The Hong Kong Widow

THe summary (no spoilers)

The same woman across three timelines - as a child in Shanghai during the war, as a young woman invited to a haunted mansion for a series of seances in Hong Kong, then as an old woman traveling back to the scene of the crime with her daughter. Her Sight allows her to see things others cannot - is it a gift or a curse? What happened at the Maidenhair House?

Touchpoints

There are such rich phrases everywhere in this book. A major theme throughout the book is an exploration of family - how those we love are the creators of our world, for both goodness and grief.

I never knew or noticed that we moved! Our home always looked about the same from the inside, and there were always the same people… It’s as if the people you’re always with are the real walls of your house.

And:

That is what betrayal means, after all. Being known. You cannot be betrayed by strangers.

There was a particular storyline around the relationships between mothers and daughters. It is something that I bet all mothers everywhere contemplate at some point. There are years after becoming a mother of trying to find yourself again. Anew. And there is the recognition that your own mother is and was a person all of her own accord before you arrived. Someone who you will never really know. Someone who no longer exists.

To a daughter, how can a mother’s life before she became a mother mean all that much, really, compared to the life after? … It is my own fault; I thought I was doing right by never showing my daugther all of my layers. But I was not born the same day she was. My life did not start when hers did. Maybe it is time for her to realize that. Maybe it is long overdue. … It is true that I will never know exactly who my mother was. But that is the nature of being a daughter.

Beyond these themes, there were two other lines that struck me, which I want to keep.

Do not reach for the very first light you see, just because of the darkness you live in.

And:

The house was silent, but silence is not the same thing as peace.

My review

I picked this up from the St. Scholastica library’s new release shelf. The first sentence of the description grabbed me immediately: “Hong Kong 1953: In a remote mansion, witnesses insist a massacre took place. The police see nothing but pristine rooms and declare it a collective hallucination.” It’s creepy in a way I’m sure I wouldn’t like if it were a movie, but in book form it’s intriguing. I’ve gone a few months feeling mostly “meh” about everything I read. But this finally ended the rut I was in and brought me something great. I give The Hong Kong Widow 5 stars.