5 Questions with Grace Yee
Grace Yee is the author of Chinese Fish (Giramondo, 2023)
Her poetry has been widely published and anthologised across Australia and internationally, and has been awarded the Patricia Hackett Prize, the Peter Steele Poetry Award, a Creative Fellowship at the State Library Victoria, and grants from Creative Victoria and the Australia Council for the Arts.
Grace has taught in the Writing and Literature Program at Deakin University, and in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Melbourne, where she completed a PhD on settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand. She lives in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land.
No.1
Can you tell us a little bit about how Chinese Fish was conceived? How was it developed and how did it evolve over time?
The earliest drafts for Chinese Fish were inspired by stories I heard growing up in Aotearoa New Zealand. At the beginning, many of these drafts were sketches, portraits, flash fictions, dialogues and monologues. I gathered them for the creative component of my creative writing PhD on settler Chinese women’s writing in Aotearoa (at the University of Melbourne).
The historical research was crucial to Chinese Fish, and underpins it. From the 19th century right up until 1987, New Zealand governments rolled out a raft of exclusionist immigration legislation, much of which was specifically targeted at Chinese women. The Pākehā mainstream was heavily conflicted about admitting them into the country: on the one hand, due to concerns about miscegenation (many were opposed to Chinese men ‘taking’ Pākehā or Māori women as partners); on the other, the admission of Chinese women into the country brought with it the possibility of ‘undesirable’ growth in the Chinese population.
The ‘problem’ of Chinese women was heavily debated in parliament, and journalists found it noteworthy to write alarmist news reports on the arrival of very small numbers of them entering New Zealand. Alongside these exclusion narratives were the usual, equally dehumanising stories that exoticised or fetishised Chinese women and their body parts.
I was interested in the ways that Chinese women in Aotearoa were subordinated by these white settler tropes, and, at the same time, by traditional expectations inside the patriarchal Chinese home, and how the former reinforced and ossified the latter. I wanted to know whether it was possible for Chinese women to claim a space and an identity ‘separate’ from these subjections.
All of these concerns informed the development of Chinese Fish.
I became very interested in the intersection between poetry and history, but I had no desire to write a conventional historical narrative or re-telling. Chinese Fish needed to be a polyphonic ‘messy’ work. Early on, I realised that the dominant mainstream colonialist voice could not be countered with a single monolingual voice—not least of all because I felt that my voice (and by that I mean the unremarkable voice of an unknown Chinese woman) did not have sufficient heft to say the kinds of things that needed to be said, let alone be heard. Nonetheless, I yielded to a semblance of an omniscient voice, which I afforded with sufficient authority to render a sense of cohesion to the narrative’s multiple voices.
Each narrator was given a unique voice and place on the page. I gave the key Chinese women characters —Ping, and her daughter Cherry—space to tell their own stories, bearing in mind (the history of) settler Chinese women’s tendency to self-efface and ‘make themselves small’ on public platforms. So the poems narrated in Ping’s voice are mostly formatted in short lines and narrow columns that reflect the ways she has learned to minimise her presence in-the-world. Her words are italicised because it’s significant that she has a voice at all. Cherry’s brief asides amidst the omnniscient narratives are protected by well-spaced parentheses, and her first-person lyrics offer intimate glimpses into the ‘inside’ Chinese world in a form that has more affinity with the mainstream, thereby bridging the space between them.
The orientalist voice is positioned flush right on the page, because the narrator is characterised by—amongst other things—a strong sense of self-righteousness. I found this voice—which echoed stridently through the archives, profoundly deaf to its own absurdities—begging to be parodied.
The book evolved to become something noisier and more complicated than I anticipated!
No.2
In 2019-2021 you received the State Library of Victoria’s Creative Fellowship to work on a project described as a ‘collection of poems that respond to two different narrative threads: stories told/written/performed by Chinese people who settled in Australia before WWII, and their descendants; and contemporaneous mainstream stories about Chinese people in Australia’. I wonder if parts of Chinese Fish developed from that? What did you discover in your research that you found especially surprising, harrowing, pleasant?
