The Pulteney StreetSurvey
NEXT GENERATION MEMORY
The different tools we use to research and write give us access to different kinds of knowledge. The creative research and writing practice that I call MemoryWorks grew out of the making of my book, Accomplice to Memory, a 10-year project trying to trace the history of my father’s exodus from China to the U.S. in the midst of civil and world war. As the oldest daughter of an immigrant father, I had been trying to write a family history using the tools of the social sciences that I’d been trained in: interviewing, ethnography, the archives. But near the end of my father’s life, he shared with me a secret that he had been carrying his whole life in the U.S., and which undermined everything I thought I knew about him and our family history.
When my father revealed the secret to me, he was very elderly and had dementia. He had a fall not long after, and at that point I realized it would be impossible to know what really happened. I began to rethink the tools and methods of the social sciences, how they don’t allow us to access so much of human experience that goes underground.
Especially with immigrant experiences, where trauma and loss are concerned, the limitations of interviewing become obvious — you can’t just ask a question and extract an answer. There’s a story that needs to be told. So my work began shifting towards more artistic forms — fiction, memoir, photography. I realized that a creative, hybrid form was the only way for me, as a next generation writer, to make sense of the past, with all its secrets and intergenerational silences.
The past is not sitting there waiting for us to simply go back to retrieve it; it requires an active process of reconstructing out of fragments, out of absence. What I’m suggesting is that we can’t think about the future separately from this work of trying to trace the past out of the urgency of the present, especially at this moment of reckoning with both our national histories and our personal histories. Memory work is not a simple, straightforward narrative recounting of the past; it’s about how to write into the silences, excavate what’s been buried, and make something new out of the remains.
Kimberly Chang ’83 is the founder of MemoryWorks, a “creative research and writing practice for the next generation,” and Associate Professor Emerita of Cultural Psychology and Creative Nonfiction at Hampshire College. The author of Accomplice to Memory (published under her Chinese name, Q .M. Zhang), which mixes memoir, historical fiction, and documentary photographs to explore the limits and possibilities of truth telling across generations and geographies, Chang serves as Prose Editor for The Massachusetts Review. Learn more about MemoryWorks at qmzhang.com, and Accomplice to Memory at kaya.com/books/accomplice-to-memory.