Kat Chow, SEEING GHOSTS: A Memoir
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[0:37]Cat Chow is the author of Seeing Ghosts.
[0:40]She is a writer and journalist,
[0:42]and was her reporter at NPR,
[0:43]where she was a founding member of the Code Switch team.
[0:46]Her work has appeared in the New York Times magazine,
[0:48]The Atlantic, and on Radio Lab, among others.
[0:51]She's one of pop culture's happy hours' fourth chairs.
[0:54]She has received a residency fellowship from the Malay Colony,
[0:57]and was an inaugural recipient
[0:59]of the Key Day Up Fellowship at the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat.
[1:03]Welcome, Cat.
[1:04]Thank you so much for coming on Momstone Have Time to read books
[1:07]to discuss your beautiful memoir, Seeing Ghosts.
[1:11]Thank you so much for having me on.
[1:12]It's great to talk with you, too.
[1:14]Would you mind letting listeners know a little bit
[1:17]about your book?
[1:17]And then I'll dive in and ask you my zillions of questions.
[1:21]Yes, seeing ghosts is a book about loss,
[1:24]and specifically the loss of my mother
[1:26]when I was 13 years old.
[1:28]And I tried to trace the ways my parents grieved
[1:31]and learned to grieve through the losses of their own parents,
[1:34]but also being immigrants from Hong Kong and China.
[1:37]And it's a lot about the inheritances
[1:40]that we have from family over generations,
[1:43]but also the idea of what we owe,
[1:46]so what we owe to ourselves, to our parents,
[1:49]to our cultures, to some degree,
[1:51]and also to our ideas at home.
[1:54]And that's really what I was trying to answer
[1:57]and get at seeing ghosts.
[1:58]Wow.
[1:59]I mean, this is one of the best descriptions of a person
[2:03]that the way you described your mom was so vivid and real,
[2:07]and the little details that you sprinkled throughout,
[2:10]like the little things that she did,
[2:12]and her body when she's putting on her stockings.
[2:15]And she's like, no, I mean, I got such a sense
[2:19]the way she smiled with her teeth in her lips.
[2:21]Like, yeah, like this.
[2:23]Yeah, I can't see the whole thing.
[2:25]Like the way the little things.
[2:27]Anyway, it was a vivid like elegy almost to you.
[2:32]Oh, so thank you for saying that
[2:34]because I think when writing about my mom,
[2:37]when someone passes, they just become this kind of unknown entity.
[2:42]And I think that's one of the hardest things about loss
[2:44]is that you no longer have access to this person,
[2:47]and in writing seeing ghosts,
[2:49]I was trying to keep my mom alive in this memory
[2:52]effort.
[2:53]And one of the things that I really wanted to try to do
[2:56]was recreate this image of her,
[2:58]and especially her body and the physicality of it
[3:01]because that's one of the things that's lost in grief.
[3:04]And so as a writer, that was something
[3:07]that I was really trying to push myself toward.
[3:09]So interesting.
[3:10]Well, well done.
[3:11]I mean, really great.
[3:12]I was trying to, like, it's a great example of this,
[3:14]like, show, don't tell.
[3:16]And even, like, my own, like, trying to write about stuff,
[3:19]like the little details that those are what
[3:21]makes a person in the end.
[3:23]That's what makes them into who they are
[3:25]and that so easily forgotten.
[3:27]So anyway, I just love that.
[3:29]Yeah.
[3:29]And you also have, like, little seeds.
[3:30]So I wanted to just read this, like one thing you said,
[3:33]carefully you said, as I used the zipper away from your skin,
[3:36]so it wouldn't catch.
[3:37]I smelled a whiff of the strawberry shampoo
[3:39]and conditioner you bought from Walmart,
[3:41]knocking a half dozen bottles into your cart,
[3:43]whenever there was a sale.
[3:45]I mean, that's like such a perfect detail, right?
[3:47]Like, you know what shampoo?
[3:49]You're not just like, my mom used this kind of shampoo.
[3:52]You're not even saying my mom was the type of woman
[3:54]who shopped at Walmart.
[3:55]And your view of the second person throughout the narrative,
[3:59]I also found was, like, super effective
[4:00]that everything was you did this, you did this, you did this.
[4:03]How did you decide to do that?
[4:05]Oh, that's such a great question.
