading their books as well, especially for the pronunciation of the Chinese words she shares.
Last night, Kat Chow sat down with Chanel Miller (hulllo, DREAM DUO ANYONE?) to discuss the book and a part that really resonated with me was the pair discussing how Kat described her mother’s goofy & mischievous nature; which is different than how Asian mothers are typically portrayed and this really reminded me of my mom.
If you’ve been here for a while, you know that I’m the kind of person who will cry over a commercial but have only cried in ONE book before (hi Namesake) but, I cried in this one, put it down for a bit, and called my mom (who didn’t answer ASAP and then gave me a cheeky answer I think Kat and her mom would enjoy). I think that speaks volumes at how hauntingly beautiful Kat’s writing is and how deeply connected readers will feel reading her book.
This book might have hit me the way it did as I saw the similarities between Kat’s mother-daughter relationship in my own (the Cantonese words likely played a bit part in that, see comments for a few translations to enhance your reading), but will also truly resonate with anyone. This has been added to my list of fave memoirs.
On that note, there’s a small passage that I’ll end this review on—re: Kat’s dad discussing how he missed his wife taking care of him (i.e., cutting her fruit for dessert, page 294) and it might not mean much to all, but I’m leaving it here because it really got me:
“Almost anyone with a Chinese mother knows this small gesture usually means love.”
Rating: really liked it
based on the back-of-the-book synopsis, i was going into this memoir expecting it to be a story about mother & daughter(s), and the grief of losing a loved one too soon
what i got was a story that largely centered chow's relationship with her father, and the intricacies of their relationship both before and after her mom's passing
so many moments in this memoir felt so raw and painful, small moments between father and daughter that echoed in my mind long after i read them. chow really has a way of taking what one person might see as an unimportant memory and weaving it into a longer narrative that breaks your heart (her sister even teases her for seemingly never forgetting anything and holding onto things forever)
chow's mother of course makes appearances throughout the book but is not the central figure i thought she would be. that's not a negative aspect, just something i wasn't expecting.
i ultimately loved the direction the book took with its exploration of immigration and family ties, and the duty we feel to our parents even after they're gone
Rating: really liked it
There's this meme about grief that's floating around the internet. It's a picture of two scenarios: First, a large black sphere in a glass jar diminishing over time to the size of a marble. Then, below it, the large black sphere stays the exact same size as the jar enlarges around it.
It's captioned: "People tend to believe that grief shrinks over time. What really happens is that we grow around our grief."
I've read many memoirs, some of them about grief. They often center around trauma as an immediate event. The shocking and debilitating repercussions. Kat Chow's memoir is one that spans a lifetime, several if you count the lives of her family members, which I do. "Seeing Ghosts" is an emotionally generous, intricately researched look at what grief looks like as you grow around it. As you continue to live your life with the presence of those you've lost.
As I read "Seeing Ghosts," it struck me how few experiences I've had with Cantonese American literature. When was the last time I read "Lei sik dzo fan mei a?" or "Wah, gum guay!" in a book? When was the last time I read an "immigrant narrative" that didn't deify older parents but instead tried to really thoroughly investigate them for who they are – and who they might be hiding from their children? Using humor and horror, Kat Chow does not glamorize this experience, nor does she wallow in it as a guilt trip.
Is writing an exorcism or is it its own form of preservation? To me, "Seeing Ghosts" is a pouring of libations. For those who have experienced loss, this cup never empties.
Rating: really liked it
[review of an ARC]
I don't read a lot on grief. Not intentionally, it just doesn't come across my radar often. Coupled with the word "Ghosts" in the title (and the fact that I'm currently balls-deep in the 274 seasons of Supernatural), I didn't pick this up right away because it gave me "help, I'm seeing the ghost of my dead mother everywhere I go and it's sending me into an endless spiral of hard partying, drinking, and a general lack of self care" vibes. Admittedly, I gave it a try when I saw the blurbs from Ocean Vuong and Alexander Chee (I've discovered I will read literally anything blurbed by Chee), and was pleasantly surprised (also, that cover!).
