Reviews
i want to be stingy with my five-star ratings but you know what that's an urge to be edgy for no reason and we all need more joy. i began this wary of cliches that normally make me feel very detached from and frustrated with certain corners of "asian american lit" (what an awfully constraining category we must deal with in order to try to be heard as human beings), but then i got increasingly wrecked with each letter. "dear l" got me crying in cedarhurst cafe. i finished these epistles perched at one of the island tables on broadway between all the shops at yale and am now writing this review still wrecked. i want to smile and cry and write poems about my first loves and my grandmother. they will come with time.
well, this unexpectedly wrecked me! i think it’s partially because so many of my own unintelligible thoughts and emotions are often wrangled into letters. of course, chang does this so much more eloquently, but the desperation, the struggle, the emergent growth takes on a very familiar shape. threaded through these epistles is an honest push-and-pull with identity and culture and language, but most of all i appreciated the humanness of her uncertainty. “i hope life has not been lost on me.” ahhhh, me too, me too. chang praises writers who “write with an intimate intensity but also a generous capaciousness”. i think she accomplishes this quite well; her voice is as far-reaching as it is penetrative.
Highlights
I realized my parents’ histories not only shaped them, but also shaped me in ways that I only began to consider after they could no longer speak to me.
I wonder what it would have been like to grow up in a family where everyone spoke the same language. The only language we had wholly in common was silence.
Saying things others want to hear is easy for an immigrant’s child because, for an immigrant’s child, language is theater. We are always performing.
In this moment, your imagined happiness covers my grief like an eyelid.
That while my parents may have maintained silence as a form of survival, silence had a heartbeat, grew up, and became the third sibling.
on intergenerational trauma
Shame never has a loud clang. The worst part of shame is how silent it is.
Maybe memories are not to be forgotten but also not exactly to be remembered. Maybe that glorious, lumbering moose that stops us for a moment isn’t death after all. Maybe it’s memory, which is the exit wound of joy.
Maybe our desire for the past grows after the decay of our present. When the present is more than we can hold, it turns into history.
The cost of being so lucky is that you never learn how to acknowledge pain. Because you’re always lucky, you should always appreciate being alive, what you have. Nothing should ever be wrong, go wrong. The problem is that the space between how you really feel and luck is always shame.
Maybe all of our memories are tied to the memories of others. Maybe my memories are tied to Mother’s memories, and Mother’s memories are like objects in a mirror—I see them, but I can’t ever reach them.
An elegy reflects on the loss of a loved one. What form can express the loss of something you never knew but knew existed? Lands you never knew? People? Can one experience such a loss? The last definition of absence is the nonexistence or lack of. See how the of hangs there like someone about to jump off a balcony?