As an adult, it’s birds like that swooping between glass and steel that stays with me. But as an adult, I loved these falcons for what they symbolized about determination and endurance.īelow is an excerpt from my new memoir, Seeing Ghosts (Grand Central Publishing).Īs a child, I couldn’t understand what an enormous feat the reappearance of peregrines at the Travelers Tower signified for environmentalists. (Hartford is nicknamed the “insurance capital of the world,” and my mother worked for major health insurance companies for much of her career, despite not feeling she could afford a health insurance plan that likely would have best benefited her.) As a kid, I was enraptured by these falcons-they seemed so powerful, and I loved how fast they could fly. Immediately, I knew I needed to write about the Travelers Tower in Hartford, where she worked briefly, and where peregrine falcons had nested in 1997. I wanted to infuse this chapter with my own childhood memory of my mother’s work and the ways that perspective can change and grow more complicated over the years. So much of this book is about the ways my parents tried to make lives for themselves and their children in America’s capitalistic system after fleeing Communism in China. When I began working on the chapter that’s partially excerpted here, I wanted to write about my parents’ marriage and careers, and how they each channeled their ambitions and had to adapt to each other’s realities.

Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow