Chinese Fish
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Akoya Publishing
Publishing:20th Aug '26
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 20th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
An award-winning debut poetry collection exploring diaspora and discrimination through the intergenerational experiences of migrant women.
Ping leaves Hong Kong for a prosperous life in New Zealand – or so she has been led to believe. Instead she works long hours frying fish in a rat-infested shop, and at home contends with a dissolute husband and four children who struggle with their mother’s unhappiness.
Polyphonic and richly textured, Chinese Fish is an intergenerational saga spanning the 1960s to the 1980s. It is an intimate insight into family dynamics, oral and written legacies, migratory histories, and the lives of mothers and daughters.
‘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.'
'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'Yee focuses on women's experience; particularly, how migration tests the relationship between a mother and her daughter. She tells the story with sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve, while paying attention to the historical circumstances – particularly everyday racism and the discriminatory government policies which affected Chinese migrants.'
-- Judges' Comments'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.'
-- Juli Min'What set 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 Ng- Winner of Victorian Premier's Literary Awards - Poetry 2024 (Australia)
- Winner of Ockham New Zealand Book Awards - Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2024 (New Zealand)
- Winner of Victorian Prize for Literature - Overall Winner 2024 (Australia)
- Commended for Anne Elder Award 2023 (Australia)
- Short-listed for Mary Gilmore Award 2024 (Australia)
ISBN: 9781836750130
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
160 pages