Not Even Past
Grace Yee writes that Joss: A History (Giramondo, 2025) was written with ‘a strong conviction that the past persists in the present.’ Through a porous interplay of past and present, Joss expands what poetry is and can be: collage, palimpsest, polyphony.
Eight pages of endnotes catalogue the textual fragments woven throughout the book, from nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial newspapers to echoes of Lao Tzu and Li Po, and interrogations of Chinese presence in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career and Patrick White’s Happy Valley.
Yee overlays, interjects, and listens closely to this vast range of voices. She exposes the brutality of the colonialist-orientalist voice—contemporary sources describe violent assaults on Chinese settlers as ‘Playful Bodily Harm’—and she satirises it, too. In ‘with two black dates for sweetness,’ she quips: ‘it is our duty to be both filial and fascinating.’ In ‘best-quality-vegetables,’ she offers a footnoted checklist of orientalist tropes (gold digger: tick; opium: tick; bound feet: double tick). I am reminded of Eileen Chang’s narrator in Love in a Fallen City describing China ‘as Westerners imagine it: exquisite, illogical, very entertaining.’
First-person, Chinese settler voices emerge, too: ‘SEE MY SOMETIME’ excerpts the diary of Jong Ah Sing, incarcerated for twenty-three years in Victorian asylums. In ‘for the sake of social peace,’ the voice of a Chinese settler—'I was born in 193_, in chinatown’—is overlaid with a louder colonial chorus (in a larger font) complaining that ‘[they] will not surrender their chopsticks for knife and fork.’
Alongside these voices, Yee weaves a countermelody of characters unrecorded in the archive. ‘Origins’ imagines the rage of ‘a phantom’ in the women’s museum ‘who knew the emperor in real life’ and goes on to boil and burn her master alive. ‘Tabulations (A Nine Year)’ gives voice to a girl forbidden from swimming—'too cold for girls’—who mocks her mother’s admonitions: ‘The Boy got to be strong, she says, to pick up refrigerators and car chassis. I must stay inside and keep detailed notes that correspond closely to my body parts.’
Joss is keenly aware of the erasure of bodies deemed illegible within colonial narrative. A series of poems that erase ‘The Bulletin: Anti-Chinaman Special Number 14 April 1888’ powerfully turns erasure back onto the colony: ‘foreigners// surrender to// everlasting// white planet history’. List poems serve as witness: ‘Non-European Ancestry’ spans seven pages, listing the names of Chinese Australians born in Victoria who enlisted in World War II, while ‘2.8km west of Ballarat Bird World’ catalogues Chinese graves with tender specificity: ‘a 17-minute walk south-east from the Maryborough Wattle Reserve Netball Complex, eighteen Chinese headstones: gardeners, labourers, storekeepers’.
Yee writes that her goal is ‘not to enliven or re-narrate the past but rather, to consider the impact of the past in the present, how it “breathes” there.’ Joss demands this attention. Reading closely—allowing Yee’s reassembled archive to seep into one’s present—is part of the work. As I read about the Bendigo White Hill Cemetery, I thought of the 2025 Bendigo Writers Festival boycott, provoked by a code of conduct censoring criticism of Zionism, and the 2026 Adelaide Writers Festival boycott following the disinvitation of Palestinian Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah under the guise of ‘cultural sensitivity.’
The past breathes in the present. I write on 26 January 2026, as Invasion Day rallies clash with white nationalist anti-immigration protests. Yesterday, my social media feed was filled with video footage of ICU nurse Alex Pretti shot dead by ICE agents in Minneapolis, closely following the murder of queer poet Renee Good. A few days ago, a bill was passed in Australia that suggests it could become illegal to call a thing what it is; that is, to give name to the 546 days of live-streamed genocide in Palestine committed by Israel. Tomorrow, forecasts predict temperatures in Naarm will soar to 44 degrees in a heatwave ‘not seen in almost two decades.’ There is so much grief in my body. There are so many scars on this stolen Indigenous Country.
Joss circles the idea of ‘dysphasia’ in its opening and closing poems. ‘Dysphasia,’ Yee writes, ‘is an inability to arrange words in the proper order due to pressure from a Central Lesion (thieves looters slavers omniscient narrators).’ Due to Playful Bodily Harm. Pepper-Spraying Police. Bullets Through Bodies. Bodily medical terminology infects the collection: ‘Brutal Compound Fracture of the Skull’; ‘eyes of a myocardial infarction’; ‘officious myopias’; ‘her arrhythmia, his congested ventricles’; ‘cadaveric ecosystems’. Joss recognises that the archive is situated firmly in the body. Fragmented language is formed by fragmented bodies. And for every legible, grievable body there are other bodies vanished from the archive. There are other bodies unwitnessed, unseen.
Burning joss is a Chinese tradition of paying respects to ancestors. Joss as a poetry collection also demands this of us as readers: that we allow the past to blaze and breathe in our fraught present.
Xiaole Zhan (詹小乐) is a Chinese-Aotearoa writer and composer based in Naarm. Their work features in Auckland University Press’s New Poets 11. They are a 2025 Creative New Zealand Fellowship recipient, a 2025 Red Room Poetry Varuna Fellowship recipient, the 2024 Kat Muscat Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize. Their name in Chinese means ‘Little Happy’, but can also be read as ‘Little Music’.