A review by daumari
Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow

5.0

my apologies if it feels like a shallow take, but reading this shortly after a [b:Crying in H Mart|54814676|Crying in H Mart|Michelle Zauner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1601937850l/54814676._SX50_.jpg|68668937] reread, Seeing Ghosts feels like a play cousin (to borrow phrasing from NPR Code Switch, where I first heard author [a:Kat Chow|17092696|Kat Chow|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1624470845p2/17092696.jpg]) because it's also a memoir about maternal grief by an East Asian diaspora author. They are distinctly different, though: Kat's mother died when she was 13, so much of Seeing Ghosts is her reflecting on the ever-present absence of her mother: how would she react to things, imagining conversations with her, and so on. Seeing Ghosts also serves as a biography of her father as he lives on, quietly yearning to resolve the generational trauma of a father he never knew who died overseas in Cuba. She also weighs the impact of her dead older baby brother on her family, and her mother's wishes to be reunited with him in death.

Chow's parents are also Cantonese/Taishanese like mine, so the romanized words really felt like I was reading from a relative (I might relisten to this as an audiobook too for the tones), with a yearning for knowing who our ancestors are.