“It is no small thing to realise, not just in mind but in spirit, that the Earth is collapsing. To see the heavy debts that you owe. And to understand, finally, the limits of knowing. For what difference does knowing make?”

In 2017 a grant for research into global petrochemical industries and environmental justice unexpectedly enabled academic Alice Mah to travel to the clan village where her great-grandfather had once lived. Ancestral roots tourism is a popular industry in China but Mah wanted to go beyond that and find some way of forging a lasting connection to her family’s past. Deliberately detached and descriptive, Mah wanted to avoid summary judgements about the people and the cultures she encountered, the first section details Mah’s journey to the Cantonese county Taishan. It’s a trip intended to recreate one taken by her great-grandfather Mah Gee Su in the 1920s when he left Canada to accompany his dying wife back to China. But Mah’s challenging experiences in her ancestral village echoed those of many overseas Chinese visitors or sojourners (Huaqiao). After China opened up and the first visitors in search of their families’ past arrived, their interest in history often became tangled up with projects aimed at attracting their investments, encouraging spending on rebuilding former family homes, shrines and clan halls. This emphasis on the financial rather than the intimate or personal overshadows interactions between Mah and the villagers she encounters. They seem more intent on exchanges based on obligation, in receiving offerings - particularly gifts of money in the customary red envelopes/pockets (dongbao).

But Mah also arrives during Qingming – start of spring and the farming season – the traditional time for tomb-sweeping. In keeping with Chinese folk beliefs these are ceremonies centred on tending to forebears’ graves to ensure they aren’t doomed to exist as hungry ghosts, restless and malicious. And it’s this image of her neglected ancestors as hungry ghosts that will remain with Mah. These images somehow link to Mah’s underlying confusion over her identity, who she is and what forces have shaped her: moving between Canada and Britain combined with her mixed heritage have imbued her with a deep-seated sense of rootlessness. In China Mah’s Scottish mother, means she’s not even regarded as Chinese. But growing up in Canada she found herself fending off questions about her origins, her right to consider herself Canadian. She’s uncertain about where to call home.

Once Mah’s back in Coventry, where she lives and works, this notion of being at home versus being adrift dominates Mah’s thoughts. But there, as the impact of climate change intensifies, and the pandemic then takes hold, it becomes interwoven with something distinctly unheimlich. Uncanny dreams, an impression of the eerie take hold of Mah’s fevered imagination. The everyday with its subtle and not-so-subtle harbingers of environmental crisis elicits increasingly-overwhelming sadness, impressions of dislocation and disconnection. Eco-anxiety mingles with intense ecological grief – I found Mah’s depiction of an all-pervasive unease incredibly moving and disturbingly relatable. There is something unheimlich about the world we currently inhabit, and it’s this that Mah’s confronted with: bringing up questions about how to live once aware of a reality of mounting losses from species extinction to disappearing coastlines compounded by news of relentless destruction, spreading violence and genocidal warfare.

For Mah, her emotions also hark back to concepts of obligation and inheritance. What debts might be owed to past, present and future generations – and to the very space she inhabits. Mah grapples with how to fully acknowledge and confront the state of things without mentally or physically collapsing or adopting evasive strategies that lead to denial and political paralysis. Mah visualises the hungry ghosts as the embodiment of these menacing thoughts and emotions, relations between material and spiritual. The final section of Mah’s unorthodox, arresting memoir which becomes her offering, is focused on healing strategies - moving forward, laying her ghosts to rest. She doesn’t come to any easy resolutions or conclusions – there are none - instead there’s a focus on the provisional and the possible: on community, on activism, on spreading information and on embracing small pleasures. The realisation that the past is past and Mah’s attention has to be given to what’s needed in the present and what’s owed to future generations.

A book that made me think and learn. Well done.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

A brilliant blending of memoir and environmental writing. I really responded to the ec0-anxiety aspect of this and Alice Mah's response to her own eco-anxiety was a fascinating read.

Red Pockets is an intriguing memoir, weaving together ancestry, climate change, and our deep connections to the land. Mah's exploration of these themes is thoughtful and evocative, offering a fresh perspective on how personal and environmental histories intertwine, with her climate anxiety acting as a palpable undercurrent.

However, I found the themes are a little undermined by the book's disjointed structure. The jumps across time, place and pace can be confusing, making it harder to fully engage with the overarching themes. While the ideas are compelling, it felt like a more cohesive narrative might have given them greater impact.

I expected a book about a mixed-race Chinese-Canadian woman visiting her Chinese ancestors' village, and it was that and so much more. Alice Mah is a sociologist and academic who focus on the environment, industrial development, petrochemical contamination... and a large part of this short memoir focuses on her climate anxiety and her desperation at every "once a century" climate event, from fire to flood to contaminated rivers. It was bleak, her constant thoughts about the planet being echoed by the Hungry Ghosts of her Chinese ancestors, her obsessive monitoring of the news during Covid finding a bit of peace here and there, outside or within a community of friends sharing the same fears. I think I loved this so much because it found me at the right time, in a period where I also moved and feel disconnected from others around me who don't seem worried about the planet as much as I am. It's a very reflective book and it is beautifully written, I will probably re-read it at some point.

Free ARC sent by Netgalley.