Chinese Fish

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 history, 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.'