BookLife Review: The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

Generational trauma, mother-daughter, healing, inherited memory, Chinese-American women

Is there such a thing as generational memory? Inherited trauma? Author Jamie Ford probes this esoterical concept in The Many Daughters of Afong Moy to mixed effect. The challenge is that while Ford weights the novel toward a single generation, she perhaps includes one too many generations for the reader to keep track of or at least for the reader to become fully invested in or attached to in all of the generations. In the back and forth, I lost track of generation 2, I think.

The topical concept of generational memory and trauma poses the fascinating concept of whether trauma can alter DNA such that phobias and abilities (along with hair color, eye color, height and artistic talent) are passed to a subsequent generation, and more mysteriously, whether memories themselves can be somehow encoded and passed or accessed by subsequent generations. Ford poses this transfer as a sort of hypothetical explanation for those moments of deja vu. She suggests, through story, that your ancestor may have experienced something, or that someone you are encountering or his or her predecessor or ancestor may have encountered your ancestor in a prior generation and that knowledge, experience, memory or trauma has been encoded and transfer to a descendant’s present.

The premise, while an intellectual stretch, is almost lovely to believe, and embrace, connecting each of us deeply and profoundly to those who have come before in ways far beyond eye color, height or talents.