Grace Yee reflects on her second book Joss: A History (1 June 2025). Her first book was Chinese Fish, which was awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature in 2024, as well as other prestigious literary awards in Australia and New Zealand.

The first poems in Joss: A History evolved from experiments with extracts from books about China written in the 19th century through to the early 20th century. I have long been enamoured with the English language of this period, and fascinated with how it sanitised, prettified and thereby advanced colonialist-orientalist ideologies and projects. The writing is so beguiling. I played with very short extracts: inserting them into and alongside extracts of my own (21st century) writing to see what, if anything, ‘took’. By the time the State Library Victoria Creative Fellowship opportunity came along, I decided to focus most of the work on settler Chinese history in Australia, something I’d been interested in exploring for some time.

As with Chinese Fish, I was motivated by a strong conviction that the past persists in the present. While researching (for Joss: A History) I found that published histories, particularly prior to the era of digitised texts and the Internet, had an unyielding quality about them, a strong aura of authority and last-word closure. When I cut into these histories and played with fragments – text, images, voices – across different time-zones to draft some of the poems, my goal was not to enliven or re-narrate the past but rather, to consider the impact of the past in the present, how it ‘breathes’ there. Stories about past events are very much alive: their energy charges our ‘nows’, and this becomes apparent when they are unsettled from their usual contexts.

Joss is a polyphonic work that accommodates multiple voices and perspectives: it’s a narrative collage that integrates colonialist-orientalist and settler Chinese stories and perspectives. The collection wrangles with well-known tropes: early Chinese settlers characterised as gold diggers, opium addicts, market gardeners, Chinatown cooks and furniture-makers, their bound-feet wives and head-down daughters, all of whom lived on ‘the smell of an oily rag’ and ‘took away the profits from everyone else’. Stories like these have been entrenched in the lore of white settler nations around the Pacific Rim since the gold rushes of the mid-19^th century, and the othering, exoticising sentiments that undergird them have endured to the present day. Joss is interested in how settler Chinese and their descendants responded to the hegemonic force of these narratives and why the stories they continue to seed remain so pertinent.

My goal was not to enliven or re-narrate the past but rather, to consider the impact of the past in the present, how it ‘breathes’ there.