Review of Grace Yee's 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝐹𝑖𝑠ℎ
Grace Yee, Chinese Fish. Sydney: Giaramondo, 2023.
Grace Yee’s Chinese Fish marks a unique point in the development of the family saga narrative. For one, Chinese Fish tells the story of the Chin family in the form of poetry rather than in prose. While countless other authors of the moment are telling narratives based on the migration of their family from a developing country towards the West, with many choosing poetry over prose, Yee’s foray into this particular sub-genre is marked by its franticness. Poems hop from left to right indentation, change perspective or positionality without any sort of warning, and sometimes cease to be poems altogether. (One particular poem interrupts itself to become pages and pages of pictures of Chinese boys and girls smiling en masse.) This is not a book for anyone who wants to enjoy simple storytelling. Even in a form as structurally free as poetry, Yee refuses to be contained.
Source: Giramondo
Cantonese characters and words are nested in the poems, at times as part of the dialogue in order to portray the nature of how the characters speak.
Enter the Grandfather, eyes half-closed. 做乜啊?
Aunty in the kitchen makes soothing noises about cold lemonade.
Grandfather sits down in his chair by the window.
阿爺...
做乜啊?
Can I go... see 大家姐 this afternoon?
At other times, Yee refers to foods or objects that are too specific to Cantonese culture to represent in English (e.g., “urns of 豬腳 薑醋 to build up the mother’s strength” - the Cantonese characters referring to a soup made of pig’s feet, ginger and vinegar) or phrases that come naturally to Cantonese speakers that don’t easily translate (such as “唔關你事. 走開!”, which according to the book’s glossary means, “None of your business, go away!”). The Chinese characters can often feel haphazardly inserted into the English of the poems, but for a very clear intent: English and Chinese culture collide more than they coalesce, and Yee is trying to convey through her writing the polyphony of languages that accompanies a person formed in one distinct linguistic culture, but who must assimilate socially in a completely different one.
The absolute disquietude of being Chinese in New Zealand forms the predominant theme of Chinese Fish. Often in the middle of her poems angry rants from local New Zealand perspectives intrude, decrying in harsh and racist terms the Chin family and undermining their struggle.
Please.
If we must have immigrants
let them come from Britain.
I have no ill feeling whatsoever against
the colour of a man’s skin,
but we must face facts.
Most New Zealanders do not
want foreigners.
Look at what the large importation of aliens
has done to Australia. Ask
any real Australian what
he thinks of the New Arrivals. Let’s fill our
lovely country with our own
kind.
Yours, etc. A STERLING KIWI.
As an Indian American myself, I found these sections quite depressing. I struggle and deal with a lot of antagonism from both of my national perspectives and these diatribes made me relive far too easily the very particular way children of immigrants feel unwanted in their country of upbringing. Sections like these make Chinese Fish a very confronting book, and purposefully so. Yee’s goal is not to soothe the reader but to make the reader live in the frustrations of immigration and the pressures faced by migrants to look like everyone else, act like everyone else, and assimilate.
For these immigrants
from the impoverished
unsanitary
villages of China,
where beggars and vagabonds are numerous,
and lepers peculiarly wretched,
where the coast is infested
with pirates, children
kidnapped and sold, and whole families
live on boats,
New Zealand is a paradise.
Immigration narratives are as complex as they are vast, and part of the reason why they have become such a mainstay of contemporary diasporic writing in English is because each immigrant tale is fundamentally different. The aspects of what people preserve from their home culture versus what they adapt to in their new countries vary from person to person, making each migrant’s narrative a novel of its own, and Yee has captured a unique narrative in Chinese Fish. It sticks to the peculiarities of its perspective without any desire to conform to how poetry or narrative is written. It deserves a welcome space on any bookshelf for those who want to engage with the frustrations, heartaches and losses of assimilating to a new land, and to do so unabashedly in the language - literally - of that lived experience.
Kiran Bhat is an Indian-American author, traveller, and polyglot. He is the author of we of the forsaken world..., and has published books in five different languages. His writing has been appeared in various journals, such as The Caravan, The Bengaluru Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Brooklyn Rail, 3:AM Magazine, SOFTBLOW, among others. He has been to 150 countries, lived in 25 cities around the world, and speaks 12 languages, but currently lives in Mumbai.