Amelia Dale interviews Grace Yee
This interview marks the publication of Grace Yee’s second book of poetry, Joss: A History (Giramondo), published in June 2025. The interview took place in July 2025. Both Joss: A History and Yee’s first book, Chinese Fish (Giramondo 2023; Akoya [UK] 2026), work with archival material. Chinese Fish was awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The collection began as part of a PhD thesis on settler Chinese women’s storytelling at the University of Melbourne. Yee is an exciting practitioner of what Rabbit is all about: nonfiction poetics. Her work has been published and anthologised in Overland, Island, Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly, Cordite Poetry Review, The Griffith Review, The Shanghai Literary Review, Women’s Museum of California, Landfall, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, Best of Australian Poems and other venues.
‘Poetry invites readers to experience the event of language uncurling from these attempts to distil and convey. The ‘real’ world is dizzy with maladies, but there is pleasure, beauty, catharsis—power—in poetry’s bold and manifold efforts.’
Poetry for this issue was guest co-edited by Mark Nowak and Angela Costi.
This interview originally appeared in the 2025 Rabbit Annual.
Amelia Dale: To what extent would you say Joss: A History represents a new turn in your work, and how is it a continuation? Do you see it as akin to Chinese Fish? Or a very different work?
Grace Yee: They are both concerned with settler Chinese histories and the enduring impact of colonialist orientalist stories on ordinary people’s lived experience. Joss: A History is a continuation of my obsession with history being integral to the present: how it reverberates and breathes in our ‘nows’. It is formally different from Chinese Fish, but I don’t see it as a ‘new turn’ in my work—at least, not in the sense of now being committed to writing collections of standalone poems. As Joss evolved in response to my research, it made sense for its narrative to be comprised of more loosely connected poems because I was responding to a wider variety of resources. Chinese Fish also required a great deal of historical research, but I drew more on my community’s stories and my own lived experience to write it. While there are personal narratives in Joss, over half of the poems respond directly to, or are created largely from archival materials. My emotional engagement with each collection is different.
AD: Could you talk about your use of found texts and treatment of sources in Joss: A History?
GY: Playing with archival extracts was such a joy. The process—if you could call it that—involved taking copious notes, reflecting on my findings in a journal, letting it all percolate, extracting what I found interesting from both the research notes and my journal, and playing with those extracts until something ‘took’.
Approaches ranged widely. A lot of the poems interweave past and present; some are collated extracts (for example, ‘Playful Bodily Harm’, ‘Little Fires’); there are a couple of book-review poems (‘Quongs’, ‘Her Brilliant Career’); there are erasure poems (‘the march’, ‘the work’, ‘history of botany bay’), ekphrastic poems (‘heffernan lane’, ‘Tong Yan Gaai’), and biography poems (‘Their Brilliant Careers’). There are straightforward archival extracts, too (‘SURVEILLANCES’, ‘NON-EUROPEAN ANCESTRY’). And I had in mind a kind of palimpsest when I drafted ‘2.8km west of Ballarat Bird World’, which plots the remaining traces of Chinese graves in regional Victorian cemeteries, using Google Maps. I was very keen to incorporate voices from memoirs and oral histories (for example, ‘for the sake of social peace’, ‘Eligible Chinese Women Were A Rarity’). Around a quarter of the poems include few or no archival extracts, and these are more reflective.
AD: How do you see the relationship between history and poetry operating in Joss: A History? What do you think about the relationship between history and poetry in general?
GY: In my view, the poems in Joss are not about history, they are history: each poem is a history that contributes to the documentation of ‘a history’ of diverse perspectives.
Originally, the straightforward archival extracts, ‘SURVEILLANCES’ and ‘NON-EUROPEAN ANCESTRY’, were in different fonts to distinguish them from the poems. I later decided to have them rendered in the same font to remove the distinction.
The different approaches to the poems—the extractions, fragmentations, interweavings, erasures, retracings, overwriting, repurposing etc—unsettle entrenched historical narratives from their usual contexts, opening them up so we can see what undergirds them.
I think poetry can inform historiography, or it can be a kind of historiography itself.
AD: Can you talk about the use of Chinese language, and the bilingual nature of your poetry? In some poems, such as the first poem, ‘longest imperial dragon’ there is the inclusion of Chinese characters, prefaced by a Cantonese romanisation of them, for example ‘sun loong 新龍’, so in a way, each Chinese word is said twice. At the end of the collection, the reader is presented with a translation of the Cantonese in the collection. What were your considerations when deciding how Cantonese (and English) are treated in your work?
