The cover design of Grace Yee’s new work is a departure from Jenny Grigg’s exquisite fragments of Queensland ferns, which quiver across Giramondo’s recent poetry. The new style in use since Kate Middleton’s Television and Manisha Anjali’s Maag Mountain seems a sublime fit for Grace Yee’s Joss: A History, where thumbprints are surrounded by a sea of white, which leaves a trace of the lives that have held these stories.
Joss began in the reading room on a State Library Victoria Creative Fellowship. While Yee’s critically acclaimed debut, Chinese Fish had the compression of her PhD research, this volume has the compression of the entire archive. Yee has casually acculturated the past with COVID, donuts and 140-character tweets. Her anti-establishment stance punctuates the patriarchy and in doing so demonstrates how to speak back to a culture that made your people a feared minority.
Joss is set around Bendigo, a gold rush town where the population of perhaps a few hundred swelled to 20,000 within a year. Around a fifth were Chinese migrants. Some were First Nations people hanging on after the forced removals and massacres of the Frontier Wars.
Everything that is said in Joss, along with that which is not, is snapped to tercets and prose, and epic erasures of The Bulletin, once revered as a national platform for pushing political policy, and mateship, with a reverence for the bushie-life sentimentalised by Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. The Bulletin fought for White Australia policies as ferociously as the Murdoch media fought against the referendum for The Voice. Evoking Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, Yee finds a version of Australia hellbent on “white planet history”, and a larrikinism that excused deeply painful policies, leaving a legacy that stretches ever onwards towards contemporary Australian racism.
In ‘What Remains’ Yee senses the decline of her ageing parents, whose minds still flood with all they left behind in China seven decades earlier. All that is left of them – and for them, it seems – is “what remains when the ocean is sucked out to sea”. This sense of futility is foreshadowed by more than 100 years of Chinese migration to these lands. Yee systematically drains the national archive until all that can be seen once she has sucked the White Australia policy away is a sense of settler entitlement that “walks past children drowning in lakes”, leaving Chinese people “paddling upstream in junks”, a people reduced to “collectors of night soil”.
Patrick White’s Happy Valley and Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career both receive re-examination, including Sybylla, who would never want to sit near a “stinking” Chinese man. While others might tease an idea out over chapters or even a book, Yee continues her tradition of capturing the Chinese diaspora in these apparently great southern lands in just a line or two, leaving the rest to drift beyond the white space in the gutter of the page. Meanwhile “chows” refuse to put down their chopsticks. They are thieves taking refuge behind the Hills hoist. They are “suspect” lepers on whom the Department of External Affairs must keep a constant eye, using the staccato “click, click, click” of their power-driven pens. The cook “sailing in from Canton” brings to mind another kind of Cook, the kind who sailed through open seas in search of lands to “settle”, leading to the issues that remain unsettled today.
Joss lands this history in a contemporary context where people listen to Shania Twain. And here it seems is the true heart of Joss – Yee’s capacity to review not only Chinese stories, but also the perspective of European settlers and their governments. Standing the reader inside the colonial perspective seems a clever approach for a work primarily concerned with a Chinese Australian point of view.
As a grandmother purchases the palm prints of another woman, Joss returns once again to the handprints pressed on the covers. Between these covers are pressed countless births and deaths – some winning and others losing unpunctuated rounds of Mah-jong, until a full stop signals the adventure has reached the end.
Chinese voices are sometimes diminished by larger colonial voices who shout in exaggerated point faces. A polyphony of voices is differentiated only by typeface, in rambling sentences that show the audacity of people who use their “cunning” and “wit” to grow cheaper lombok and peas. They are better quality, too.
Meanwhile the purity of lotus blossom is enjambed with Australian crassness, racism and misogyny, with two small lines claiming their own page (53) in a land where “anxiety is a double brick house” (48). In ‘greener’, skin tones take on the colours of flags flying at half-mast in a country yet to reckon with its past while miscegenation becomes a constant cause for national alarm.
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The National Archives record that the Chinese men and women who gave up their freedom to fight for Australia were regarded as foul and filthy aliens, their names recorded in honour rolls from Geelong to Bairnsdale. Yee spills their stories over many pages to prove the point, using ellipses to suggest how many she left out. In her hands these people will not be forgotten, though some may have wondered, was it good luck or bad luck to come here?
Joss: A History, Grace Yee
Publisher: Giramondo
ISBN: 9781923106314
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80pp
RRP: $27
Publication date: June 2025
