asianamlitfans | A Review of Alexandra A. Chan’s In the Garden Behind the Moon: A Memoir of Loss, Myth, and Magic (F (Reply)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Alexandra A. Chan’s In the Garden Behind the Moon: A Memoir of Loss, Myth, and Magic (Flashpoint, 2024) continues my trend of reading some creative nonfictional publications. The book actually comes out of a hybrid publishing company that also has a self-publishing arm called Girl Friday Productions (the full link for this book can be found below). This text is an absolutely gorgeously produced work, much in the same vein as Satsuki Ina’s The Poet and the Silk Girl. There are full color illustrations, high quality glossy pages, and full color photographs. Let’s let the marketing description do some work for us: “A left-brained archaeologist and successful tiger daughter, Chan finds her logical approach to life utterly fails her in the face of this profound grief. Unable to find a way forward, she must either burn to ash or forge herself anew. Slowly, painfully, wondrously, Chan discovers that her father and ancestors have left threads of renewal in the artifacts and stories of their lives. Through a long-lost interview conducted by Roosevelt’s Federal Writers’ Project, a basket of war letters written from the Burmese jungle, a box of photographs, her world travels, and a deepening relationship to her own art, the archaeologist and lifelong rationalist makes her greatest discovery to date: the healing power of enchantment. In an epic story that travels from prerevolution China to the South under Jim Crow, from the Pacific theater of WWII to the black sands of Reynisfjara, Iceland, and beyond, Chan takes us on a universal journey to meaning in the wake of devastating loss, sharing the insights and tools that allowed her to rebuild her life and resurrect her spirit. Part memoir, part lyrical invitation to new ways of seeing and better ways of being in dark times, the book includes beautiful full-color original Chinese brush paintings by the author and fascinating vintage photographs of an unforgettable cast of characters. In the Garden Behind the Moon is a captivating family portrait and an urgent call to awaken to the magic and wonder of daily life.”

I’ll start out by saying that this work doesn’t fit into a single genre, though it probably hews closest to the memoir. Chan chooses to structure the work through the Chinese zodiac calendar. While it would seem like the memoir would be linear, it actually is not. The placeholder years really exist as the beginning point of each chapter, which often moves forward and backward in time. Chan has done some painstaking work, not only in ensuring that a larger archival footprint of her family is shared with readers but also in the background research that she conducts to fill out her family’s lengthy genealogy. This creative nonfictional work is anchored primarily by Chan’s attentiveness to grief. Indeed, the emotional core emerges through Chan’s close relationship with her father, which she conveys through the larger historical tapestry that is unveiled by detailing his life. He grows up in Georgia at a time where there are very few Chinese Americans; he serves in World War II; he marries and gets divorced and marries again (having dealt with the problematics of legislation that impeded interracial unions). Adding to the author’s loss is the fact that her mother will also die of a rare cancer a number of years before the death of her father. But Chan’s modus operandi is to find a way through the grief. Thus the subtitle also reminds us of the centrality of both myth and magic as ways that we confront devastating loss. The “magic” of this particular text surfaces especially in the signs that Chan sees that tells us that her relationship with her parents endures whether or not they are physically with her. She’ll visit faraway places and see traces of her parents in the majestic vistas before her, and she’ll know that the memories she carries means that she will never lose her parents. As the memoir moves forward—and I provide you with a spoiler warning here—Chan’s research into her family history yields a shocking discovery. Her father discovers that their ancestral background ties them to African Americans. Chan comes to find out that an ancestor who was purportedly from South America had actually come to pass as half-Chinese and that she and her family members are part Black. The depth to which Chan continues to mind her biological background is perhaps not surprising, given that she is an archaeologist, but Chan also has an astutely analytical mind as a scholar. Indeed, she comes to consider her father’s mixed race background as one of the reasons why he was so compelled to achieve and to move forward so diligently in life, knowing that the shadows of racial difference could overwhelm him. Chan’s memoir soars precisely because of this impressive balance between self-reflection and excavation, which provides readers with an enduring tribute to a uniquely American family.

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