[4:06]I mean, I knew from the start that I wanted to merge this idea
[4:10]of my mother as a memory or as a ghost
[4:13]with a couple of different elements,
[4:15]one of them being this really macabre joke
[4:19]that she made about taxidermy when I was a young girl
[4:21]because she knew I was afraid of dead things.
[4:24]And the joke basically was before she even knew
[4:27]that she was terminally ill or sick,
[4:29]was when I passed, I want you to put me
[4:33]in your future apartment and have me stuck.
[4:35]And that's such a strange joke to reach out.
[4:38]I copied that whole thing.
[4:39]When I died, you said, as you made that face,
[4:41]I want you to get me stuffed so I can sit in your apartment
[4:44]and watch you all the time.
[4:46]This was the first and would be the only time
[4:48]that you would address your death with me.
[4:50]Yeah, so Zippy, one of the funniest parts
[4:52]of this, and then I'll answer your question,
[4:54]but one of the funniest parts of this,
[4:56]as I was writing this book,
[4:57]I was trying to tell this story to someone
[5:00]I didn't really know that well.
[5:01]And she got this really concerned look on her face
[5:05]and sort of shifted uncomfortably in her seat
[5:08]and was like, me, do you have your mother
[5:11]and your apartment at home?
[5:14]And I was embarrassed, but I thought that was so funny
[5:17]and also like, oh my gosh, could you imagine?
[5:21]So it's definitely a joke and in the narrative
[5:24]of seeing ghosts itself, I try and use it as,
[5:27]well, I'll leave it to the reader to decide
[5:29]if these ghosts are imagined or it's a metaphor
[5:31]or how real they are.
[5:32]But I love this idea of death and taking this fear
[5:36]of my mother and this joke she made,
[5:39]but also there's this idea in a lot of East Asian cultures,
[5:43]but also Chinese cultures that my own family
[5:45]describes to you, which is the dead are meant to be appeased.
[5:49]Otherwise, their spirits might be restless.
[5:52]And as a child, that is such a scary concept
[5:55]to hear about your own mother or relatives who have passed.
[5:59]And I wanted to merge all of that
[6:01]into a way to structure this book around this ghost
[6:05]who I address sporadically and very frequently.
[6:08]And so I loved that and I always wanted to try
[6:11]and write this book this way.
[6:13]and it was only this attempt with seeing ghosts
[6:16]that I was really able to do it.
[6:18]Wow.
[6:18]I have to say, as a mom of four,
[6:21]who like, I worry about my death all the time,
[6:25]only in relation to like how much they'll miss me.
[6:27]I mean, oh yeah.
[6:29]I mean, they would miss you so much
[6:30]to, you know, pat myself on the back.
[6:32]But yes, my kids would miss me a lot.
[6:34]And like, that's the part I worry about all the time.
[6:37]So then I was reading your back and I was like,
[6:39]huh, like a stuffed version of me for their,
[6:45]and then I was certain my dad was involved for a little while
[6:48]with, you know, the wax museum,
[6:49]my camera was called the Madame Toussous wax museum.
[6:52]So the gifts, they gave him a wax statue of himself
[6:55]with one of his actual suits and ties and shirts.
[6:59]Oh my gosh.
[7:00]No.
[7:01]Like tailored in the same way.
[7:02]He always wears his pants a little too long.
[7:04]So he looks a little shlumpy in the bottom.
[7:05]And I shouldn't even say that.
[7:06]But anyway, then like his hair and his smile
[7:10]and literally he has it in his house.
[7:12]And every time anyone walks by, it's like,
[7:14]oh, no, no, no, no, no, not this thing.
[7:23]I mean, but that's exactly the type of thing
[7:25]that I think would be really hard to throw out to.
[7:28]I mean, I think, yeah, you would donate it
[7:30]or put it on my website.
[7:31]It's somewhere not in, not in like, you know,
[7:34]the kitchen or, oh my gosh.
[7:36]Yeah, over your kitchen table with orange juice,
[7:39]just waiting, asking city.
[7:41]No, it's not your life size too.
[7:43]So it's not even like I could hide it somewhere.
[7:45]And you also wrote about grief in general a lot.
[7:49]And you talked about so sad your brothers, you know,
[7:53]not still born, but he only lived a few hours,
[7:55]which is like the saddest thing.
[7:56]Right.
[7:57]Imagineable at birth.
[7:58]And you wrote, this is the thing about grief.
