When Kat Chow was a girl, her mother once joked about being preserved by taxidermy after she dies so that her family will still have her around. Not long after, she succumbs to cancer, leaving grief in her wake. Grief pervades the immigrant story of Kat Chow’s new memoir, Seeing Ghosts. Although most of the book takes place in Connecticut, where Chow was born and raised, her story reaches back to Southern China, Hong Kong, and Cuba.
Chow’s parents were no strangers to grief. Her mother’s mother died at the age of 41 from uterine cancer and Chow’s father never knew his father because he also died young in Havana, far from the family’s home in Hoiping, Guangdong Province. The Chow parents also suffer the loss of their only son, a premature baby born with a congenital defect that takes his life just minutes after he’s born. Then when Chow is thirteen, her mother dies from a cancer that went undiagnosed, perhaps for years.
Most of Chow’s grief centers around her mother’s passing and she speaks to her mother in the book, addressing her in the second person. As an immigrant and as first generation Americans, Chow’s father and his daughters, respectfully, don’t have a normal mourning experience in Connecticut because they don’t have a tight community there. As Chow explains:
My parents did not have friends whom we invited over for dinner or saw casually. We weren’t like the other Chinese families in these suburbs, since we didn’t attend church or speak Mandarin. We were our own island.
After Chow’s mother dies, her father is suddenly thrown into a parenting role to which he is unaccustomed. Chow writes with honesty about her strained relationship with her father, especially during her teenage years. Although they find ways to connect through food and travel, Chow and her sisters are frustrated by their father’s hoarding of everything he comes into contact with: food containers, his wife’s clothes and personal possessions, and even dead pet fish.

Although the sections set in Havana comprise just a small part of this book, they explain the dynamics between Chow and her father. Chow’s paternal grandfather was amongst the end of the wave of southern Chinese migrants who sailed to Cuba and Peru starting in the mid-1800s.
Plantation owners who feared the revolts of enslaved men and women from African countries—and saw the rumblings of abolition due, in part, to the British blockade of slave ships—considered Chinese coolies an alternative source of labor. Between 1847 and 1874, 125,000 men arrived in Cuba from China, and 92,000 arrived in Peru during a similar time period.
Chow’s grandfather went to Cuba in the 1920s or 1930s to work in Chinese restaurants there, leaving behind his wife and parents. He came back to China long enough for Chow’s father to be conceived, but all in all he and Chow’s grandmother were only together for a little over two years. After Chow’s grandfather dies in Cuba in the 1950s, Chow’s grandmother uses his death as an excuse to leave China in 1953: if the family can get to Hong Kong, they can then travel on to Cuba to retrieve her husband’s remains. The authorities allow the family to enter Hong Kong, but that would be their final destination for the time being.
Decades later, Chow, her father, and one of her sisters travel to Havana after the US travel ban is relaxed during the Obama years. They finally search for the remains of Chow’s grandfather. Chow learns that family associations in Havana’s Chinatown used to facilitate the return of deceased family members to their ancestral homes in China—via Hong Kong.
These tongs also took care of funeral services of their members, who were buried in a cemetery about five kilometers from Barrio China in tombs special to their association. After a few years the association would clean the bones and send them to the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals in Hong Kong, which coordinated the return of the remains to the deceased’s home village. But because of the Japanese occupation of China and the country’s civil war, as well as Cuba’s own Communist uprising, bone repatriation became difficult. My grandfather, despite his intentions, remained in Cuba indefinitely.
Chow also writes about Yung Wing, the first Chinese graduate at Yale, who was buried in the same Hartford, Connecticut cemetery as her brother. Several decades before he died in 1912, Yung Wing was sent to Peru by the Chinese government to check on the treatment of Chinese migrant workers there. At the same time, Yung Wing’s counterpart traveled to Cuba for the same.
These men worked on sugar plantations, in mines, or as butlers or cooks, sometimes alongside enslaved men and women, though at the end of their contracts—if they managed to emerge from them—they at least owned their bodies. Shortly after Yung and his colleague’s investigations, China ended the coolie trade to Peru and Cuba.
Others like Chow’s grandfather would migrate on their own to Cuba to work in Chinatown restaurants.
One hopes Chow found some solace in writing about her mother’s death and how her father came to peace by going to Havana to mourn his own father. As Chow writes to her mother in her book:
I didn’t understand why everything always came back to you, how grief seemed to inhabit so many of my feelings, how I couldn’t think about my own shortcomings or mistakes without considering our family’s history.
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