Joss: A History

Grace Yee’s follow-up to her triple award-winning poetry collection Chinese Fish.

In the White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo the remains of more than a thousand ‘chinamen’ lie interred, many in unmarked graves. Most were sojourners, who hailed from the Canton region in south China, and found themselves unable to return to their homeland. Joss: A History is inspired by the lived experiences of these early settlers, and their compatriots and descendants across Victoria and New South Wales, and Aotearoa New Zealand. The poems pay tribute to the author’s ancestors, illuminating how they survived – and thrived – amid longstanding colonialist stories that have exoticised and diminished Chinese communities in white settler nations around the Pacific Rim since the gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Refracted through a twenty-first century lens, Joss is grounded in the conviction that the past is not past, that historical events reverberate insistently in the present.