Chinese Fish

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 immigrantsfrom the impoverishedunsanitaryvillages of China,where beggars and vagabonds are numerous,and lepers peculiarly wretched,where the coast is infestedwith pirates, childrenkidnapped and sold, and whole familieslive on boats,New Zealand is a paradise.'

Grace Yee is an acclaimed poet who was born in British Hong Kong, grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand and now lives in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land. She has been awarded the Patricia Hackett Prize, the Peter Steele Poetry Award and a Creative Fellowship at the State Library Victoria. Her debut collection Chinese Fish won the 2024 Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in Australia, and the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her second collection, Joss: A History, was longlisted in 2026 for the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.