[8:00]Despite how much we want to forget,
[8:02]how much we try to ignore the debt or still here,
[8:05]waiting, watching.
[8:06]I try to commit the exact location
[8:08]of my mother's photo to memory,
[8:10]one, two, three down, one, two, three, four over
[8:13]when a temple employee flicks the lights on and off.
[8:16]Not exactly related to general and stuff.
[8:18]Anyway, tell me about grief in general.
[8:20]I need, so part that you just read
[8:23]was actually this scene in this Buddhist temple
[8:26]in New York where my family has basically a shrine
[8:30]or memorial or something photos
[8:32]to my mother and her parents.
[8:34]And visiting that for the first time as an adult
[8:37]was such a strange feeling,
[8:38]because for many years, the way that my family had dealt
[8:41]with my mother's delt in her quotes
[8:44]was just to not really address her
[8:47]and going to the cemetery, for example, was really painful.
[8:51]And this idea of having to face the dead
[8:55]was really crucial in terms of writing this,
[8:57]where you can't look away and did something
[8:59]that is an ongoing measure or an ongoing thing
[9:04]that you're always trying to challenge yourself to do.
[9:06]And I really thought that was an important thing to show
[9:11]because in seeing us, there's just such this giant theme
[9:14]of where remains might be with my dad
[9:17]and his search for his own father
[9:19]or my brother Jonathan, who you mentioned,
[9:22]who died just a couple of hours after he was born.
[9:25]And I really thought it was important
[9:27]to play with the idea of a physical nature of grief
[9:32]and how a lot of what was really important
[9:37]in my process of dealing with boss
[9:39]was figuring out ways to grieve
[9:42]and the absence of a physical grave
[9:45]or in the absence of being able to bring myself
[9:48]to the cemetery.
[9:50]And I mean, I keep thinking about this in terms of COVID
[9:53]to just because we have all gone through so much loss
[9:57]in this past year and one of my uncles.
[10:00]So I write it on this the past suddenly last April and not being able to physically be there for his funeral because of safety reasons was so so difficult and it was painful but being able to rely on my family's rituals that I have taken and adapted of my own as an adult was really beautiful.
[10:21]So I burned some incense and I just think that it shows this ongoing nature of loss and grief and how you learn to make ways for yourself to experience those things.
[10:33]So we had a lot of Zoom funerals during COVID and it was never gets easier.
[10:38]No, I'm really sorry for your loss and your mom, all of it.
[10:43]Can we discuss your dad going to jail?
[10:45]That was like that came out of nowhere in this hall.
[10:48]I could not believe that part.
[10:49]I know it's just a reminder thing in the midst of the greater scope but the way you and your two sisters rallied and also this whole pressure both with paying his bail but also
[11:02]the staggering health care costs of your mother's illness and I feel like you're both your parents felt so responsible as maybe the wrong word but just felt so guilty that their tending to them was costing you all so much money and the imposition it sort of placed on the families.
[11:20]Just tell me a little bit about that.
[11:22]Exactly. I mean, so those two anecdotes that you mentioned where my father and going to jail and then also my mother and her deciding to take on less effective health care for many reasons.
[11:37]Those were two examples of how I really wanted to play with the idea of at some point a lot of people reach these agents where they realize that they are the ones who have to care take for their parents.
[11:48]And I think for my father's story in general, that was one of the pivotal moments where my sisters and I realized that we had to come together as a unit and really assemble as you mentioned.
[12:00]One of the themes in seeing goes that I mentioned earlier is about the idea of what we owe and what our debts are and also this idea of survival and the sacrifices that we make or the sort of concepts that we adhere to in order to feel as though we can survive or be successful.
[12:20]So my father, this was this concept of property ownership which he learned from his mother in Hong Kong and in China.
[12:27]And for my mother, it was this idea of self definition and also reaching toward, I think, a higher class or sort of this idea of money or wealth as a way to prove to her father and other people that she needed in America.
[12:44]The difficult thing to grapple with as I was writing this was realizing that for my parents, these ideas of success or survival had not really been fully realized for a lot of different circumstances.
[12:58]My father's property ownership did not go as you'd imagined and my mother and her successes financially did not go as she had imagined and they all came at great expense and that was something that was really hard to turn back in with as a writer and also in my own lived experiences as a daughter too.
[13:21]So how do you approach life differently knowing sort of all this?
