Chinese Fish

Winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature 2024

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’.

WINNER: Victorian Prize for Literature 2024
WINNER: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2024
WINNER: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards – Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2024
SHORTLISTED: Mary Gilmore Award 2024
HIGHLY COMMENDED: Anne Elder Award 2023

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 Whittaker’s Blakwork.
Marion May Campbell

In Chinese Fish, Yee cooks up a rich variety of poetic material into a book that is special and strange; this is poetry at its urgent and thrilling best.
Judges’ citation, The Ockhams New Zealand Book Awards

Yee focuses on women’s experience; particularly, how migration tests the relationship between a mother and her daughter. She tells this story with sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve, while paying sustained attention to historical circumstance – particularly everyday racism and the discriminatory government policies which affected Chinese migrants.
Judges’ comments, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

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

Brilliant…Visually rich and poetically stunning, Chinese Fish is for those who enjoyed Thuy On’s Decadence or Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar.
Ana Brawls, Books+Publishing

What sets this work apart is its daring approach – it leaps across genres and forms, sometimes on a single page…Chinese Fish is a layered and thoughtful work that reveals more through multiple readings.
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, Saturday Paper

Poetry of captivating clarity…a joyous celebration of the materiality of a life, of the chaotic sights and smells of a family life which is loud, disorganised, and adept at adapting its rituals to a society that is silent, organised, and judgemental.
Jennifer Mackenzie, Cordite