by Kat Chow
In conversations likes the one at our front door, adults tested their consolation.
She’d want you to be happy, not suffering.
I couldn’t blame them for saying such things, but each time someone said my mother was watching over us and would have wanted us to be happy, I privately disagreed. To have been happy would have been to disrespect her life. After all, we were only just surveying the rubble after the catastrophe. We understood now how everything had shifted: There would be no more visits with our family; no more of her cooking; no more talks about our futures and how we needed to do more; no more burrowing into her shoulders for hugs. And from the practical mind of a thirteen-year-old, there would be no more horseback riding after the checks my mother had written before her death ran out.
Still, those assurances:
She’s watching over you.
She’s with you every day.
She’s everywhere.
She’s alive in your memories.
Despite myself, I took their words literally, my newborn grief latching onto every word. My imagination gorged itself on this hope.
* * *
I conjure you from the underworld, part taxidermy, part ghost. Your expression toggles between something comical and something frightening.
I want to think that you don’t mean me harm, but I wouldn’t blame you if you lashed out because you were mad about your premature death. When you’re not dropping into my life, you are somewhere vaguely above—heaven, perhaps, though I’m not sure if either of us believes in it. You stomp around in the attic of our family’s grief. The thrums and rattles from your footsteps constantly punctuate our thoughts.
As Steph and Caroline and I clear out your desk at your office, or call the cell phone company to change the name on the bill to Caroline’s, or visit the cemetery to burn more incense and joss paper, or research how to order a tombstone, I have a flash of something that feels like memory, though it never happened. In it, you are irate about the L.L.Bean dress. You will always be a little annoyed about this outfit.
Why? you ask repeatedly. You barge into my mind, a frenetic four-foot-eleven Kramer, slapping my mental doorframe with your hands, limbs flying this way and that. Why this?
You keep tugging at the hem, then the sleeves. Your agita is my indigestion.
You couldn’t have buried me with a sweater? you ask. What if I get cold?
You run your fingers along your arms to show that it’s chilly. I find myself missing, of all things, seeing the soft flaps of your triceps, and how they looked like deflated balloons. There is a gentleness in the taxidermic, ghost-you, though you are mad. I prefer this irritation to the agony and indignity of your death; to your being sad or needy or worried about all that you’re missing in life and all that you’ll never do.
Eventually, your ghost will find this outfit situation amusing, and we’ll joke about how you are perpetually underdressed in your L.L.Bean ensemble. (Whatever eventually means.)
I know that you are cold. But it never occurs to me until now to burn tissue cutouts of clothing to send to you. As a teenager, I was a rude host. I could’ve made you a jacket or a new dress that way. I could have made you rich.
2.
The Saturday before my fourteenth birthday—MY MOTHER JUST DIED TEN DAYS AGO!—Steph and Caroline headed to the grocery store to buy ingredients for a birthday cake made from boxed mix and two cartons of ice cream, our mother’s recipe. On their way out, Steph shouted, Baby! Baby! from the foot of the stairs to wake me. I recorded in my journal how she shouted like our mother, making her words long. Baaaaaay-beeeeeee. Baaaaaaaaaay-beeeeeeee.
Our mother had a special way of calling for things—animals or us. If she was outside looking for our cat, Moo Cow, she shook a container of treats and bellowed Moooooooooooooooo, Mooooooooo Cow, the first moooo undulating like she was a backup singer whose chipper ooooooooh was the true star of the show. Sometimes she added our last name, Chow, to convey her urgency. Caroline had named Moo Cow. She chose it defensively, when she learned that eight-year-old me wanted to call him something she found corny, like Duke or Prince. Moo Cow soon associated our mother’s call with treats, and it became impossible to summon him without imitating her.
After my mother’s death, I stood every night on the back porch before bed. I hollered the cat’s name and pulled her voice from the bottom of my stomach and threw it at the yard.
Moooooooooooooo. Mooooooo Cow Chow. I scanned the trees. I felt ridiculous, like I was summoning my mother. I imagined her scurrying to the door on all fours with her back hunched. Her eyes were wide and unnaturally golden.
Jesus Christ, Mommy.
In a half decade or so, I will realize that I have all but forgotten how you sound. The only way I recall the pitch of your voice and where your vowels sharpen then soften is when I remember you howling the cat’s name.
I woke slowly, still in the haze of a haunting dream. I listened to my sisters back the van down the driveway en route to the grocery store.
“I had a really odd/scary dream which unnerved me,” I noted in my journal, which had a fake lock and, on the cover, a repeating pattern of stilettos and purses. The recent entries were a mix of recording what my family had done in the aftermath of burying my mother—the cemetery visits, the burning of joss paper—and the tiny dramas of freshman year, including which boys I crushed on, and what they’d written in the condolence card my English teacher had passed around.
“Mommy came back alive, or something,” I wrote, “like she was never dead.”
In the dream, my mother and I were on a road walking toward the barn. It was dusk. We were on foot. She wore loose clothes that hid the weight she had gained in recent years, and her hand cradled her stomach.
