The Memory Museum: Stories

Jul 29

by M Lin

I saw The Memory Museum: Stories by M Lin on Instagram when it was first coming out and figured I'd get to it eventually. Then I started chatting with the author, we were in Chicago at the same time and honestly we had the same camera roll. She's lovely. She had a book signing and discussion in LA and mentioned she hoped I'd be able to make it. It didn't work out, but I really did want to go, and that's what actually bumped this up my list.

This is Lin's debut, and it moves around a lot, from present-day China to a speculative future, from Beijing to the diaspora scattered across the West. Underneath all of it is memory, how unreliable it is, how much of who we are depends on which version of the past we're holding onto. A couple of the stories go fully speculative, the opening one has an elderly woman in a dystopian future visited by memories of her grandfather's village, and the title story imagines an actual museum generations from now where two people's entire job is cataloging and sharing other people's pasts. Most of the rest stay grounded in the present. There's a couple on what's basically a divorce honeymoon in Morocco. Four migrant workers and petty thieves who end up connected over one desperate night. A filmmaker trying to hold together censorship, motherhood, and her own art all at the same time. There's this quiet sadness running under most of the stories.

I'd recommend this for anyone who likes short stories with a little twist to them. Most carry that specific immigrant sadness, but not all of them, the divorcing couple story didn't have that particular ache, though there was a different kind of sadness sitting in it instead.

Definitely worth the read.