Chinese Fish

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’.

WINNER: Victorian Prize for Literature 2024

WINNER: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2024

SHORTLISTED: Ockham New Zealand Book Awards – Poetry 2024

About the Author

Grace Yee lives in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land. 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. Her debut book Chinese Fish won the 2024 Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry.