Basket
Chinese Fish
When Ping leaves Hong Kong to live in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, she discovers that life in the Land of the Long White Cloud is not the prosperous paradise she was led to believe it would be. Every day she works in a rat-infested shop frying fish, and every evening she waits for her wayward husband, armed with a vacuum cleaner to ‘suck all the bad thing out’. Her four children are a brood of monolingual aliens. Eldest daughter Cherry struggles with her mother’s unhappiness and the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings, especially the rage-prone, meat-cleaver-wielding Baby Joseph.
Chinese Fish is a family saga that spans the 1960s through to the 1980s. Narrated in multiple voices and laced with archival fragments and scholarly interjections, it offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of women and girls in a community that has historically been characterised as both a ‘yellow peril’ menace and an exotic ‘model minority’.
A major poetic work of feminist, so-called ‘minority’ writing, its originality and brilliance more than earning its space alongside such works as Kathleen Fallon’s Working Hot, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, and Alison Whittakers’s Blakwork.
Marion May Campbell
As visually provocative as it is poetic, Chinese Fish portrays the fractured, multilayered, imperiled body of the immigrant story in a stunning work of genre-bending prose poetry. Yee has given the Chin family a literary resting place as complex and as searing as the New Zealand in which they survived.
Juli Min, Editor of The Shanghai Literary Review
An unflinchingly honest look at life behind closed doors, where resentment simmers, generations clash, and individual dreams are set aside for the interests of family.
Chris Tse, New Zealand Poet Laureate
An utterly mesmerising, richly textured and polyphonic collection of poems that detail familial and migratory histories of the Chinese in Aotearoa. Yee engages in deep play of oral and written legacies through riveting, interconnected sequences. Chinese Fish is a complex and deeply intelligent examination of who and what we choose to record, and what slips between the lines.
Eileen Chong
