In Accomplice to Memory, Q.M. Zhang tries to piece together the fractured mystery 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. But after a lifetime of her father’s secrets, lies, and tall tales spun for fellow Americans, 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–trying to separate the good stories from the true ones. The one about the Chinese boy scout. The one about the secret radio station and the communist spy. The one about the girl on the boat. As Zhang follows her father upriver into the interior of a country at war, she is pulled in and along by an uncanny assemblage of images, memories, documents and dreams that inspire and conspire with her own attempts at truth telling.
Part memoir, novel, and historical documentary, this award-winning hybrid text explores the silences and subterfuge of an immigrant parent, and the struggles of the second generation to understand the first. Mixing images and text in the manner of W.G. Sebald, Zhang blurs the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, memory and imagination, and the result is a literary page-turner of one woman racing against time to uncover and reimagine her family’s origin story.
Reviews
“The term “hybrid” is applied mostly to memoirs with more than the usual amount of invention, or to novels with less. Here, though, is a book that realizes the true potential of a hybrid approach as few others do, to be placed on your shelf next to Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Kazim Ali’s Silver Road. Its combination of memoir, fiction, history, and photography captures how complex and partial any understanding of a loved one necessarily is. After reading Accomplice to Memory, it will be tempting to view as incomplete any memoir that doesn’t utilize such a multifaceted approach. How else, after all, can we triangulate between memory, fact, and truth?”
“The narrative evolution is the most significant contribution of this book. If you were to randomly pick two italicized passages from different parts of the book, each would seem as believable as the other. Yet when viewed sequentially, we see how the later fictionalizations contain more and more of what is revealed by the statements and silences of the father. There is a good process of discovery - as well as invention - going on that makes sense of each successive narrative. It may be 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.”
“Zhang’s voice is authorial, not authoritative. She often doubles down on her suspicions and doubts, presenting collective historical record, particularly images, as personal family history and then mythologizing that history. Zhang abandons the singular narrative in favor of a troubled, unstable construction that exists between image and text, father and daughter, memory and history, reader and writer, in a stance that claims the collective experience as her own. Zhang offers endless prompts on which to hang the narrative of her father’s life, and as the line between truth and fiction is steadily and deliberately blurred, it becomes clear that all memory is narrative, a construct that’s replayed again and again until it gains saliency and longevity in the mind.”
“The photographs that pepper the text are useful and create a scrapbook-ish verisimilitude. However, the book would have been nearly as strong without them, as Zhang delivers images in prose that are far more powerful than any photograph could communicate. ”
“A poetic exploration of the nature of immigrant origin stories, and the violent, strange legacies of displacement and diaspora.”