For readers of Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Alexander, an intimate portrait of loss and the search for meaning, NPR's Kat Chow approaches the universal experiences of grief through the prism of her own Chinese cultural identity.
Growing up as children of Chinese immigrants, Kat and her two older sisters were taught to attach meaning to rituals they didn't understand. They struggled to find a place for those practices in their lives as they observed their parents struggling to assimilate. When Kat's mother died suddenly of cancer when she was only 13, she was forced to not only cope with the shock of loss, but to confront the cultural and familial divides that were inflamed by her mother's passing. Kat and her sisters were taught the dead and their spirits were meant to be served and attended to, but many of the ancestral rituals have lost significance or translation, forcing Kat into deep reflection. What obligations do children of immigrants have to carry on the traditions of their parents? How does one's identity get shaped by the rituals and habits that lose power over time? What things must be carried, and remembered, over every passing generation?
These are the questions explored in SEEING GHOSTS. The need to carry on a family's traditions from another country is always both a burden and blessing for immigrants' kids. Even when they experience something as universal as a death, a partition still divides them from most of their peers in how they feel their loss. The book will reflect on the way we grieve-and handle that loss-and how it follows us throughout our entire lives. After all: Grief illuminates our belief systems, what we do to comfort one another and what we do out of obligation despite ourselves.
