Kat Chow examines the long life of grief in 'Seeing Ghosts'

Kendra Hanna

October 01, 2021 / 10:25 am

caption: Kat Chow is a writer, journalist and founding member of NPR’s Code Switch team. In her new book, Seeing Ghosts, she tracks the ways grief and loss have touched her family across decades.

Kat Chow is a writer, journalist, and founding member of NPR’s Code Switch team. In her new book, Seeing Ghosts, she tracks the ways grief and loss have touched her family across decades.

Your death warped me. I had not realized that all this time, I had taxidermized myself.

In 2004, when Chow was 13, her mother died of terminal cancer. She writes not only about the after-effects of that loss, but of the woman who raised her as a character. Kat’s mother was a lover of practical jokes with a sometimes dark sense of humor. When she was 9 years old, she told Chow that when she eventually dies she’d like to be stuffed and taxidermized so she could sit and watch her daughter.

Chow is a graduate of the University of Washington. Several scenes in Seeing Ghosts take place at the UW, and some of the book itself was written during her time in Seattle. Fitting for a book about how events can reach through time, Chow is in conversation with two of her former professors. Leilani Nishime is the author of Undercover Asian and a professor of communications at the University of Washington. Shawn Wong is also a professor there in English, and the author of Homebase and Americanese.

The Elliot Bay Book Company presented this conversation on August 31st, 2021.

If you have any feedback on this episode, you can email John O’Brien at jobrien@kuow.org. Or you can just click the feedback button on the edge of this page. Reach out. We're listening.