In Conversation: Three Writers on Myth, Migration & Mourning

Kat Chow is a writer and journalist; she was previously a reporter at NPR and was a founding member of the Code Switch team. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Radiolab, among others, and she is one of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour’s fourth chairs. Chow worried constantly about her parents dying, especially her mother, a vivacious and mischievous woman. And after her mother’s unexpected death from cancer, Chow, her sisters, and their father are plunged into a debilitating, lonely grief. In Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing), she weaves together a story by the emotional fallout that follows her extended family as they emigrate from China and Hong Kong to Cuba and America. She asks what it means to reclaim and tell your family’s story: Is writing an exorcism or is it its own form of preservation? The result is a meditation on who we become facing loss, and a remarkable contribution to the literature of the American family. Kirkus observed that by “uniting family memories, elements of Chinese culture, and an intimate perspective, Chow wraps tragedy and history into an affecting memorial. A powerful remembrance of a family unmoored by the loss of its matriarch.”

Albert Samaha is an investigative journalist and inequality editor at BuzzFeed News whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly, and the Riverfront Times, among other outlets. He is also the author of Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City. In Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes (Riverhead Books), Samaha explores the forces that steered the fate of his sprawling Filipino American family, and his findings reframe how we comprehend the immigrant experience. This book relays one family’s story, but Samaha presents it through the region’s unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, placing that personal story into the broader tale of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. Adam Serwer, author of The Cruelty Is the Point, called it a “gorgeous, cinematic epic about how an immigrant family becomes American, and the unfathomable losses they bear in pursuit of the dream.”

Patricia Engel is the author of The Veins of the Ocean: A Novel; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris: A Novel; and Vida. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. In Infinite Country: A Novel (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), Talia is an American daughter of Colombian parents who is serving time at a correctional facility for adolescent girls. Her father and a plane ticket to the U.S. are waiting for her back home in Bogotá. But can she really bring herself to trade the solid facts of her father and life in Colombia for the distant vision of her mother and siblings in America? Her story, a tale of how her family came to be in two different countries and two different worlds, comes into focus like twists of a kaleidoscope. The New York Times noted that the book’s “prose is serpentine and exciting … [with] intimate and meticulously rendered descriptions of Andean landscapes and mythology, of Colombia’s long history of violence. … a compulsively readable novel.”