Introduction
You may find that navigating unexpected loss within an immigrant family carries a weight that lingers across generations. Cultural displacement and the unspoken burdens of history often amplify personal grief, leaving you to manage both sorrow and the preservation of memory.
Kat Chow examines these dynamics in Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir. Grief operates as a persistent, generational force that shapes identity, memory, and the unspoken burdens carried by immigrant families.
The book traces the echoes of a mother's death through childhood lore, workplace struggles, catastrophic illness, and traditional mourning rituals. You will explore how financial strain, material memory, and transnational roots influence the process of healing and remembrance.
- How do childhood myths shape your understanding of family history?
- What role do cultural rituals play in processing sudden loss?
- How do financial pressures affect domestic coping mechanisms?
- In what ways does ancestral repatriation help reclaim buried histories?
1. Childhood Lore and Family Foundations
Immigrant family histories and childhood memories are shaped by protective myths, strict academic expectations, and the heavy legacy of displacement.
Parents often use invented frightening figures or monsters to instill obedience and shape your behavior. You might be warned about specific spirits to ensure you finish your meals or listen to instructions. The author was warned that the Ginger Ghost would come get her if she did not finish all the rice in her bowl. Her mother and her sisters were assigned specific monsters, such as the Ginger Ghost, Boaloodoo, and Mooloogachu, to punish them if they failed to listen or finish their food.
Strict academic expectations imposed during early childhood become defining memories of familial hierarchy and personality differences. The author's father required each of his daughters to memorize multiplication tables up to twenty before starting elementary school, using grids on graph paper to test them. While Steph eagerly mastered the task and Caroline resisted before complying, the youngest daughter Katelin wailed and refused entirely, cementing her reputation as the defiant child in her father's eyes.
You can replicate these rigorous standards using specific techniques:
- Take a ruler to graph paper and sketch grids when a child turns five.
- Require children to memorize multiplication tables up to twenty.
Family histories of displacement and survival in China and Cuba forge a legacy of stoicism and emotional evasion. In 1953, the author's grandmother fled Hoiping with her young son to escape communist land redistribution after receiving remittances from her husband working in Cuba, establishing a family culture of avoiding difficult truths with the phrase nothing you can do. Kiu Kwan fled her village with her son Wing Shek past watchtowers and farmlands to avoid being forced to kneel on broken glass by resentful neighbors.
2. Workplace Struggles and Business Ventures
Parents navigate career pressures and financial risks in predominantly white environments while attempting to secure a stable future for their children.
Your career choices often reflect an urgent need for security. You might balance demanding night courses while working long hours in hospital laboratories just to gain a foothold. The author's mother started with night classes at the Hartford Graduate Center and analyzed blood samples at Saint Francis Hospital during the day. She eventually became a database administrator at Travelers Insurance and later Aetna, proudly ranking as one of the highest-paid DBAs.
She worked in the 527-foot Travelers Tower in Connecticut, which was the seventh-tallest building in the world when built in 1919. The building soared 24 stories in stone and glass, creating a towering backdrop for her daily work in a heavily white and male workplace.
Immigrant workers face casual workplace discrimination, often defusing discomfort by invoking their status or ignoring microaggressions. At a steam power manufacturing firm, a manager told the author's father and his Chinese co-workers not to complete projects the Chinese way, an instruction the father simply ignored. The mother deflected raucous jokes from co-workers by identifying as a double minority and threatening to go to HR.
Business ventures offer a tempting route to independence despite the heavy risks involved. You can channel the entrepreneurial spirit of your elders when seeking financial freedom in a new country. The author's father partnered with another couple to buy a failing Chinese restaurant, renaming it Lotus Garden, hoping to emulate the grandfather who thrived in Havana restaurants. The family struggled to retain talented Cantonese chefs and manage expenses. The venture eventually shuttered when the children were young, leading to bankruptcy and mounting debt.
3. Catastrophic Illness and Sudden Loss
A terminal cancer diagnosis and the sudden loss of a mother shatter family stability and trigger long-standing psychological trauma.
You face immense stress when medical systems fail during a severe health crisis. Relatives often scramble to pool assets and sell properties when hospital bills threaten financial ruin. Mistakenly treated for irritable bowel syndrome during a trip to the Pacific Northwest, the mother was eventually diagnosed with stage four terminal cancer. After returning from a trip to Seattle and Vancouver, she was rushed to an emergency room in Flushing, New York, where family members realized her health insurance was out of network and useless.
