Red Pockets - by Alice Mah (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A poignant personal narrative about family, cultural history, and ecology, and a quest to understand what we owe our ancestors and our descendants from an unforgettable new voice.

"Part of me knew what the hungry ghosts wanted all along, what they still want. It is not vengeance. No, they want something else, but we refuse to listen. They want us to face up to our broken obligations."

Every spring during the Qingming Festival, people return to their home villages in China to sweep the tombs of their ancestors. They make offerings of food and incense to prevent their ancestors from becoming hungry ghosts that could cause misfortune, illnesses and crop failures. Yet for the past century, the tombs of many overseas Chinese have been left unattended because of the ruptures of war and revolution. Following a record year of wildfires, Alice Mah returns to her family's rice village in South China, ninety years after her grandfather's last visit and fifty years after her last relative died in the village. While she finds clan members who still remember her family, there are no tombs left to sweep. Instead, there are incalculable clan debts to be paid.

In Red Pockets, Mah chronicles her journey from the rice villages of South China to her home in post-industrial England, through the Chinatowns of Western Canada where she grew up, to the isles and industry of Scotland where she now lives. As years pass and fires rage on, she becomes increasingly troubled by her ancestors' neglected graves. Her research on pollution gives way to growing eco-anxiety, culminating in a crisis of spiritual belief.

A haunting blend of memoir, cultural history and environmental exploration, Red Pockets confronts the hungry ghosts of our neglected ancestors, while searching for an acceptable offering. What do we owe to past and future generations? What do we owe to the places that we inhabit?

Review Quotes

"A mixture of memoir and polemic, Red Pockets cleverly connects the familial with the global. . . . Sensitive and sensible." --The Scotsman

"One of the most unusual and powerful books I've read in a long time. . . . A moving and imaginative memoir." --Rosemary Goring, The Herald

"Red Pockets is a marvel: a work that wrestles with diasporic dreams, ecological destruction, filial devotion and the fragile, ferocious thread of our connection and responsibility to one another, even across the great divides of time and geography. Consumed not just by an apocalyptic vision, but by the collapse of the idea of hope, Alice Mah sets out on a journey to understand what we owe the generations that precede us. But as she journeys across a suffering planet, her focus shifts; how can we be good ancestors as well as good descendants?" --Kyo Maclear, award-winning author of Unearthing and Birds Art Life

"A beautifully written, deeply fascinating and richly thought-provoking book which looks, bravely, at what it means to live at this most ecologically destructive time; about what we inherit and what we leave behind. Moving, important and finely crafted." --Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden

"Red Pockets is a fascinating exploration of the linkages between ancestral inheritance, diasporic belonging and our climate future. Mah takes us on a keenly observed, immersive journey, from an astute sociological portrait of a Chinese clan village to toxic petrochemical towns to the green hills of Glasgow, and offers surprising, beautifully interconnected insights on material and psychic debt, climate despair, trauma and hope. I read it in one sitting, which took me on a moving and often unexpected journey." --Aube Rey Lescure, author of River East, River West

"Mah asks beautiful questions on grief, climate and identity that are as urgent as they are pensive. The result is a spiritual Bildungsroman that envelops the reader in a meditation on past, present and future." --Jenny Lau, author of An A to Z of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included)

About the Author

ALICE MAH is a Chinese Canadian-British writer and Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her award-winning research focuses on toxic pollution and environmental justice, the subjects of her most recent books: Petrochemical Planet and Plastic Unlimited. Born in Smithers, BC, she now lives in Glasgow, Scotland.