Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief - Hardcover

Chang, Victoria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1571313923 ISBN 13: 9781571313928

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2021

Synopsis

A Firecracker Award Finalist in Creative Nonfiction
An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of the Year
A Kirkus Best Book of the Month

From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.

For Victoria Chang, memory “isn’t something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally.” It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.

Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted collages and missives on trauma, loss, and Americanness, Victoria Chang grasps on to a sense of self that grief threatens to dissipate.

In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories. 

About this title

About the Author

Victoria Chang is the author of Dear Memory. Her poetry books include OBIT, Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. OBIT received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN Voeckler Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. She is also the author of a children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, illustrated by Marla Frazee and named a New York Times Notable Book, and a middle grade novel, Love, Love. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Katherine Min MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA program.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Dear Grandmother,

Today I found a Certificate of Marriage and a translation of it by the President Translation Service. The date is July 26, 1939. Now I know your name: Miss Chang Chi-Yin. I also know you were 27 and Grandfather 26. I wonder if this was considered strange at the time, your being older than him.

I now know you were born on April 29, 1913. Seeing this date makes me cry. The tears are long and rusted. I have tried to tie them together into a long string toward your country. The farthest I’ve ever made it was Kansas. The tornadoes always break my tears.

Dear Grandmother, I now know you were born in Chingwan Hsien, Hopei Province. I google Hopei and see it is in the North of China, where all the good doughy food Mother used to make comes from―the bao zi, jiao zi, and shao bing. I can see how close you were to Beijing and Mongolia.

I learn that you were born one year after the Qing dynasty collapsed. I learn that you lived amid civil war. I wonder if this is why you took your children and left for Taiwan.

I can’t find your town, Chingwan Hsien, on Google because it’s probably spelled another way. After more searching, I figure out it is likely Jing Wan Xian. But I still can’t locate it on the map of Hopei, which I figure out is also Hebei Province.

The Certificate says you were united in matrimony at Chungking City, Szechuan Province. Google says there are thirty million people there. I try to imagine thirty million people who look like me. In that moment, grief freezes.

The Certificate says you were introduced to each other by Mr. Chang Kan-Chen and Mrs. Chou Chi-Ying. I wonder who these people were. I wonder if yours was an arranged marriage or if you loved each other. Or both. I wonder what love looked like in China in 1939.

The Certificate says: These two parties are now united forever in harmony on this auspicious day in taking an oath of mutual fidelity throughout their lives. What happened afterwards, I don’t know. I do know that when I met you, the one time I met you, you were no longer together and hadn’t been in a long time. But Mother never talked about that. Mother only ever bitterly talked about how you favored all of your sons.

The one time I met your former spouse, my grandfather, was when Mother brought me to the arcade to meet him. I played Ms. Pac-Man the whole time, while they stood near the door and talked. Their mouths moved but I couldn’t hear anything. All I remember is the sound of the yellow mouth eating white pellets.

I often think about what the poet Mary Jo Bang wrote about her dead son, What is elegy but the attempt/To rebreathe life/Into what the gone once was/Before he grew to enormity. That is what Mother feels like: an enormity. My history feels even larger. The size of atmosphere.

An elegy reflects on the loss of a loved one. What form can express the loss of something you never knew but knew existed? Lands you never knew? People? Can one experience such a loss? The last definition of absence is the nonexistence or lack of. See how the of hangs there like someone about to jump off a balcony?

I want to believe in the origin story. I want to believe we all desire to know how we came to be, who we came from. I want to know why my fingers are so long, why my mouth naturally frowns, why my back has chronic pain, why I have freckles all over my nose. Why my mind is so restless.

But what if, during her own migration, my mother’s memories migrated, too, and became exiled from their origins? What if both my origin and memory can never be pinned down?

Grandmother, in the list of people present during your marriage, there were two matchmakers, three parents, and a witness. Where was the fourth parent? I now know the names of three of my ancestors: Jin Hsuan-San, Chang Yen-Chen, Pi Pao-Chuan. I also have a photocopy of the original marriage certificate in Chinese. I now know your names in Chinese characters, though I can’t read them well.

