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WORK TITLE: Accomplice to Memory
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Chang, Kimberly
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.qmzhang.com/
CITY:
STATE: MA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://kaya.com/authors/q-m-zhang/ * http://kaya.com/2017/04/read-interview-accomplice-memory-author-q-m-zhang/ * https://www.qmzhang.com/new-page-3/ * https://www.hampshire.edu/faculty/kimberly-chang
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2017031301
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017031301
HEADING: Zhang, Q. M. (Writer)
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040 __ |a TnLvILS |b eng |e rda |c TnLvILS
100 1_ |a Zhang, Q. M. |c (Writer)
370 __ |e Massachusetts |f Amherst (Mass.) |2 naf
374 __ |a Teachers |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Accomplice to memory, 2017: |b title page (Q.M. Zhang) about the author (Q.M. Zhang is a writer of hybrid non/fiction stories and forms, with a focus on “Chinese” and “American” identities and communities across the Pacific ; teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA)
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Studied anthropology and psychology; Juniper Summer Writing Institute; Vermont Studio Center, writing resident.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, teacher.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
M. Zhang studied anthropology and psychology and writes ethnographies of Chinese and American identities, communities, and border crossings on both sides of the Pacific. Zhang grew up in upstate New York and attended the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. At the Vermont Studio Center she was a writing resident. Zhang has lived in China and Hong Kong, and now resides in Western Massachusetts. She teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
In 2017, Zhang published Accomplice to Memory, which combines memoir, fiction, documentary photographs, and graphic art to explore memories and history. After her father suffered a fall that left him with a brain injury and dementia, Zhang sat at his bedside recording his stories and trying to extract the true story of his immigration from China to the United States in the 1930s just before the civil war and world war up to the 1949 Chinese revolution. Her father tells her stories that she backs up with historical information, timelines, geography, and poetry. He reveals to her previously untold stories of love, betrayal, and immigration. Although some of his stories are contradictory, what begins to develop is a truth about Zhang’s relationship with her father: his temper and her stubbornness to learn about her family’s history. Zhang acknowledges that children of survivors and immigrants are sometimes skeptical of their family’s deceptively simple stories and have difficulty distinguishing between fact and fiction. Through her memoir, she attempts to show where the past and future meet and how children of immigrants piece together fragments of memory into a coherent narrative.
A reviewer in Publishers Weekly commented that Zhang’s memoir is illuminating yet muddled, and that the back and forth between the present as her father tells her a story and the past as Zhang imagines it “proves ineffective, leaving the reader to wonder how much truth is really here.” The story becomes compelling in its own right only towards the end when Zhang learns secrets of her father’s life in China, noted the reviewer. On the Foreward Reviews Website, Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers said that 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.” Montgomery-Rodgers added that the unstable construction of the book reflects the dichotomy between image and text, father and daughter, memory and history, truth and fiction, and reader and writer. This strategy in storytelling blurs the truth and focuses on memory as narrative.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2016, review of Accomplice to Memory, p. 136.
ONLINE
Foreward Reviews, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (November 10, 2017), Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers, review of Accomplice to Memory.
Q.M. ZHANG
Home About the Book About the Author News Events Contact
Q.M. Zhang (Kimberly Chang) grew up in upstate New York, lived in China and Hong Kong, and currently makes her home in Western Massachusetts. She is a writer of hybrid non/fiction stories and forms, with a focus on “Chinese” and “American” identities, communities, and border crossings. Trained in the disciplines of anthropology and psychology, she has written ethnographies of diasporic communities on both sides of the Pacific. She is an alumni of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and was a writing resident at the Vermont Studio Center. Her book, Accomplice to Memory, combines memoir, fiction, and documentary photographs to explore the limits and possibilities of truth telling across generations and geographies. An excerpt from the book was published in The Massachusetts Review. She currently teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.
Photo by T. Prutisto
Photo by T. Prutisto
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Q.M. Zhang
Q.M. Zhang (Kimberly Chang) grew up in upstate New York, lived in China and Hong Kong, and currently makes her home in Western Massachusetts. She is a writer and teacher of creative non/fiction stories and forms, with a focus on Chinese American border crossings. Trained in the disciplines of anthropology and psychology, she has published ethnographic studies of Asian diasporic communities on both sides of the Pacific. Faced with the limitations of her social science tools, she has worked over the last decade to develop herself at the craft of creative non/fiction as the quintessential hybrid literary form for writing about migration and diaspora. She is an alumni of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and was a resident writer at the Vermont Studio Center. Her book, Accomplice to Memory, combines memoir, fiction, and documentary photographs to explore the limits and possibilities of truth telling across generations and geographies. An excerpt from the book was published in The Massachusetts Review. She currently teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.
BOOKS
ACCOMPLICE TO MEMORY
Kaya Press Feb. 28, 2017
BUY Accomplice to Memory HERE!
