Kat Chow > Quotes

“What is a marriage, if it is not a partnership born out of affection, respect, and a closeness that makes life more navigable? Anything else feels lonely.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“What is grief, if not the act of survival? How can it be anything else but persisting through an enormous loss?”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“All children live in their parents’ realities or the realities of those who raise them, but to be the children of immigrants is, in a sense, varying degrees of living in our parents’ remaking of the country in which they were born.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“That is what it means to lose someone, understanding how, after all these years, memories shift and shape us. How we cannot exorcise someone as much as we try; we must learn the ways in which we preserve parts of them in ourselves.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“But, Mommy, grief is a container of contradictions. I want to expel something, though I do not know what. I want to rid myself of this heaviness, just as much as I want to keep your ghosts.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“Cheng’s broader argument is that identity formation—and racial identity formation in particular—is melancholic itself and is shaped by the push-pulls of loss and recovery.2 I get this. The immigrant family tries to preserve a history and a life that the surroundings resist. They try to invent a new way of being while always seeking a home within the negative space.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“Mothers provide, she often said. I’m the provider . She made a fist and thumped her chest to show her strength. She filled such basic needs for us just by being alive. She was the general. She was the one who strategized our futures and led us to win wars. With her, we were safe.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“All children live in their parents' realities or the realities of those who raise them, but to be the children of immigrants is, in a sense, varying degrees of living in our parents' remaking of the country in which they were born.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“It is always strange when a child realizes that they are attempting to recreate their parents’ path with their own; something uncanny within these movements, embedded within it a contradictory worry of recreation and a hope of carrying out a wish that had not been fulfilled.”
― Kat Chow

“My father often talks of survival - do whatever is necessary to succeed - but where in this idea does satisfaction factor?

Mommy, I am asking about your happiness - and yet, I am only able to reach as far as "satisfied.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“I often tell myself, I am young, my body is strong, and I delay making appointment after appointment, physical after physical, until I think about my mother, and I schedule something for the next week.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“She’d want you to be happy, not suffering. I couldn’t blame them for saying such things, but each time someone said my mother was watching over us and would have wanted us to be happy, I privately disagreed. To have been happy would have been to disrespect her life. After all, we were only just surveying the rubble after the catastrophe. We understood now how everything had shifted: There would be no more visits with our family; no more of her cooking; no more talks about our futures and how we needed to do more; no more burrowing into her shoulders for hugs.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“How was it that after your death, I was still trying to change how you had lived?”
― Kat Chow

“You can't change your father," she said. "Why not?" I said and she had replied, "You can only change yourself." That quieted me.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir

“Our time with our mother was a past life—some version of ourselves from which we’d become estranged.”
― Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir