... Chow’s memoir is a memorial to her mother delivered in a graceful, captivating voice. Like several acts of tribute to the dead in this book about grief and family, immigration and ancestors, it’s accomplished long after the loss that it marks ... A certain kind of sorrow lingers because a part of us wants it and wills it to persist, and Chow artfully and intelligently maps which kind of grief this is ... Chow exercises such control that her tone manages somehow to be both brooding and affectionately humorous ... gives flesh to this theory, the idea that loss of country and loss of loved ones can hook us with similar perpetual sorrow, through storytelling that brings alive both Chow’s mother and father, drawing their characters tenderly but with unflinching honesty.
The book reads like a memory album, of enduring images of Chow's mother and of family treks and private jokes ... Seeing Ghosts is no tearjerker. The book’s emotions are restrained, dry, even (an inheritance from Chow’s father?). It doesn’t manipulate, nor does it seek to recreate an idyllic past ... As Chow grows older in these pages, she also grows more open and willing, enough so that she was able to write this fine book. We all have our ghosts that need witnessing, for their sake and for ours. In baring her memories and her soul, Chow reminds us why this task is so important, and how it lets us heal.
... magnificent ... In carefully arranged pieces, anecdotes laid together like mosaic tiles, Chow unleashes the power of her own grief after the loss of her mother ... Chow excavates her own history with ruthless honesty and deep respect ... It would be easy to characterize Chow's book as yet another grief memoir, another tale of how to wade through the years of loneliness and struggle after the loss of a parent. That would be selling the story short, not to mention failing to grasp its scope. Seeing Ghosts is about Florence, yes, but also about everything Florence's family means--a patchwork quilt of Chinese Americans making sense of the amorphous American Dream. Chow does this most skillfully in scenes with her father, a man who struggles with happiness, whatever that means, yet seems desperately to want ... Chow's memoir is not an easy book, which doesn't mean it's not an easy read. The prose is tight and lovely, one page and one fragment intertwining with the next. The experience of reading it is enjoyable, despite the subject matter. But that is where Chow's journalistic skill triumphs: she feeds readers an impossibly challenging topic through beautifully seasoned bites. The result is that readers turn the last page having swallowed a delicious meal, only to realize there is so much more for them to digest. Seeing Ghosts is a book that will leave readers thinking, mourning, probing the absences and injustices of American life, equally haunted and soothed by ghosts
... while Seeing Ghosts would not exist without Chow's grief — while Chow would not be the person she is now without that grief — her project here aims for more than just mapping her primal anguish ... Chow was one of the cofounders of NPR's Code Switch, and her reporting background and deep interest in race, identity, and cultural history drives her memoir's larger project ... In writing about her mother's life and death, and what came before and after, Chow excavates her history and the ways that distance and longing refract across generations ... Memories like this, though startling, inject levity as Chow grapples with all she cannot know about her mother ... Chow has, in a way, preserved her mother, satisfied her request to be taxidermied. But she has also given up her ghost and released it to the world.
... undeniably one of the best books you will read this year. Not one of the best nonfiction new releases, not one of the best memoirs; but one of the best books, period ... Loss is a hard thing to read about, an even more difficult thing to write about, and crippling to endure. Chow, however, has an extraordinary ability to put her own personal experiences with grief into words ... First and foremost, the lens through which Chow sees and shares her mother with the reader is powerfully raw, emotional and real in a way few books are. Her writing will gut you from the very first page, the crisp clarity of her memories providing such detail you will feel as if you were there also ... There is something so approachable, so entirely relatable and heartrending, about the stories shared in Seeing Ghosts. The natural flow of the book, as Chow shares piece by piece without following a chronological order, mirrors how memories come and go at random in one’s mind, making it easy to lose yourself within the pages. She also effortlessly captures the many ways grief manifests, the ways we approach and avoid it, the ways it changes and shapes us all ... a reading experience you need to feel for yourself.
Chow recounts both her own youth and episodes from the lives of her parents, immigrants who met and married in Connecticut and whom Chow portrays with love and candor ... Wing Shek, Chow’s dad, became unable to throw anything away in the years after his wife’s death, and Chow portrays this reality with compassion ... Like the experience of grief itself, Seeing Ghosts is meditative, fragmentary, sometimes funny and occasionally hopeful.
The book is a tribute to Chow’s spirited mother, but it’s also a revealing portrait of three daughters trying to negotiate a complicated relationship with their father ... Chow’s book is an important and welcome addition to a growing catalogue of memoirs by a new generation of Asian American writers.
The ghosts Chow writes about in her elegiac memoir are both literal and metaphorical. In lyrical and probing vignettes, she explores the spaces left behind when someone dies and how the loss reverberates through generations ... Readers familiar with Chow’s reporting on NPR will not be surprised at her storytelling skills, which shine even more brightly here. This haunting, deeply moving, and beautifully written chronicle of the immense grief that once tore Chow’s family apart and now binds them will resonate with every reader.
The poignancy of journalist Chow’s debut memoir can be felt instantly when she confesses that she still struggles to comprehend her mother’s death in 2004 and finds herself often rushing to glimpse her memorial ... As a loving tribute, Chow vibrantly tells the story of her mother’s life with great dexterity and in luminous detail ... There is levity braided into the memories ... By uniting family memories, elements of Chinese culture, and an intimate perspective, Chow wraps tragedy and history into an affecting memorial ... A powerful remembrance of a family unmoored by the loss of its matriarch.
Chow writes longingly about her mother, who died from cancer, in this intimate debut about a life shaped by loss ... While deep emotion drives her writing, Chow generally avoids oversentimentality and buoys what could otherwise be an overwhelmingly despondent narrative with bursts of joy and irreverence ... The result is a moving depiction of grief at its most mundane and spectacular.