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 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.
PRAISE
“In comic book parlance, the blank space between illustrated panels is called “the gutter.” It’s in the gutter where the real story comes to light, where time past and time future meet, and where readers turn fragmented images into coherent narratives. In Accomplice to Memory, Q.M. Zhang constructs her own “gutter” out of an assemblage of aesthetic forms: this book moves between photography and memoir, between history and poetry, between essay and fiction, to artfully excavate the truths behind Zhang’s father’s escape from China, and his subsequent life in the US. History is filled with the voiceless and nameless, those who have disappeared into obscurity. Accomplice to Memory works to revive the lost, to memorialize the author’s father, and the many thousands who fled the wars that roiled China during the 20th Century.”
– Paisley Rekdal, author of Intimate: An American Family Photo Album
Q.M. ZHANG NEWS
EVENT—VISIONS AND VOICES PRESENTS I LOVE DICK: FIVE WOMEN WRITERS ON HYBRID STORYTELLING
I Love Dick, Chris Kraus’s auto-fiction about the obsessions of a writer named Chris Kraus, has influenced a generation of writers to experiment with blurring fact and fiction as a way to claim radical subjectivity. The book has now been adapted into an Amazon Prime series produced by Jill Soloway (Transparent). In a conversation about how […]
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Come hang out, make things, get hands-on publishing experience, and meet some amazing literary artists at our booth at the LA Times Festival Of Books! OTHER BOOKS/Seite Books will be curating an amazing selection of comics, zines, and literature, plus we’ll be featuring books from Kaya Press, Kundiman, and other LA indie presses. We’ll have publishing-and-bookmaking activities […]
READ AN INTERVIEW WITH ACCOMPLICE TO MEMORY AUTHOR Q.M. ZHANG
Last week, we published Accomplice to Memory, a brand new experimental memoir from author Q.M. Zhang. Check out this interview between Zhang and Kaya Press in which the writer discusses the book’s structure, her writing process, her relationship with her father and her heritage, and much more. Kaya Press: Accomplice to Memory defies genre—it is […]
ACCOMPLICE TO MEMORY IS HERE–GET YOUR COPY NOW
Kaya Press is so excited to announce the publication of Q.M. Zhang’s brand new hybrid, experimental memoir, Accomplice to Memory! In Accomplice to Memory, 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 […]
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10/2/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Accomplice to Memory
Publishers Weekly.
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p136.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Accomplice to Memory
Q.M. Zhang. Kaya, $17.95trade paper(228p)
ISBN 978-1-885030-52-8
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Zhang's peculiar memoir of recording her father's memories is both illuminating and muddled. The story
begins with her embellished version of the story that Zhang's father would often tell about leaving China on
a train. The story continues to evolve after Zhang's father suffers a fall that causes a traumatic brain injury.
He's not as sharp but is still undeniably himself. Zhang's relationship with her father emerges as complicated
and dynamic, shaped by his temper and Zhang's stubbornness and curiosity. The book is filled with history
regarding the revolution and war, intended to relate to her father but often overshadowing his story. The
book moves back and forth between the present and the past, both as Zhang's father recalls it and as Zhang
imagines it. The choice to tell the story this way proves ineffective, leaving the reader to wonder how much
truth is really here. Only towards the end, when Zhang discovers secrets about her father's life in China,
does his story become compelling in its own right. Many readers will wish she'd spent less time imagining
his life and more time exploring the truth about it. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Accomplice to Memory." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 136+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225096&it=r&asid=0b40966c723839404d0551d4e466234a.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225096
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FOREWORD REVIEW
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ACCOMPLICE TO MEMORY
Q. M. Zhang
Kaya Press (Mar 28, 2017)
Softcover $21.95 (352pp)
978-1-885030-52-8
Trained in anthropology, psychology, and creative non-fiction, Q. M. Zhang brings all these disciplines to bear in Accomplice to Memory, a radical investigation into the nature of truth and memory that’s equal parts biography and memoir, narrative and graphic art. Zhang’s father, Wang Kun, grew up in China in the decades leading up to the 1949 revolution and immigrated to the United States shortly afterwards. Zhang finally decides to tell his story after a health crisis that leaves him with declining mental facilities. When his lifetime of silence breaks down, it’s in scant, often contradictory stories. Although his narrative overlaps major historical events, he always places himself just outside the known. Zhang notes that children of survivors “are afflicted with a strange condition that makes it difficult for them to distinguish between fact and fiction, though they are certain that a clear line can be drawn between the two. They crave truth yet are beset by doubt and suspicion of anything that smacks of it.” All too soon, the deceptively simple task of narrative becomes the greatest challenge of all.
It soon becomes clear that 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.
Reviewed by Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers
March/April 2017
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
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