His Mother’s Life Was a Mystery He Needed to Solve
Writing about the dead is difficult business. Whenever I write about my mother, I spend a lot of time struggling to recall: How did she take her coffee? What music made her dance? When she laughed, did she throw her head back, like I do? My ability to answer these questions—to try to create an honest portrait of her on the page—is constrained by the five and a half years we spent together before she died. To fill in the gaps, I’ve interviewed family and friends, even built an archive of documents and photos. Each piece of new information—her U.S. naturalization certificate, her honeymoon pictures—is a gift, but it’s also a reminder of all that I will never know about her.
Given how intense and emotional the work of remembering can be, I was stunned to learn the story behind a book called . First published 40 years ago by the journalist Chris Perez Howard, it’s considered to be the U.S. territory of Guam, where my family is from. Part novel and part biography, follows the author’s Indigenous Chamorro mother, who was killed when he was a small boy during the World War II occupation of Guam by the Japanese. She died just three days before American troops arrived; her body was never found.