“We were walking behind people with horses. They were slow, and me and Mommy were fast, so we passed them,” I wrote. “I wanted to ask, or mention…how strong she seemed. IDK what she said in turn.”
When we reached the stable doors, I glanced over my shoulder, but she was nowhere to be found. I wrote that when I woke, I had a “droopy feeling”—the crash after a high, a heaviness, another wave of loss—as if my mother had died again.
When I was in elementary school, my mother borrowed a library book for me that gave me nightmares for days. I cannot find the title now, but I remember that in the early pages, the protagonist—a girl about my age—watches her mother disappear. Her mother seems preoccupied and unwell. They walk outside somewhere near their home. Suddenly, the air feels different and her mother is gone. She has a mother, and then she does not. In order to explain away her absence, the girl believes her mother has vanished into a parallel world. I was disturbed by this uncertainty and that there was no goodbye. It felt violent and sinister, and reading this book instilled in me a preemptive longing for my mother. I turned to her then as she lay in bed next to me, engrossed in her kissing book. I threw a leg and arm around her.
Mothers provide, she often said. I’m the provider.
She made a fist and thumped her chest to show her strength. She filled such basic needs for us just by being alive. She was the general. She was the one who strategized our futures and led us to win wars. With her, we were safe.
For years, my mother asked Steph about two of her friends—sisters, whose own mother had recently died from cancer.
How are they doing? she’d say, her tone not too different from the lady with the prayer blanket. We knew that she only asked because they were motherless girls. But just the thought of them stirred within me some secondhand panic, like their tragedy could filter into our own lives. These days, whenever I hear those names, I think of them as the girls with the dead mother.
Not you, I wanted to say to my mother at the time, because this worried me. This would never happen to you. But I stopped myself, because saying that sort of thing out loud only invites trouble.
It took me years to realize that my mother had also grown up motherless. By the time I understood this—and gathered
that this was a worry of hers, that she would die before all of her children were adults—she was long dead and her fear was my inheritance.
On my birthday, my sisters asked me to stay seated at the kitchen table after we finished dinner. They pushed fourteen candles into the cake, which was frosted with rocky road ice cream and had wedges of pistachio ice cream inside.
OK, don’t look, Sticky, they said as they put something in my arms.
When I opened my eyes, I saw a wooden jewelry box. They’d discovered it when we cleaned out my mother’s cubicle at the insurance company and had hidden it from me for the past week.
It’s from Mommy, they said and helped me slide it from its packaging. We think she was saving this for you.
It was rectangular and made of faux rosewood. It had a single lid that opened like a loose jaw to expose a mouth of velveteen slots for rings and earrings.
All I could see was a casket.
Oh, I said. I tried not to recoil. I was fourteen now, and though I still slept cuddling my childhood stuffed animal—a toucan my mother had mistakenly named Ducky—I considered myself an adult. I wondered if this was a test.
Thank you, I heard myself say. I pushed the corners of my mouth up and I made my voice light. My sisters relaxed.
This is perfect, my mouth said. And then, I began to cry.
Each time I opened the box and stared into its maw, littered with my costume jewelry and a tiny fake-onyx necklace you’d bought for me at a gift shop on that trip to Seattle, I thought of you in your casket. Your hands were clasped on your stomach and your engagement ring was still on your swollen finger. Your coffin, the largest jewelry box. Your body, the gem.
You suddenly are across the kitchen table peering at me over a pile of wrapping paper.
Happy birthday, Chin-na Chow, you as my ghost mother say. You invoke one of my nicknames, a derivative of Chinchilla, which you and my sisters had called me because when I was young, I was so small and, in your eyes, cute. You hadn’t wanted to miss my birthday; you wanted to keep your claim as my mother. I shrink back. You lean closer and make the face. You flip your head back and caw with brutal, bracing laughter. Your teeth are Colgate white.
3.
In the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, there is:
An eighteen-foot-tall pink granite pyramid with an angel standing in a doorway. Her head tips toward the sky and her wings bend open. It’s a memorial for Mark Howard, who died in 1887. Howard was appointed by President Lincoln as the first internal revenue collector of Connecticut.
A statue in memory of a toddler who died in 1905 for which Cynthia Talcott’s parents commissioned a life-size carving of her face. Her head floats toward the top of a small cross-like marker. It looks as though she stands at a wooden cutout at a carnival and pushes her cherubic face into it for a photo.1
The Colt memorial, commissioned by Elizabeth Colt. At forty feet tall, it soars above the other monuments, hoisting its bronze angel into the sky. Colt’s husband was the inventor and industrialist Samuel Colt, who mass-produced revolvers and died in 1862 during the Civil War. Upon his death, Elizabeth Colt became one of the richest women in the U.S. The monument to her husband, where she would later rest, cost her $25,000 and set trends in the cemetery.
Memorials dedicated to a man named Yung Wing, who died in 1912. Yung’s markers sit in the family plot of his wife, Mary Kellogg, and there is an unassuming obelisk for the couple, which is inscribed with Yung’s name in Chinese. There is also a plaque from the Chinese government applauding his work in starting the educational mission.