Kau Fu wrote a check for 2000 dollars to help cover immediate medical expenses. The family consulted specialized care networks like Sloan Kettering, Mayo Clinic, and NewYork-Presbyterian while Yi Ma and other relatives tried to navigate the medical limitations.
Deep psychological scars can linger long after a family member dies prematurely. You carry unexpressed grief when a life is cut short under tragic circumstances. Born prematurely at Saint Francis Hospital due to a rare windpipe condition called tracheal agenesis, baby Jonathan lived for less than two hours. Jonathan was born at Saint Francis Hospital, lived for only one hour and fifty-six minutes, and was later buried at Cedar Hill Cemetery with the middle name Love.
His death occurred at 1:30 p.m., creating a lingering shadow of survivor guilt and unspoken sorrow for the surviving family members. It took 15 years before Jonathan's remains were cremated.
Decisions made immediately after a death can deeply fracture extended family relationships and amplify grief. When the doctor asked if the family wanted an autopsy, the father surprisingly agreed because he believed more information was better, causing bitter friction with the mother's family who believed it would prevent her spirit from resting.
4. Rituals of Mourning and Material Memory
Traditional mourning rituals and material artifacts serve as vital mechanisms for communicating with the dead and preserving memory.
You can observe how traditional practices offer concrete ways to care for deceased relatives. Yi Ma led her younger siblings up the hill at Wo Hop Shek Public Cemetery to sweep their mother's headstone, burn joss sticks, and leave food offerings before immigration disrupted these traditions. During Chung Yeung, the children carried a whole boiled chicken, strips of uncut pork belly, apples, and oranges up the hill to lay on their mother's grave as an offering.
- Observe the day by sweeping the dirt from the mother's headstone until it gleams.
- Run hands along the mother's name and dig fingers into crevices to scrape away dust.
- Carry a whole boiled chicken, strips of uncut pork belly, apples, and oranges up the hill and lay them on the grave.
- Bow three times while clutching burning joss sticks.
- Say: Take care of yourself, good luck, and take care of everyone else.
Traditional mourning rituals, such as burning joss paper and fake money, serve as a tangible postal service for the dead to send provisions to the afterlife. Families participate in burning tissue paper cutouts of clothing, cars, and money so that the deceased spirits can be warm and provided for in the afterlife. Six days after her death, Kat Chow and her sisters stood in a funeral home parking lot around a metal bucket burning joss paper, mirroring rituals they performed each Lunar New Year for their brother Jonathan.
- Cut objects out of tissue paper such as tiny shirts, cars, shoes, or horses.
- Burn the tissue objects in a metal bucket until reduced to ash.
- Wrap gold candy like Werther's and nickels in white printer paper folds to pass along good fortune and sweeten the bitterness of death.
Material compromises on memorial markers reflect ongoing financial constraints and become focal points for displaced grief and ghostly visitations. Due to budget constraints, the family purchased a soft salmon-colored gravestone that turned out Pepto-Bismol pink with inappropriate fonts and clip art, prompting imagined complaints from the deceased mother's ghost.
The author's family bought a cheap gravestone in India Red's place that arrived Pepto-Bismol pink, featuring a font resembling Comic Sans and cartoonish clip art of a heart, fish, and bamboo. April 20, 1956 is the incorrect birth date engraved on the mother's gravestone chosen by her father in paperwork to leave China.
5. Financial Strain and Domestic Coping
Financial anxiety drives an atmosphere of rigid frugality and coldness within the domestic space.
The author's father rigidly kept the thermostat low, refusing to spend money on adequate heating or fixing frozen pipes. You might find yourself returning from school to a house dropping down to fifty-five degrees while the thermostat was set to sixty-five degrees. When frozen pipes burst in winter, the father dismissed the disaster as something you simply had to live with, offering the flat refrain that there was nothing you can do.
Following their mother's death, Caroline took over family finances, methodically calling creditors and pooling work-study money. Kau Fu lent two thousand dollars that the father put toward funeral expenses. Caroline later gifted items like an iPod Shuffle using corporate reward points from her job in Seattle to help support the author.
Driving offers a necessary physical flight from a sad household and a method to practice inherited safety rituals.
Given independence through an old family van and an added driver's policy, you navigate the roads surrounding your home to flee a diseased and sad household. Kat used her old family van to drive to her weekend job at Green Tea/Green Olive Bistro, therapy, school activities, and empty late-night stretches of Route 2. This solitude allowed you to mimic your deceased mother's safety rituals on the road.
Before unlocking the car, you must perform specific safety steps:
- Peep in the back seats and under the van to make sure no one is hiding there.
6. The Persistence of Melancholia
Grief lingers across distance and time, transforming into an internal state of longing and haunting reminders of the deceased.
