CHASING MEMORY

In this volume of essays, a woman looks back on her past and family.

Owyang has led a tumultuous life. Born in Nanjing as the Japanese were invading the Chinese city, the author fled as an infant with her parents to the Philippines, where her father’s position as a diplomat won them asylum. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines a few years later, Owyang’s father was captured and executed. After the war, the author’s talent at the piano landed her, at age 11, a spot in the Juilliard Preparatory Division, and she settled with her mother and brother in New York City. She gave up the piano after her marriage and raised two sons with her husband, Gilbert. The essays in this collection are written mostly from the perspective of her later years, as a grandmother and retiree, meditating on the shape of her life. For example, the title essay follows a return trip to her native Nanjing in her 60s to teach an English-language course. The trek was a strange exercise in belonging and not belonging: “The locals scanned me with their eyes; some spoke to me in Chinese, trying to detect the origin of my accent. But even in a place where I looked more like the people around me, I felt like an outsider.” Several of the essays deal with her mother, an idiosyncratic woman who in her later years loved to gamble and cut her own hair. In this second edition, Owyang’s prose is measured and insightful, as here where she discusses the lack of self-determination she felt when she was young: “I remembered the dutiful periods of accommodation in my youth, the number of times I had to wait until I got old enough to wear makeup, date boys….To make waiting easier during the early years, I used to imagine my mother wrapping me in a cloak of high expectations.” The essays are well crafted and are accompanied by a number of photographs of the author’s family. The book is short and will be of greatest interest to Owyang’s grandchildren—it is to them that it seems to be directed—but many readers will likely see something of themselves in the author’s moving experiences.

A compact, often affecting collection of autobiographical essays about family and responsibility.