By Rachel Martin and Reena Advani
FROM: Morning Edition

In her new book, Chinese American poet Victoria Chang writes, “Shame never has a loud clang. The worst part of shame is how silent it is.”

After her mother passed away in 2015, Chang found boxes full of family documents, letters and birth certificates in a storage facility.

“And a flood of questions came through my body but I had no one to ask them to,” Chang says. “So I decided to write a letter to my mother, and that was sort of the first letter that I had written for the book with no intention of writing more.”

But, as writers do, Chang kept on writing these letters — to her parents, her grandparents, her daughters, her teachers — until they turned into a book. And with the letters came questions, many of which had no answers. So she dug into what she remembered. And the result is Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. Listen to Rest of Interview Here