Reviewed by Samantha Paige Rosen

For Victoria Chang, memory is a form of grieving. The act of trying to remember our own pasts, of inquiring about others' histories, of filling in the blanks through imagination, of connecting the memories we have with the memories that are described to us. In Dear Memory, Chang seeks to understand and process her family's past by grasping onto the few things she knows about her history and exploring them through language. 

She doesn't have a lot to draw from. Her mother's family fled China for Taiwan and later immigrated to Michigan, where she met Chang's father, who is from Taiwan. Her parents rebuffed most conversation about their pasts, and perhaps, by her own admission, Chang didn't listen closely enough. For them, and for many immigrants, memory is something that "bleeds internally, something to be stopped." Silence is survival. For Chang, her parents' silence "had a heartbeat, grew up, and became the third sibling." As a writer, she is building an identity out of this silence.

The story opens in the present. Chang's father has dementia and lost his ability to speak after a stroke 12 years ago, and her mother died six years ago. She views her mother's memories as "objects in a mirror. I see them, but I can't ever reach them. When Mother died, my exile detached from her exile, and that gap filled with longing." Since she can't have conversations with her parents, Chang must write her way into memory. She writes letters to her parents, to her grandparents, to other family members and friends, to former teachers, to fellow writers, and finally, to her readers. She incorporates photographs, marriage certificates, floorplans, and other images, which she alters with bits of handwritten text or by obscuring identifying features. In the letters and collages, she confronts trauma (her own and inherited), loss, grief, shame, silence, identity, Americanness, and racism. Each of these topics deserves its own book—it's impossible to capture them in 147 pages. But maybe that's the point. There's so much Chang will never know and understand, so her readers don't get to either.

The longing Chang expresses is present in the very first line of the book: "Dear Mother, I have so many questions." The level of detail that follows when asking about her mother's migration to Taiwan seems intentionally overwhelming: "I would like to know if you took a train. If you walked. If you wore pockets in your dress. If you wore pants. . . If you carried a bag. If you had a book in your bag. I would like to know where you got your food for the trip." While this book is rife with metaphor and imagery, complex emotions and themes, it is Chang's longing for these basic, concrete details that moved me the most. People who have access to their histories don't think to ask these kinds of questions; people whose pasts are closed off to them ruminate over this lack.

In another letter, she follows a Google Maps trail to the house where her father lived when her parents met: "I wonder how many Chinese people lived there. I wonder if he ever stood on the pretty porch. I wonder, when he came down the steps, if he turned right or left, I wonder if he picked that house because it was red." It's heartbreaking to know that Chang won't get answers, but in creating a record of her thoughts, she is adding shape to memories in the only way she can. In a collage featuring a picture of her great-grandmother and mother, she describes her mother's move from China to Taiwan: "During the switch, language / was lost at sea. When / language belongs to no one, / a door opens." With these letters, Chang walks through that open door. She writes in an effort to move "out of silence to make a new language" because of "a deep desire to understand something that is invisible and voiceless." 

The big question is whether the epistolary form works. Based on what I believe Chang is trying to achieve, yes. Every piece of this book feels like some kind of fragment. The form itself is an example of how Chang views writing, that it "feels a bit like trying to attach words to things that are moving, that we cannot see, and that we never fully understand." I found myself yearning to connect narrative dots, to anchor myself, becoming excited when a translated letter from a cousin in China appeared over multiple collages. The letter was just a sliver of the book, but it was a thread I could follow. Because Chang is a compelling storyteller, I would have liked more of this. Every memory ended before I wanted it to or was interrupted in some way. The all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch her family served at their Chinese restaurant simply disappeared one day. Then the restaurant disappeared. Chang doesn't know why. It's difficult to be in this space of not knowing why, of wanting more. Of getting half-painted pictures. But that's where Chang lives and writes, and so it is where we must read. 

By the end of Dear Memory, the readers see how important the process of writing this book has been for Chang. It allowed her to claim the silence that was handed down to her. It led her to explore the idea of "postmemory"—a concept identified by professor Marianne Hirsch that "characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created." As a child of immigrants, Chang is left with the task of bridging the gaps within her own identity. This is the burden of first generation children. She realizes, though, that silence isn't all bad. It allows for curiosity, discovery, imagination. It's "the most open text."

A former high school teacher told Chang that she always knew there was something "burning beneath" in her writing. This leads Chang to determine that "poets live between a fire and a great fire." The urgency of these fires is present throughout her writing. Maybe the urgency was ignited by silence. Maybe silence is why Chang is a writer.