As she approached the age of 40, Dionne Ford, co-editor of the 2019 anthology Slavery’s Descendants, wondered how she had become “an invisible woman.” Who was she behind the mask she’d created to survive white supremacy and evade her struggles with mental illness? In Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing, Ford, a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellow, skillfully blends illuminating research and moving prose to describe her path to self-liberation.

Ford’s quest began when she discovered an early 1890s photo of her great-great-grandmother Temple “Tempy” Burton; Tempy’s enslaver, Colonel W.R. Stuart; and the colonel’s wife, Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s family were North Carolina plantation owners who bequeathed Tempy to the couple as a wedding gift. Tempy’s six children with Stuart included Ford’s great-grandmother Josephine, who was born a decade after emancipation. Although an internet search had uncovered this ancestral information, there were still considerable gaps in Ford’s family history.

Driven by the need to understand and contextualize Tempy’s life, Ford mined genealogy records, newspaper articles, county archives, ancestry message boards and the murky memories of relatives. Ultimately, Ford didn’t unearth clean-cut answers. The reasons Tempy stayed with her enslavers well after slavery had been abolished remained opaque, as did the interpersonal dynamics of Tempy’s relationships with the couple. But the intergenerational project cracked open the darkness of Ford’s trauma, which manifested as PTSD and alcoholism. Through efforts that often challenged her comfort, Ford restored the silenced voices of her ancestors, connected with distant cousins who were propelled by the same mission, and learned how to heal from childhood sexual abuse inflicted by a male relative.

Go Back and Get It is as deeply empathetic as it is introspective. With this striking work, Ford magnifies the interconnectedness of pain and forgiveness, cruelty and reconciliation. In order to regain autonomy—to feel at home in her body and to fully own her Blackness—she had to confront the dead rather than erase them. “Remember and recover,” Ford writes. “Re-member. Put yourself back together again and again.”

Growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s and ’60s, novelist Fae Myenne Ng (Bone) and her youngest sister accompanied their father to Portsmouth Square to visit the elderly “Orphan Bachelors” who gathered in the park “like scolds of pigeons.” Because of the United States’ exclusionary immigration laws, these men couldn’t bring their wives or children when they came to work in America. Ng’s father instructed his daughters to call these men Grandfather.

As she relates in her luminous, sometimes sorrowful memoir, Orphan Bachelors, Ng’s own maternal great-grandfather was one such bachelor. Born in the 1870s, he fathered two sons before leaving China to work in the abandoned gold mines in America. On a visit back to China in 1907 (it was common for Chinese workmen to travel home on occasion), he fathered a daughter, Ng’s grandmother. Nearly 50 years later, Ng’s mother arrived in America and found and cared for her grandfather, but Ng’s mother’s mother never met her own father.

No wonder Ng’s life was filled with secrets and mysteries. She peppered the Orphan Bachelors with questions about their lives and families, but most of these were ignored or answered with wildly inventive fictions meant to scare and instruct. Ng suggests that these stories seeded her desire to write.

Ng’s father, who worked as a merchant seaman and a laborer, arrived in San Francisco in 1940 as a “paper son,” a man who had purchased his identity from another family and studied a “Book of Lies”—a coaching book containing the “correct” answers to give during his immigration interview—before entering the U.S. Although some restrictions had been lifted since the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Ng’s mother was one of only 105 Chinese people allowed into the country in 1953. After Ng’s father decided to participate in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Chinese Confession Program and admit (with the promise of forgiveness) that he had entered the U.S. using falsified documents, she and her sister eventually changed their surname to Ng; their younger brothers, however, retained their father’s “paper name,” Toy.

A simple confession is never simple, however, and much of the memoir tells the story of an immigrant family in conflict. Ng’s mother, who worked first as a seamstress in a sweatshop and then as a shopkeeper, and her father, who was often at sea, did not see eye to eye. At some point the children chose sides. This family story will resonate with readers partly because of the crackle of its conflict but also because of the keen observations of its writer.

Orphan Bachelors feels intimate and evocative, quiet rather than strident. Ng’s grace as a storyteller makes it possible to understand in one’s bones how heartless policy bends and misshapes lives for generations.