Photo by T. Prutisto
Q.M. Zhang (Kimberly Chang) is a writer, teacher, editor, and founder of MemoryWorks, a creative research and writing practice for individuals and communities who are trying to trace their past and reclaim histories in the face of historical omissions and intergenerational silences.
Finding Form
The idea of MemoryWorks was born out of three decades of documenting the lives of migrant and diasporic people who have been at the center of Kim’s work: international students in the U.S., migrant workers in Hong Kong and China, refugees of war and revolution on both sides of Pacific, including her own immigrant father. Originally trained in the social sciences, Kim grew increasingly dissatisfied with conventional academic modes of inquiry and forms of writing that fail to convey the absences and erasures that are at the core of the migrant experience. When her father opened a secret near the end of his life, subverting everything she thought she knew about him, Kim realized she needed a new set of tools. Turning to creative forms of writing and image making, Kim developed her own hybrid methodology for researching and writing into the silences within diasporic family histories.
Hybrid Writing
Kim’s award-winning book, Accomplice to Memory (Kaya Press, 2017), combines memoir, fiction, and documentary photographs to piece together the story of her father’s exodus from China to the U.S. during the two decades of civil and world war leading up to the 1949 revolution. The book is based on interviews conducted with her father during the last years of his life, along with extensive historical research on pre-revolutionary China. The text moves between a father-daughter story told in the present and a fictionalized account of a father character making his way out of war-torn China. A central feature of the book is the 131 photographs that work at a slant to the text, blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, memory and imagination, and calling into question the veracity of the stories told. In a review for the LA Review of Books, Xujun Eberlein concludes that: “this is a book worth reading twice, once for the story, and once to understand how we construct stories about what really happened, and what that tells us about ourselves.”
Teaching & Mentoring
Since the publication of her book, Kim has met with individuals and communities of diverse backgrounds and experiences who are engaged in the difficult intergenerational work of trying to recover family histories and seeking creative means of writing and reclaiming the past. As a Faculty Emerita of Cultural Psychology and Creative Nonfiction at Hampshire College, Kim brings to this work over 20 years experience of mentoring students and teaching interdisciplinary courses such as “Critical Ethnography, “Ways of Knowing,” “Crafting Truth,” and “Memory Work” that combined critical research methods with creative forms of writing to explore questions of migration, identity, and belonging.
Examples of her students’ next generation memory work projects include:
combining ethnography and fiction to recover the underground lives of Vietnamese migrants in Russia
juxtaposing childhood memories, family interviews, and national narratives to excavate the rift between the US and Iran
blending cultural analysis with creative forms of storytelling to reclaim histories of same sex and third gender identities in India
mixing myth and memory with image and sound to tell the contradictory tales of a family’s exodus from Cuba to the US
weaving prose, poetry, and art in order to re-see the American War in Vietnam and its aftermath for one Asian American family
splicing family photographs with video footage of actors playing the roles of family members as a means of exploring the gaps between history, memory, and myth within a mixed race family
A recipient of Mellon and Luce grants for her innovative teaching, Kim has worked extensively in China, where she led a field study program on food and identity, and in Hong Kong, where as a faculty at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology she was one of the first recipients of the Michael G. Gale Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Engaging Community
Outside of an academic setting, Kim has served as a consultant and contributor on a wide range of community memory work projects in the U.S., Asia, and Africa:
an intergenerational oral history project with the Bhutanese American community in Springfield MA, supported by a grant from Mass Humanities
an online creative writing curriculum for high school teachers and students in Hong Kong funded by the Education University of Hong Kong, in partnership with the International Writers’ Workshop and Hong Kong International Literary Festival
an archaeology heritage project on slave fortresses in Ghana from the perspective of a direct descendant of a slave trader
Editing
Kim is Prose Editor for The Massachusetts Review, a literary journal with a social justice legacy committed to publishing stories, poems, essays, art, and hybrid works by international and BIPOC writers and artists. She edited the 60th anniversary volume, And There Will Be Singing: An Anthology of International Writing (UMass Press, 2019), a compilation of stories in translation of war, migration, environmental and climate catastrophe, poverty and powerlessness, and race and ethnicity in a global context.