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.' - The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, 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.' - Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, Judges' Comments

'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.' Saturday Paper, Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

ISBN-13: 9781836750130

Weight: 505 grams

Format: Paperback

Country of Origin (language): New Zealand

Language: English

Pub Date: 20/08/2026

Page Extent: 160 Pages