The State Library research didn’t really inform Chinese Fish as I’d already completed most of the draft before I began the fellowship. And I had earlier read a fair bit of Chinese Australian history, so nothing I found was particularly surprising.
But I did discover striking differences between the settler Chinese histories of Australia and New Zealand. In Australia, the level of violence directed at Chinese communities during the goldseeker era was far greater than in New Zealand (the most obvious example being the Lambing Flat massacre of 1860-61). Despite this, partnerships between settler Chinese men and European women were much more common, and it appears that the early Chinese settlers integrated more quickly into the mainstream. Relatedly, there was a trend for some of the later generations of descendants to deny or conceal their Chinese heritage. The settler Chinese in New Zealand, on the other hand, were closer-knit and more self-contained, and less likely to marry outside of the community.
No.3
Chinese Fish is highly experimental in genre and form, incorporating disruptions, silences, codeswitching to tell a story about a Hong Kong Chinese settler family through the generations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Although this story is not based on your own, what resonances did you notice while writing the book?
There are many resonances with my own family’s lived experience over the (now five) generations they’ve lived in Aotearoa. Our histories are not ‘past’: they’re persistently, insistently present. They resonated in numerous ways in the lives of several generations of my forebears, and they continue to reverberate—to be felt—in the everyday lives of the settler Chinese community today. The low profile, self-reliant, model minority mentality, for example, was developed as a strategy for survival. As descendants, we carry a longheld awareness of our selves as perceived-as-other, and this influences how we navigate and exist in-the-world.
I’ve received numerous responses from people across quite diverse diaspora communities, who’ve told me that they found Chinese Fish ‘very relatable’. Experiences such as humiliation over school lunches, being targeted by bullies, translating language and culture for parents and grandparents, working in small family businesses, performing ‘mainstream’, and feeling the pressure to comply with parents’ traditional cultural values—all of these things seem to be universal for first- and second-generation migrants everywhere.
No.4
What buoyed you while you were writing Chinese Fish?
So many things. I enjoyed the research the most. Because the story is set in the decades from the 1960s to the 1980s, and harks back as far as the late 19th century, there was a great deal of historical research that needed to be done. I enjoyed detailed conversations with New Zealand family and friends across Aotearoa and Australia. I was buoyed by frequent discussions with my early readers (Helen Gildfind, Alison Wong and Coral Campbell)—their willingness to read and critique multiple drafts and extracts, and their enthusiasm for the book, sustained me. I had fun learning about the cultural and historical origins of the Cantonese language (with the assistance of translator Ely Finch), and the Taishanese language. I felt very grateful for the team at Giramondo, who tolerated the story’s many idiosyncrasies!
And of course, practical and moral support from family and close friends. It takes a village to research and write a book.
No.5
What advice can you give to other diaspora writers who are working on projects similar to Chinese Fish, which deal with grief and loss? How do we care for and protect ourselves while writing about our histories, which due to white supremacy has made some of it painful and difficult to confront?
I recommend cocoons. Keep your good friends close, and discuss the project only with those who you know are on the same page. Resist the urge to ‘talk people around’—that depletes energy better channeled into the book. Resist the temptation to sanitise your work. Experiment with voice. I found that using multiple narrators got me around the inner censor. Internalised racism is real and insidious. When your lived experience includes events that have cumulatively inculcated the belief that your existence is offensive (to some people), you can develop a tendency to placate and appease. The very early poems for Chinese Fish were fake and fawny because they were narrated in what I believed to be a palatable voice. But that palatability compromised the story’s emotional truths. Be true to your story. Read other diaspora writers, experiment, take breaks, write in fragments, break it up so it doesn’t break you.
Find out more
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’.
Get it from Giramondo here.