The title is really only part of this story. Grief is a weird thing that spans lifetimes and generations and changes but then doesn't really change at all. We change around it. Kat Chow's particular grief (over her mother dying when Chow was a child) molds itself around her relationships to her father, sisters, her parents' immigrant experience, and her own existence as a daughter of immigrants. What do we really know about our parents as children vs what we learn when we're older? And how is that complicated when a parent dies before you grow up? How is that further complicated through the immigration lens?
I didn't intentionally read this after Speak, Okinawa, but it feels in conversation with that at times, around the mother-daughter relationship and the child-of-immigrant experience. Chow has written a very full story, not just about grief, but how it works its way through lifetimes and how we evolve around it at different stages of our lives.
Rating: really liked it
I loved this book from beginning to end and I'm so grateful to Kat for writing this and for asking the questions central in this book. What do we owe our parents? What do we owe our dead? And how do we craft ourselves in spaces that emerge after loss?
This is an important, instrumental book: Kat masterfully writes not just of her own loss and grief, but that of her parents. She looks at her family, their histories, and her own memory with clarity and empathy. Though ostensibly a book that's about who Kat became after losing her mother, the book is equally sharp on her relationship with her father, and it is here that Kat is most unflinching and brave. In less skilled hands, the narrative might suffer for the hints of magical realism that are embedded throughout, but by taking the chance— by trusting us, her readers— Kat manages to instead portray the continuous nature of grief and of the selves we might have been in one of the most effective ways I've ever read in a book. It's poetic, beautifully wrought, and filled with a love that translates off the page.
I can't wait to see what she does next!
Rating: really liked it
"This is a book about death" might not seem like the most appealing tag line at first, but in Kat Chow's capable hands, Seeing Ghosts becomes much more than that. It follows the aftermath of her mother's death from cancer, ascending the steep slope of this loss again and again in search of solace and, if not solace, then some semblance of understanding.
A book about death is of course a book about life, and how we try to go on — how an absence becomes a presence, with uncertain and sometimes jagged contours, and how grief continues to transform us in ways we never imagined. I'm grateful for how this book resists easy narratives of redemption, and how it patiently catalogs the stubbornness and beauty of flawed human relationships. And I'm in awe of how it collects so many intimate moments into a rich, ambivalent, almost incantatory whole.
Rating: really liked it
I thought the content of the book was excellent. It was interesting learning the dynamics of this authors family and reading how she coped with her feelings and her Mother’s death. However, I felt like the storyline was jumbled and became hard to read. It was as if the book was all the author’s random thoughts, memories and stories compiled in no particular order. I’m sure there was a reason for this but for me, it made it hard to stay captivated with the story.
Rating: really liked it
Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir deserves more than a short few words of praise and a rating from me. Instead: I'm going to sit down for a full review and documentation of the personal notes this book hit for me, as soon as I get the time.
Insightful, vulnerable, beautifully constructed and mostly
memorable in every sense of the word. Highly recommend!
Full review to come.
Rating: really liked it
SEEING GHOSTS by Kat Chow is an amazing memoir! In this book Kat shares very openly about losing her mother to cancer at a young age. I felt such an immediate connection to her as we are both Chinese. I loved learning about her family history and the writing really took me on a journey through time and grief. I quite enjoyed the use of the second person point of view throughout as Kat has so much to say and ask her mother. There were several extremely poignant parts that made me sad. I appreciated the honesty and relatability. While reading this book it made me reflect on my own family and how we’re all still dealing with our own ghosts in our own ways. I found this book to really resonate with me. It’s my fave memoir of 2021 so far!
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Thank you to Grand Central Publishing for my gifted copy!
Rating: really liked it
This book made me cry.
Kat adeptly maneuvers the personal and the political, the private and the public, the grief and the joy. The memoir tells the story of not just one deep and obvious loss, but of layered set of quotidian losses associated with migration, assimilation, and identification.
It is the quintessential story of the American family, and how they survive and reclaim their stories — collective and individual.
Rating: really liked it
What is [blank], if not a [blank]? That's not a question I had during the reading of this book, but it was certainly one that showed up within the book itself roughly a thousand times. The discussions of grief, loss, mourning, trauma, family, etc. were interesting, but the prose felt very juvenile. I feel bad for being mean, but that's the experience I had 😭
Rating: really liked it
One of the better grief memoirs out there. Read via audio (narrated by the author).
Disclaimer: I received a free audiobook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