[13:25]Like I feel like people who have gone through grief and loss, like there's something intangible that sort of shifts like the view just like crystallizes or something.
[13:34]Like do you feel that because of your loss, like some things are just obvious to you that might not be to other people or do you live your life a little bit differently?
[13:42]That's a really good question.
[13:44]Thank you.
[13:45]I think that.
[13:46]No, it's really provocative because I mean, I would like to say that I do live my life differently. I feel like that's something that I would aspire to.
[13:55]But in the moments and day to day, I can still feel and experience the grief of, you know, my uncle's passing my mother's passing other people's passing just so, so much.
[14:06]But I think one of the things that I strive to always remind myself is how grief can be really protracted. It can stretch over time.
[14:16]But also to try and remember the loss of someone on this big picture way where they're not just their death.
[14:25]They're the moments that made up their life and trying to ground myself in those memories of the little idiosyncrasies that made up my mom, the teeth face, for example, or the speech patterns that she would fall into.
[14:40]Those are the things that I found really important to preserve. So even right now, I noticed myself, I think it's probably a response to COVID and just being so afraid of the uncertainty sort of like what you mentioned with your kids.
[14:53]I find myself trying to be more intentional about my relationship with people and the things I remember and grateful for.
[15:01]So with my dad, we have a complicated relationship, of course, that I try to remember his sense of humor and a subtle as it is.
[15:10]And I try to find, you know, compassion and empathy in the way that he can be so stubborn and also me too and how I learn these things from him.
[15:19]And with my sisters too and I has been CJ and everything.
[15:23]And so going through so much loss at a young age taught me how to see things kind of big picture, but as an adult, it taught me how to sort of zoom in on the tiny details.
[15:34]Yeah, I think that's one thing I feel like I've learned more in COVID is like moving in like focusing on today. And so far, I'm like, I feel like it's kind of like a hack, you know, like right.
[15:46]But it's working, right. It's like mitigating my anxiety in the short term. So I'm like, well, maybe I'll just like go with this and you know, yeah, I'll see not do scroll for hours.
[15:56]Well, I don't know about that, but you know, so are you working on anything else now or like what do you up to what's your day to day like and all that.
[16:05]My day to day is really just a mix of getting ready for this book launch and hopefully working on some other projects and the works that I'm not ready to talk about.
[16:15]The future. I'd love to write more books. I'm a reporter and journalist by nature. And I'm so excited to have the fun space to get back into reporting.
[16:26]And I think one thing that I'm really looking forward to is seeing what happens now. And when you focus for so many years on a project like seeing goes, it takes everything from you or at least to did for me.
[16:41]And I'm looking forward to reopening myself with the world as someone who is not writing this book.
[16:47]How long was it like start to finish.
[16:50]I sold the book in 2018. So since then, but really I've been working on it for so many years earlier. I'd say between eight to 10 years I had this idea in my head and it just was, you know, it's just something that I've always wanted to do.
[17:04]So well, how great. I'm glad. Yeah, I'm glad that's coming out. Yeah, this is amazing. Well, what advice would you have for aspiring authors.
[17:13]One thing that a very good friend Maria Karimji told me when I started writing seeing ghosts was writing a book is a series of trust balls.
[17:23]I loved the idea so much because there are so many opportunities for you to be afraid, but having trust in yourself in the process of being a creative person or writer is so important, but also having trust in the people around you who, whether they're friends or editor or, you know, your publisher.
[17:45]Just as important to because publishing can be such a machine and also writing an entire book is really hard, but having faith that you can ultimately do it and that you will be satisfied because it is yours is really crucial.
[17:59]Very true. Amazing.
[18:01]If you could just name one thing you missed the most about your mom. What is it?
[18:05]Oh, I miss her hugs. Oh, yeah. You know, just that's all. That's a really nice question because I think that's one of the things you can get back is physical touch.
[18:20]So, but I think that's really it's a lovely image. Thank you for that. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to make you with the very end.
[18:27]Well, it's nice to think about these things, too, because I think it's just a reminder of what's not there, but also everything that we still have with the people who are still present.
[18:39]Okay. Well, Kat, thank you for this talk and I'm really excited for you and so rooting for you with the book launch. So good luck and, you know, thank you for chatting today.
[18:49]Thank you, Zippy. Thank you so much.
[18:53]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[18:57]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
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[19:09]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact, Texture Sound for the Sound Editing.
[19:13]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.