A Review of Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory (Milkweed, 2021)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape

*reviewer’s note: In my aim to cover as much ground and texts as I can, I’m focusing on shorter lightning reviews that get to the gist of my reading experience! As Asian American literature has boomed, my time to read this exponentially growing archive has only diminished. I will do my best, as always!

In this lightning review, I am here to cover Victoria Chang’s brilliantly crafted Dear Memory (Milkweed, 2021). Let’s let Milkweed’s official marketing description gives us some more key information: “For Victoria Chang, memory ‘isn’t something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally.’ It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered. Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted collages and missives on trauma, loss, and Americanness, Victoria Chang grasps on to a sense of self that grief threatens to dissipate. In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.”

I absolutely adored this particular work. It’s really a kind of poetry work in epistolary form. Chang is the author of a number of other poetry collections, and her signature lyric style is apparent here, even in the prose narratives that populate Dear Memory. At first, the epistolary poems seem more directed to immediate family members, but Dear Memory certainly branches out, as the infinite ways in which we grieve are made apparent. The archival traces of Chang’s family are all over this book, but Chang makes us realize how finite our access to the past can be, and that we never fully know our family members. The design quality of this work is impressive: the images are scanned at very high resolution, which are important because many of the archival documents that Chang includes are government files, including things like passports, social security cards, and marriage licenses. You can see the ravages of time upon so many of these items, but some crucial information is retained, to give the lyric speaker a sense of the past, however partial. A work full of melancholy but also of possibility. We see those sites of connection and constitution through and by the networks the lyric speaker creates with other poets and writers, teachers and keen listeners. A profound work that inhabits the fecund, yet disorienting space of loss.

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A Review of Ava Chin’s Mott Street (Penguin Press, 2023)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape

I write this review after having read Ava Chin’s Mott Street about five months ago or so! I had a reason to return to it in mid-October because Fordham University chose Chin as the Mary Higgins Clark Chair. Chin thus came to Fordham University’s Lincoln Center to read from this memoir/ biographical recovery work (and let’s be clear, it’s multigenre in the most productive way possible). Due to COVID issues and general overwork, it has been some time since I have gone to a reading and seen someone speak in person about their creative writing. The timing of it was perfect since Fordham had recently established Asian American Studies as a minor and program. I attended the event with two new minors and a third student interested in possibly minoring as well. To have Chin speak about the history of Asian American exclusion as routed through her own family dynamics was truly empowering. The event was structured such that, toward the end, a student was able to ask some pre-determined questions about Chin’s process. Since this book covered around 4 generations of Chin’s family, she had to complete not only years of archival research but also interview family members, some of whom she had been estranged from and others whom she found resistant to her project. In this respect, Chin had to overcome a number of obstacles in order to just get the raw materials from which to create this work. The creative, mixed-genre work is absolutely epic in scope and breathtaking in its expansiveness. It adds so much to the existing catalogue our rich field of Asian American literary studies. It would certainly serve as an excellent comparison point to other memoirs, including, most notably, Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men. The resonances between the two are undeniable, but one might say that Chin takes it a couple of steps further only insofar as Chin is able to track so many sectors of her family across multiple generations. The challenge for this kind of work is that she must continually toggle between multiple storylines and temporalities, but the framing mechanism involving her connection to Mott Street is of course the emotional touchstone to what unfolds. Indeed, Chin occasionally seems to see spirits connected to her ancestors, harbingers then that her work is being supported by the ghosts of the past. An impressive work, one that I’m sure that many cultural critics will find their way to and will engage as a site of analysis.

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