Drawing on Anne Anlin Cheng's ideas about melancholy, you may question whether you are trying to preserve your mother or rather refusing to let go of the idea of her. This internal state merges identity formation with the push-pull of loss and recovery. You cannot shake your mother's death and do not want to. Those who internalize loss become ravenous in their hunger to sustain their grief.
Grief does not simply disappear with time or distance. It remains injected into the body like a preserving agent that continues to secrete pain. Despite moving across the country to college and attempting to escape your sorrow through new environments and accomplishments, you find yourself repeatedly overcome by sudden, visceral sobbing. You relate this persistence of sorrow to a poetic image of plants continuing to secrete pollen even after the petals are gone.
While taking a shower during a trip to Guangzhou, you break down in tears, prompting your sisters to comfort you and remind you that your deep grief for their mother is still entirely present. Years after your mother's death, you fall into a habit of calling her mother's old workplace database administration line late at night while intoxicated. You imagine alternate realities where your mother answers and you converse fluently in Cantonese.
During your college years in Seattle, you routinely dial your mother's former work number 860-636-XXXX from your studio apartment when unable to sleep.
You discover that your father has attempted to clumsily taxidermy a dead striped bass in his basement. He previously roasted pet angelfish in the oven to track their growth. You connect these bizarre preservation efforts to Rachel Poliquin's writings on taxidermy. Poor preservation reflects a melancholic inability to accept loss, where objects become material souvenirs meant to mimic permanence.
You find a rotting, DIY-taxidermied striped bass on a makeshift stand in your father's basement and recall discovering baked angelfish in the kitchen oven.
7. Transnational Roots and Ancestral Repatriation
Tracing ancestral migration roots across continents allows families to reclaim buried histories and fulfill long-delayed burial wishes.
You travel with your sister Caroline and your father to Havana, Cuba. You want to trace the life of your paternal grandfather among local Chinese associations known as tongs. The family visits Barrio Chino and various tongs like Casino Chung Wah and Min Chih Tang. You look through century-old registry books for records of the grandfather. Only two hundred Chinese people remain in Cuba after Fidel Castro restricts immigration.
Tongs traditionally store members' bones in association tombs before sending them back to home villages in China. Revolution and war disrupt this process of bone repatriation, leaving your grandfather in Cuba. A deceased body remains in an aboveground tomb for two years before bones transfer to a vault.
Your father, assisted by his nephew Denny and association leaders like María Elena Hung, unlocks cemetery crypts in Havana. They find his father's bone box five kilometers from Barrio Chino. Facking a lack of time for official paperwork, your father smuggles his father's ashes out of Cuba. He packs the ashes inside a garbage bag surrounded by toilet paper inside his luggage. He successfully passes through airport security where officers mistake the urn for a vase.
Your father brings his father's ashes to Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto to bury them alongside his mother. He successfully executes his mother's lifelong wish. The family gathers in the heavy snow at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto to bury the grandfather's remains. Relatives lay out offerings of poached chicken, steamed buns, oranges, and wine.
Steph, Caroline, you, and your father gather at the Fairfield cemetery to complete the burial of your infant brother Jonathan. You fulfill your mother's dying wish by planting sunflowers and lighting joss sticks in the rain.
You follow traditional protective steps after leaving the burial site:
- Drive to a nearby pharmacy or parking lot and turn around after a burial.
- Go inside the store and purchase candy such as Mentos.
- Distribute and eat the candy to ensure spirits do not follow home.
10 Key Ideas
- Grief operates as a persistent, generational force that shapes identity, memory, and the unspoken burdens carried by immigrant families.
- Immigrant family histories and childhood memories are shaped by protective myths, strict academic expectations, and the heavy legacy of displacement.
- Parents navigate career pressures and financial risks in predominantly white environments while attempting to secure a stable future for their children.
- A terminal cancer diagnosis and the sudden loss of a mother shatter family stability and trigger long-standing psychological trauma.
- Traditional mourning rituals and material artifacts serve as vital mechanisms for communicating with the dead and preserving memory.
- Financial anxiety drives an atmosphere of rigid frugality and coldness within the domestic space.
- Driving offers a necessary physical flight from a sad household and a method to practice inherited safety rituals.
- Grief lingers across distance and time, transforming into an internal state of longing and haunting reminders of the deceased.
- Tracing ancestral migration roots across continents allows families to reclaim buried histories and fulfill long-delayed burial wishes.
- Families complete long-delayed burials by fulfilling final resting wishes and performing protective rituals to ensure spirits do not follow home.