My mother had a photocopy of each of these documents. And then she made another copy of the copies. So many copies to forget her past. If I throw them away, does that mean I was never born? In some ways, being born Chinese in America means not being born at all.

Maybe all of our memories are tied to the memories of others. Maybe my memories are tied to Mother’s memories, and Mother’s memories are like objects in a mirror―I see them, but I can’t ever reach them. When Mother died, my exile detached from her exile, and that gap filled with longing.

But with these papers, there’s now a new wind. A Mongolian wind from the North, one I have never smelled before. A new feeling that I, too, come from something, from some people, from somewhere.

***

Dear D,

Do you remember those Fridays in gym class when Ms. A made us jog around the field behind the school? Did you know they tore down the school a few years ago? The school is charred, but the field isn’t. The field is still there. The field foiled the trucks. The field won. My shadow is still in that field, attached to your shadow.

Do you remember how you used to run after me shouting you’re so ugly! How you would be in front of me, turn around and face me, jog backwards and laugh, Why are you so ugly? I yelled back at you with silence.

Dear D, I doubt you remember the fields, but the fields remember. I’ve wanted so many times to return to that field, to hear the grasses tell me what they heard.

Sometimes I wonder if you chased me one time or many times. I wonder how memory can become larger and larger. Does it matter whether you were wearing shorts or not? Whether the shorts had a stripe down each side? I imagine you had tube socks on. I imagine they had blue stripes. Sometimes I think of H, who once threw an icy snowball at my face. Did he do that once or every winter? And M, whenever we were alone, telling me to go back to China.

Sometimes I think about the styles of these bullies―some preferred to work alone, some needed an audience. But all of them had eyes that singed.

We often speak of memory as something that lingers, that returns again and again. Maybe memory is more like a homicide, each time it returns, it’s a new memory, one that has murdered all the memories before.

Last night, we were driving in a car in Montana, a scientist and two poets. The scientist turned off the headlights by accident. All went black. And it was beautiful. For a moment, even trauma was gone. And then he found the switch, the lights came back on, and we were again driving underneath the fog, and all of my memories returned.

In that moment, in the darkness, it felt like I had seen Elizabeth Bishop’s moose:

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church
homely as a house
. . .
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

But in fact, I had seen nothing. In darkness, my body had emptied of all memories. In that moment, nothing had shape. Maybe Bishop’s moose is death.

Dear D, a while back, I found you on Facebook. I saw two children with curly brown hair. You, like me, must teach your children how to be kind. You looked fit, like a runner. I imagined you running backward again. Step by step, able to shout and laugh at once, a small crowd gathering around you, all the same kids who are friends with me on Facebook now. How they looked on, some laughed.

Sarah was the only one who said anything. When she saw me crying in the locker room, she stopped, asked me if I was okay. Recently, Sarah messaged me and seemed to feel relief that I was still alive. Her concern startled me, as I had spent decades forgetting those early years, telling every new person I met that I had a great childhood. Because I had no history, history could be made, like a painting.

D, I wanted to send you a message and tell you about all the years your face stayed in my body, how you were that fog in Montana. Instead, I silently scrolled through your photos and looked at one where you stood next to Nina at a reunion and had captioned it the one that got away.

Sometimes I think I was the one who got away. From you, those kids, that quiet street on Langlewood Drive in Michigan. But then the fog. There’s an eye in the middle of that fog.

In truth, I am ashamed to write this, to still think about the past, to still have these memories. I wonder if I am ashamed of the memories, the events, or myself. That fundamentally there was something wrong with me, my family, my countries I never knew.

Recently, in her book, All You Will Ever Know, I read about Nicole Chung’s experiences being bullied in a mostly white town, Cathy Park Hong’s experiences being mocked on a school bus in Minor Feelings, Sejal Shah’s experiences in This Is One Way to Dance, and Jaswinder Bolina’s memories in Of Color, and my memories returned again, like Bishop’s moose, high as a church / homely as a house. While reading, I suddenly felt less ashamed, less alone, and less silent.

Maybe memories are not to be forgotten but also not exactly to be remembered. Maybe that glorious, lumbering moose that stops us for a moment isn’t death after all. Maybe it’s memory, which is the exit wound of joy.

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571313923
• ISBN 13: 9781571313928
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 136