And, from 1988 until 2004, a flat headstone dedicated to a newborn named Jonathan Love Chow.
4.
My father held the square tin as though it were a gift he’d just received, his elbows bent, box in both hands just below his chest. As he approached the van where Steph and I waited, it looked for a moment like he wanted to shake the container to determine if it held a watch, a candle, a glass figurine. In reality, it was a canister of ash and bone fragments. A debt he owed to his dead wife.
A month after her funeral, the three of us were at Cedar Hill so that my father could pay for Jonathan’s remains to be disinterred, then cremated. It struck me then how many transactions were necessary in mourning. So many invoices to be paid over the past few weeks: the obituary notice, the funeral services, the casket, the flowers, the burial, the death certificate, Jonathan’s disinterment and cremation, and, eventually, my mother’s monument.
Steph and I waited for our father in the car, not speaking as we watched the smoke drift from the building’s chimney and fade into the trees. I wondered who we were witnessing take on another form.
As we left, bursts of gold and crimson scattered throughout the cemetery. The monuments obscured the groundskeepers and their leaf blowers, which made it appear as though ghosts had kicked the foliage.
At home, Steph and I took turns standing at the microwave to reheat bowls of a thin broth with pork bones, boiled mustard greens, and winter melon. I warmed crispy noodles in a pan and we slathered them with a gravy of fish cakes and bok choy we’d made the previous weekend. We ate these without speaking, spooning rice into our soup and slurping loudly, chomping on the noodles with visible, audible relief. Afterward, the TV still blasting the Nightly Business Report with Paul Kangas, our father carried the tin with Jonathan’s ashes to the family room. For the next decade, my parents’ only son would sit at the base of the fireplace behind a jungle of wilted and rotted plants.
* * *
Watching my father clutch his son’s ashes, I understood the weight of what he held. One can grieve a person, place, or ideal. All of those things have heft. The word itself, grieve, comes partially from the Latin gravare—to “make heavy; cause grief.” Heavy. Like the realization that his wife and son were not ready to leave their lives behind; that each of us was scared of death and all that it would bring; that with it, our sense of home—the people who made it, the paperwork that codified it—could easily be upended.
Freud wrote famously about mourning and melancholia. These two types of grief were distinct from one another, he posited in an essay from 1917. Mourning had an end in sight; a person in mourning had a grief that adhered to a specific person or object. But melancholia was an ongoing state—pathological, almost. The melancholic may know they have lost something, but not exactly what they have lost.
The scholar Anne Anlin Cheng puts it this way in The Melancholy of Race: “The melancholic eats the lost object—feeds on it, as it were.” Eats, feeds. As though those who have internalized loss become ravenous in their hunger for sustaining their grief. It bloats them, but they continue to feast. Perhaps, instead of asking if I am exorcising or taxidermizing you, I should ask if really, I am taxidermizing myself. What within my grief am I afraid to lose? It is the idea of her, of course. Here, so many years later, I can’t shake her death and don’t seem to want to in the first place. Eats, feeds, eats, feeds—insatiable.
But Cheng’s broader argument is that identity formation—and racial identity formation in particular—is melancholic itself and is shaped by the push-pulls of loss and recovery.2 I get this. The immigrant family tries to preserve a history and a life that the surroundings resist. They try to invent a new way of being while always seeking a home within the negative space.
I find this melancholy in the story of Yung Wing, who was buried in Cedar Hill not far from where Jonathan first rested. So many historians tout Yung’s firsts: that he was the first Chinese immigrant to graduate from Yale; that he wrote what was arguably the first Chinese American memoir, before a “Chinese American” identity was called such. But it is Yung’s existence in Connecticut and the question of his belonging that I find most compelling.
As a child, it was hard for me to imagine that anyone alive centuries ago in Connecticut looked like my family. Wethersfield’s borders had placards that delighted in how it was established in 1634 and therefore the “most ancient” town in the state. On ele
mentary school field trips, we toured the homes of white men named Joseph Webb and Isaac Stevens that were built in the 1700s and preserved with assiduous detail. It was impossible for me to feel as though my family, or anyone who looked like us, had roots here. We felt so new and had no community outside of our relatives. I did not know that there were immigrants from China of my great-grandparents’ generation who lived and died not far from where I was born.
While at Yale, Yung was granted American citizenship, which was unusual in that era, considering that many Chinese immigrants in the American west were denied such, and the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 would make that xenophobia and racism law. It was perhaps, as some scholars argue, the privileges and proximity to whiteness that a prestigious institution like Yale afforded Yung.
Still, Yung struggled to find work after his graduation. His sponsors had hoped that, following his time at Yale, he would return to China to continue their mission work. The scholar Robert G. Lee once made a distinction about immigrants: A foreigner was “innocuous” and temporary; an alien had no desire to leave and was therefore considered a threat. I had previously considered both labels—foreigner, alien—to be similarly derogatory, practically synonyms because they both served to otherize immigrants. But an immigrant’s permanence so quickly can eradicate any veneer of welcome.