GY: My considerations were very practical. I don’t use Chinese characters very much in my poems because I’m not fluent with the written language. I’m not fluent with spoken Cantonese either, though I understand a little bit. When I draft poems I usually read them aloud, and because I’m not fluent in Cantonese, the romanisations serve as pronunciation reminders. I decided to leave them in for readers so that they could get a sense of what the Cantonese phrases might sound like. (I say ‘might’ because there is not one standard system for Cantonese romanisation and therefore, diverse pronunciations.)
The romanisations also help to show that the language being used is Cantonese and not Mandarin. It was important to me to signal this early on in the book—i.e. in the opening poem, ‘longest imperial dragon’. Joss is inspired by Australia’s and Aotearoa’s early Chinese settlers, the vast majority of whom hailed from the Canton region of south China (now known as Guangdong).
Generally, I included Chinese phrases in places where I felt that the translation into English wouldn’t work very well, or if the Cantonese-ness in a poem would be excessively diminished or erased in translation. ‘sun loong’, for example, would not be ‘the world’s longest imperial dragon’ if his name was ‘New Dragon’. I’m pretty sure even the non-Cantonese speakers at the Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo refer to ‘sun loong’ by his Cantonese name.
AD: While most of the sources for Joss: A History are related to the history of Chinese settlement in Australia, some of the poems also quote classical Chinese writing, such as the quote from Li Po and Lao Tzu. To what extent is your practice influenced by classical Chinese forms?
GY: I admire the succinctness and deftness with imagery, but apart from that my practice is not influenced much by classical Chinese poetry. In Joss, I have incorporated extracts from ancient Chinese poems with a great deal of irony, alongside Australian tropes and colloquialisms. For example, the couplets throughout the collection are composed of one ‘Chinese’ line and one ‘Australian’ line. The voice of the former is earnest with spiritual overtones; the voice of the latter, pragmatic and down-to-earth.
AD: Alongside the treatment of historical sources, and the quotations from ancient Chinese works, there is also plenty of reference to novelists like Miles Franklin and Patrick White. I was particularly interested by ‘Quongs’ and the way it offers an extended poem/essay/critique of White’s novel, Happy Valley—quoting not just from White’s novel but from essays and reviews of the novel and its treatment of the Chinese-Australian characters. Can you talk about what impelled this poem, and the choice to write the critique as a poem?
GY: Patrick White’s debut Happy Valley is one of my all-time favourite novels. (I am fascinated by small towns in Australia.) One of the things I love about Happy Valley is the sense of the narrative feeling its way: like a foal, wobbly in parts, but driven by instinct to stand and walk. The town is very cleverly characterised through the shifting perspectives of the townsfolk: their conversations, internal monologues, random feelings. All these unfiltered thoughts—the pettiness and meanness, the pity, secrets, despair—coalesce to create the small town that is Happy Valley. I was intrigued and amused by the language used to describe the Chinese characters, and the women characters—both of whom are portrayed most unflatteringly—so I copied down phrases and played with them. What a poem is about usually occurs to me quite late in the drafting process, often not until the very end; in this case, the poem-as-critique evolved over several drafts.
AD: Can you talk about the emotional labour involved in researching and writing Joss?
GY: Researching and writing Joss was emotionally very labour-intensive. The project began during a creative fellowship at State Library Victoria in late 2019, five or six months before the first COVID lockdown. Over the next couple of years, there would be five more lockdowns in Victoria. My fellowship was extended to late 2021, but I chose to work mostly from home because library closures were difficult to predict—and I had become wary of leaving the house. I was deeply disturbed by the news and social media footage documenting assaults on Asian people, particularly women. While the worst of this was happening overseas, there was a significant spike in Sinophobic sentiment here as well, and I had been the target of both verbal hostilities and physical abuse in public spaces in the early months of the pandemic.
In my work, I was parsing numerous sources documenting the ways that Sinophobia manifested in Australia 40 to 150 years earlier. I was listening to oral histories recorded in the late 1970s through to the early 1980s, in which interviewees recalled the slurs directed at them as children growing up in the 1930s and ’40s; reading Sinophobic diatribes in The Bulletin’s ‘Anti-Chinaman Special Number’ published in 1888; and scrolling through endless pages of newspaper stories replete with epithets and graphic accounts of everyday violence directed at ‘Chinamen’. I was engaging with all these stories acutely aware of the fact that I was, at the time, living in a world where I was perceived (by some) to be an undesirable presence—the embodiment of a disease: the ‘Chinese virus’—just as my forebears had been perceived as ‘filthy Chinese’.
Researching and writing Joss: A History during this time of enormous upheaval was an unsettling, visceral experience. But the emotions it gave rise to did inform the writing and, I feel, reified the ancestors’ stories and their lived experiences in ways that would not have been possible otherwise.