Joss: A History
Joss: A History by Grace Yee. Giramondo Publishing (2025). RRP: $33. PB, 96pp. ISBN: 9781923106314. Reviewed by Cybonn Ang.
Following the success of her multi award-winning debut, Chinese Fish—a novel-in-verse exploring the struggles of a Chinese immigrant family in Aotearoa New Zealand—author Grace Yee once again dips her pen into the marvelous well of antipodean history. The result is a stunning collection called Joss: A History, in which Yee excavates the forgotten lives of Chinese workers who arrived during the 1850s gold rush in Victoria and New South Wales, and unearths the experiences of their descendants as they laid down roots in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Joss is a magnificent linguistic brocade that weaves together lines from museum labels, gravestone markers, diaries, news clippings, films, ancient Chinese poetry, various novels, history books, and interviews. Yee threads them together into one beautiful, poignant whole with her luminous words, revealing a haunting image of the immigrant Chinese identity within the European-dominated world of the southern Pacific. It is essentially a people’s archive in poetry. Being of Chinese descent myself—and a fan of both history and poetry—I find Joss an absolute marvel to read.
In many Asian cultures ‘joss’ means destiny or luck, sometimes a reference to the divine. Some believe that the word may have come from ‘deus,’ the Latin word for God, adapted from the Portuguese when they settled in the Pearl River Delta in the 1560s. In the Chinese tradition, one’s fate in the afterlife is fully dependent on the strength of the devotion and filial piety of one’s descendants. Children and grandchildren burn joss sticks, joss money and other paper symbols of wealth to make sure that their ancestors live well in eternity. Faithlessness or forgetfulness on the part of the younger generation could spell doom for those on the other side. It’s a practice that safeguards the memories, lessons, and reverence of the past, passing them down from generation to generation.
One could say that Joss performs exactly the same function. It is a reverent acknowledgement of the past, making sure that the ancestors are given their just and honourable reward in history, and that their experiences remain like shining stars to guide our present paths. They are, after all, the reason that we are here.
The tracing of this long history begins quite aptly with the poem ‘Longest Imperial Dragon’ which recalls the first Chinese dragon that was ever paraded in Bendigo, Victoria. It is as much a poem about the dragon’s journey as it is about the first group of people who carried it triumphantly upon their heads—those who had circumvented the Victorian quota on Chinese workers by marching through South Australia:
‘life is good because arable land was scarce in sun ning 新寧
and your fathers walked three hundred and twenty-three
miles without female companionship from robe to the bendigo
goldfields….’
From these portentous beginnings, the reader is treated to a parade of poems which spirits us along the path of history. We read about the Chinese workers’ poverty, isolation, struggles with language, and the riots and violent crimes for which there was often no redress. A particularly haunting piece is ‘See My Sometime’ based on the handwritten journal of a man who spent decades in an asylum. Written in crude English devoid of punctuation, its misery and hopelessness ring out through the centuries. Another cleverly written poem is ‘Playful Bodily Harm’ where Yee uses news clippings of crimes targeting Chinese men in Victoria, oftentimes dismissed by authorities under the genial and omnibus category of ‘larrikinism’ although they ended in deaths. The brilliance of this collection springs not only from the poetic power of the pieces but in how it provokes readers to go back to the source works. Like a campfire, it draws people to come nearer for a momentous and eternal telling. In this way, Joss drives poetry closer to its origins in oral history.
One prose poem, ‘Heffernan Lane,’ was inspired by a photograph taken in 1929 which shows young Chinese women posing confidently during a fundraising event for the victims of famine in their homeland.
‘Look at us: well-dressed and opulently fed, a rare oriental
opportunity, fully cognisant of the messages our bodies convey’
Comparing the fractured feet of their grandmothers to their own—fully developed and clad in t-bar shoes—they reflect on what this new power in their stride could mean in a land where one is not quite free. Yet even so, one must be grateful.
‘we are well-heeled, muscular, arched and
unfettered, tripping and gadding in shoes our grandmothers
(supposedly) could never have conjured.’
Behind their smiles and confident strides, Yee imagines the women’s conflicting emotions, coaxes out the underlying feeling of guilt, of trying to understand what this new life even means, the responsibility that it puts on their shoulders to provide for those still living in dire conditions back home.
‘Dear Lord, there are so many questions and moral
dilemmas.’
As Joss conjures up the spirits of the goldfield workers, it also necessarily calls up the spectre that haunts the dark corners of our history: the sometimes mute, frequently blind, oftentimes cruel, ‘white’ perspective through which the ancestors have been portrayed, preserved, and remembered. Records of this voice pop out from time to time throughout the collection as Yee traces and retraces the path of cultural exchange and co-existence, as if plotting its route will demystify the disequilibrium in the relationship.
