Chinese Fish by Grace Yee, Giramondo 2023

Some books I’m not sure if I consume them or they consume me. Chinese fish has an amazing hypnotic clarity. Page turning, subterranean transitions keep moving me forward, they flow with no catch of air to breathe, a woman’s way book. Grace Yee’s words swim inside into the canals of my life, they are in me in the contemplation in my whole body. Usually, I have to chew on one poem at a time, but Chinese fish is different. The poems represent notions of home through contrasting sounds and sensations that gobbled me whole.

………Ping steps out into a million-starred hush – no traffic horns
sizzling woks banging cleavers clacking mahjong tiles no honking
squabbling squawking singing – seven-thirty in the evening, her
kitten heels sinking in the dew-soaked lawn, the whole world
asleep.

 Grace Yee’s Chinese Fish, centres around a narration of intergenerational family sagas. Particularly women and girls’ storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand: in regards to intercultural immigration between the 1960s — 1980s. The story is told through multiple voices. Written as fiction but with nonfiction stippled through to great effect, in direct quotes from places such as the New Zealand legislation, the New Zealand Chinese Association, newspaper and advertisement. The personal is peppered with revealing quotes from primary sources.  

The Chinese woman
has a slender figure and a miserable life, yet she
neither diets nor exercises.………………………………….

 Grace Yee uses the page as a map, she plots and plants poems on various cardinal points ie. left / right / top / bottom. Some sections of poems are grey to distinguish the language of power from the vibrant language of resilient agency. Grace Yee’s white space is as active as her text: rests, re-orientates and challenges the reader in silent, spatial patterns. The placement of words with the awareness of space results in a three-dimensional effect with movement, a mobile. The logograms add dimension. At the back are the Cantonese -Taishanese logogram translations. To my delight I began to recognise the logograms in the text.

  ……………….… conduct
random searches on Chinese
businesses and residences
without warrant (until 1965).
they never asking me
just make big mess
死 … 

Chinese Fish is structured around fractured contrast and comparison. It begins with brief family portraits. The body of the collection holds seven sections, with works in diverse voices and poetic form. Chinese Fish propels through a strong narrative elucidating on themes of displacement, race, racism, sexism, the poetry is written in line, prose and asemic wordlessness, sometimes using the Latin alphabet, Chinese logograms and graphic symbols, with hybrid Cantonese – Taishanese, Te Reo Māori and English languages.

The Giramondo Publishing Company’s quality care is evident, the book as an object is elegant with its monochrome cover. The pages are a toothy matt, tactile to the fingers and ears, the paper is a slight lemon cream in colour, giving the text a charcoal appearance.

Grace Yee’s poems hit up and slide with similar, though different, experiences within my own migratory story. Universal to those tied to the bridges and gates of intercultural mastication. What’s so refreshing is the complexity of voice, the removing of [box]ed positioning.

she stomped because she hated the heat, the house
and raising children in the heat in the house.

I believe/feel the genuine in Grace Yee’s mountain of work. Her poems cut through the lacing of language. I think the voiced complexity of individual, group and national identity is the hero of Chinese Fish. This collection is a textured work, Grace Yee masterfully transports me through time, cultures, edges of childhood, sexual learning and discriminations, she held me tight as a whisper to the ear of a family and intercultural dynamics.

  ……………………………………………………….… but I knew I had
to be brown – it was the colour of everyone-and-everything-in-
the-world that-wasn’t-white.

I just cry because within the book are the pains of many difficult situations, I cry because she writes with a genuine generosity. Chinese Fish is so rich with the language of languages: the layers of push and shove. I was shown places where I still need to unpick bias / assumptions / privileges. (What is it when you think {don’t think} when culture grooms [me] to take for granted that [i] know a to z). I had to re-read because my bias on the first reading assumed certain information was from a white mainland when it was from an Asian mainland. I was woken, relaxed of trance. This book shows the power of words as spells as bindings.

… see my everything
so embarrass! they
wish you was boy
of course… 

The poetry is not just text on a page numerous layers are incorporated. Deeper habits overlap the pages, as is the complexity of land and colonisation, forces that run and smother.

…Ask
any real Australian what
he thinks of New Arrivals…

Grace Yee’s textured placement of poems is juxtaposed to content, marginalisation and meaning: a small islanded voice in a sea of white. The collection creates the home feel of a place, pattens of sound, Grace Yee showed me this through the curtains of text, her poems consume real estate. Voice camps occupying territory. Understatement yells in all the gaps, crashes me into the reality that all narratives are naturally fractured: an emerging genera. I have been changed in gentle waking, gently woken, a masterful arm-rock. I learnt from the Acknowledgment page that this collection is an adaption from the creative component of Grace Yee’s PhD thesis at the University of Melbourne. It has intellectual vigour in equal parts to the visceral. I highly recommend Chinese Fish, I believe it shall become a significant literary marker.

 – Leone Gabrielle

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Leone Gabrielle writes from Seymour, a snaking river town in Central Victoria, on Taungurung country. Her work has appeared in Cordite, Australian Poetry, Plumwood Mountain, Mona Magazine, MASKS Literary Magazine, XR Global, and Meanjin. When not writing she is in company of dogs, flowers and ravens.

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Chinese Fish is available from https://giramondopublishing.com/books/grace-yee-chinese-fish/

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