Accomplice to Memory

by Q.M. Zhang

In Accomplice to Memory, Q.M. Zhang pieces together the mystery of her father's exodus from China to the US during the two decades of civil and world war leading up to the 1949 revolution. But after a lifetime of her father's secrets and lies, Zhang's efforts to untangle the truth are thwarted by the distance between generations and her father's growing dementia. One day, late in his life, Zhang's father tells her a story she never heard before, and suddenly, all of his previous stories begin to unravel. Before she can get clarity on the new information, her father is hospitalized. Armed with history books and timelines, Zhang sits at her father's bedside recording accounts of love, espionage and betrayal, attempting to parse out the truth. Part memoir, novel and historical documentary, this hybrid text explores the silences and subterfuge of an immigrant parent, and the struggles of the second generation to understand the first. Q.M. Zhang is a Professor of Cultural Psychology at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

Published March 28, 2017

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overrated. 'Which are you really' a dream interrogator demands of the author, 'Chinese or American?' This seems to be what the author wrestles with. She desperately wants to be "a survivor" in some sort of Chinese holocaust story, a victim in her own half-fabricated victim narrative rather than simply a second-generation American woman of Chinese heritage. The style of weaving truth and fiction becomes tedious after a couple hundred pages and the story ultimately fails.

[Josh Reuss]

An interesting work that plays with form and challenges the relationship between fiction, truth, and memory.

[Kayo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredible book that chronicles the author's quest to find answers to how her father--a Chinese man who ended up in upstate New York during the tumultuous power struggle between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party in mid 20th century. Zhang has blurred the line between essay and story, the truth and memory, to weave the imperfect narrative of her father.

I learned, as a Taiwanese Canadian trying to understand my own identity, that sometimes, we need to fill in the gaps with our own imagination because we can never uncover the truth from our family, who have tried to bury their painful memories.