From the shadows of history the poet calls up Marco Polo who ‘…returned to venice after seventeen years in china. he had the kit / but he didn’t know the incantations,’ Ezra Pound, who through the works of American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, fell in love with the inherent poetry of the Chinese language with arguably problematic results, and British author Alexandra Etheldreda Grantham who in 1927 published the highly ambitious one-volume work Hills of Blue: A Picture-Roll of Chinese History from far beginnings to the death of Chʼien Lung, A.D. 1799.
Perhaps mercilessly, Yee also summons Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White who, burdened by guilt even in his lifetime, had wished that the world would forget his novel Happy Valley altogether for its poor portrayal of a Chinese family. But it’s too late—Happy Valley remains a telling artifact of its era and must now be part of the conversation.
Another brilliant response to literary history is the pair of prose poems ‘Her Brilliant Career’ and ‘Their Brilliant Careers.’ Separated by several pages, they stand like two posts marking a memorial. The first one recollects the 1901 semi-autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career written by Miles Franklin (incidentally, now being made into a series by Netflix) where one scene depicts the demeaning of a ‘chinaman’ riding on a bus and who never appears in any other scene again, like a piece of stage prop used once then discarded forever from the theatre of life. In response to Franklin, Yee writes ‘Their Brilliant Careers,’ a poem that celebrates four talented Chinese individuals who became global sensations and, with the help of Yee, could not now as easily be vanished from the stage. I wonder at the extraordinary power of words to move the scales of justice.
The poet’s meticulous digging uncovers more sad relics of Australian history, like a special edition of The Bulletin, dated 14 April 1888 and advertised as the Anti-Chinaman Special Number. From the pages of this issue, Yee coaxes out a memorable trio of erasure poems: ‘the march,’ ‘the work,’ and ‘history of botany bay.’ In found poetry, a poet often celebrates the discovery of something totally fresh and surprising from the source text. But in erasure poetry one could argue that the re-surfaced message had always been buried there. The snipping of the superfluous is the whole point of the exercise, to uncover what had been concealed. It is like polishing the patina off one’s antiques to see the original object more clearly. The objects that emerge from Yee’s erasures are images that will stay long in my mind. From ‘history of botany bay’:
little verses
dangled from the gallows
the plaintiff’s labour
wide illustrious
free
As I continue to flip through the pages of Joss, the experiences start to echo and the voices—both historical and contemporary—reverberate and resonate through the pages of the collection until they become one. Who can tell where past ends and the present begins, in lines such as these:
‘…the chief mandarins from our country
are cooks, storekeepers and irrigation experts
who know that to enjoy good health in this hot climate of australian
national identity (which does not exclude fish-curing germans, swedes
or danes), we must at all times
be congenial domestic servants, never loafing about, never liquored.
on arrival we must declare our offspring, our nest eggs, our avian influenzas
and submit repeatedly to the neurosurgeon’s interrogation: do your
synapses fire loyally?’
Possibly my favourite in the collection (there are numerous contenders) is an amusing poem called ‘Chinny Chin Chin’ which describes a contemporary experience—that of an Asian immigrant passing through border security. The allusion to the three little pigs who would not let the wolf come in (‘not by the hair on our chinny chin chin!’ as the children’s tale famously says) is playful and witty. I remember my first arrival in Te Whanganui-a-Tara as an immigrant and find this depiction of myself as a wolf to be hilarious and yet—why does it ring so true? When the guard finally lets her in:
‘stroking the hair on his chinny chin chin. he says, it’s council land,
technically. clickety clickety clickety click. (brick brick brick brick).’
It ends with:
‘if you fly in on a clear day, you can see them stationed along the coast,
crowns firm in the sand, bottoms pink and bare and raised to the salt like
porcella rumps.’
It is indeed time for the wolf to tell his story, to correct the egregious detail that has gone accepted for centuries: that he had arrived to steal someone else’s home, that all he does is ruin, that everyone needs protection from him. But how difficult would it be to correct an old tale that almost everyone knows by heart?
As Yee says in ‘Slides’:
‘they fossilised our stories on a solitary brick burner:
O R I E N T A L S:’
Yet Grace Yee does not flinch from the challenge. She acknowledges the absurdity, the pain, and the weight of the responsibility in ‘two black dates for sweetness’:
‘it is our duty to be both filial and fascinating.’
Joss: A History is equally these things. It is a significant and spectacular effort whose light will linger like an ever-burning joss stick, acknowledging the contribution of Chinese immigrants in Australian and New Zealand history and bidding the new generation to recount and remember.
Cybonn Ang is a fiction writer and poet whose works have appeared in adda, The Three Lamps, Naugatuck River Review, and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices in Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP), among others. She has a Master of Creative Writing from the University of Auckland and currently writes from Montreal, Canada. She blogs on www.cybonn.com and is sometimes on Instagram @cybonnang.