Latest news with #AliceMah
The Guardian
20-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘We can't step back in time: a new book about eco anxiety and climate change
When university professor Alice Mah visited her family's ancestral village for the first time in 2018, she knew it would not be a grand homecoming; her father's lack of interest in ever making the trip to South China suggested that much. But what she did not expect was that it would unleash waves of eco anxiety which would follow her back to the UK, where she lives. Documented in her new book Red Pockets, Mah confronts her family's past – the site where her ancestral home used to be, untended graves and the descendants of the villagers who remained. This presents her with a whole host of debts and the impossibility of ever really repaying them. 'Part of the journey was about what might be appropriate as an offering, to respect my ancestors, to respect the village that would not be superficial,' she says when we meet in Glasgow, where Mah is professor of urban and environmental studies. But this proved hard and resonated with how she feels about the ecological crisis. 'There's a lot that we can't undo. We can't step back in time and make everything good again. We have to recognise the damage and loss, sit with it and then try to find ways forward that are positive and that recognise imperfection.' The past lurks in and transforms the present in all kinds of ways. The countries that have been most responsible for the climate crisis are often not the ones being most affected in the present. When the UK's colonial history is taken into account, for instance, it moves from eighth to fourth on the list of nations responsible for the biggest historical emissions. Despite this knowledge, equitable ways to address this – climate reparations, a sufficient loss and damage fund – remain neglected or inadequate. These facts circulate in the current climate debate. But Mah's rich, reflective book is focused on a different type of connection between the past and the present, carefully and subtly weaving threads between what we owe to our ancestors, to future generations and to the places we currently inhabit. I had not read a book making these links before, and it is a compelling and moving narrative, but when I finished Red Pockets I found it difficult to fully grasp how she fits it all together so well and it took some time to get my head around it before I visit her in Glasgow. Mah is softly spoken but answers my initial questions thoughtfully and passionately as we walk through the city's streets. Arriving in the village in China was not completely dislocating, she says. Parts of it were familiar, echoing family gatherings in Canada, where she grew up. But she was surprised by how disappointed she was when she realised the people she met were not kin. A sense of foreboding is with her throughout. Before arriving in the village, she was in Guangzhou for work, visiting two petrochemical villages with her research assistant, Ying, who tells her that PM 2.5, a microscopic form of airborne pollution, is the same level in the countryside as in the city. This is not the only kind of pollution she encounters. Mah is, coincidentally, in the village during Qingming, a spring festival where it is common to visit the tombs of your ancestors, clean the gravesite and make offerings to support them in the afterlife. If the graves are not tended to, and Mah's are not, Chinese folk religion suggests your ancestors become hungry ghosts, who bring bad luck, illness and ecological destruction. This clings to her when she returns home, and she wonders what impact this neglect has had, and whether spiritual and ecological pollution might be connected. The book is structured in three parts; each, she tells me, is intended to be a journey of transformation. The first, which recounts her trip to the village, is written in an intentional, descriptive way, she says, to avoid judging the villagers and what they expect from ancestry tourists such as herself (including the hope that she and her cousin, who she goes with, would build a new house where their ancestors once lived). That we d not know anyone else's perspective and the gaps this leaves is a largely unspoken part of the text. Their interactions, mediated by interpreters, are stilted and uncomfortable. Wanting to engage with the people in their clan village respectfully and meet cultural expectations as far as possible, Mah and her cousin end up in the back of a car stuffing money into red pockets, envelopes that grandparents and parents traditionally give to children and unmarried relatives on special occasions, and which give the book its title. Their plan is to give them to the villagers who attend a dinner they are hosting, but their local guide advises them against it. None of this sits easily with Mah, she writes: 'I felt we had scraped by, having fulfilled the barest minimum of obligation.' An intense but relatable whirlwind of anxiety forms the second part of the book. Going to the village allowed Mah to see that the scale and depth of cultural and ecological loss is so great that it impossible to return to lost worlds, to ancestral and environmental pasts. The hungry ghosts start to become the bridge between these ideas, symbolising eco anxiety, how culture is entangled in the environment and how planetary destruction affects the body and the mind, as well as the earth. It can be suffocating and dislocating to live in the truth of the crisis, and then Mah becomes ill with Covid, attends the disappointing Cop26 and begins to experience panic attacks. She tries therapy but gives up: 'My 'intrusive' thoughts about the climate crisis were not distortions; they were real', she writes. Eco anxiety is also not, for Mah, an individualised pathology but a collective, social phenomenon. A kind of resolution comes in the final section. She realises it is not sustainable to remain in worry and grief for ever. Even from a place of privilege, only focusing on destruction has psychological and physical impact, and it can be self-reproducing, blocking out other perspectives. This was the most difficult part to write, she explains. 'I felt an incredible obligation to do it in a way that was authentic and truthful, that my son could read, or people could read in the future and think, oh, this is an offering.' Red Pockets is not a manifesto. Mah is interested in charting a route through the main ways of thinking about the climate crisis together: neither succumbing to doomsday thinking (it's so far gone, there's no point) nor false hope (Technology! The young! Capitalism! One, or all of them, will save us). Instead, she suggests we might try to sit with the dichotomous climate emotions – anger, grief and anxiety alongside joy, connection and love. When we meet she explains that this is a form of collective dialectical behaviour therapy, which Mah learned about through a conversation with a climate activist. Suffering and injustice are an important part of the picture, but they are not all of it. Her son appears every so often in the book and his curiosity for the world, which is beautifully described, captures some of this. When they visit Coll, an inner Hebridean island, he immediately loves the treeless landscape. Still carrying her ghosts, it takes Mah longer to respond to the call of this place, but she eventually gets there – a sign that next to pain there can also be joy. Back in Glasgow, Mah looks out of the window on the third floor, and the sky is a bright shade of blue. It is one of the first warm days of the year. 'If you think about the here and now, we're sitting in this cafe … I can see a seagull flying by, plants growing out of the roof. There are so many aspects of human experience … There are so many places worth fighting for.'
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Red Pockets by Alice Mah review – finding hope amid the climate crisis
Eco-anxiety is not an official medical diagnosis, but everyone knows what it means. The American Psychological Association defines it as 'the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one's future and that of next generations'. Fear of the future, an ache for the past, the present awash with disquiet: into this turmoil Alice Mah's new book appears like a little red boat, keeping hope afloat against all odds. Mah is a professor of urban and environmental studies at the University of Glasgow as well as an activist passionately concerned with pollution, ecological breakdown and climate justice. Her previous books, Petrochemical Planet and Plastic Unlimited, catalogued the catastrophic impacts of the petrochemical industry on the natural and human world. In Red Pockets, the trauma is personal. For some, eco-anxiety is paralysing; for others it is a spur to action. Not many respond by heading off to sweep the graves of their ancestors. For Mah, this suggestion, proposed by her father when he hears of her plan to visit her ancestral village in southern China, takes on the urgency of a quest. In Chinese folk traditions, ancestors neglected by their descendants become 'hungry ghosts', creatures with 'bulging stomachs, dishevelled hair and long, thin necks, suffering from insatiable neediness'. Red Pockets is divided into three parts: the first chronicling Mah's trip to China. Accompanied by her cousin Amanda, and a local guide, Lily, Mah fails to find her great-grandmother's grave. Her gifts of tea in British telephone box tins are received with disdain – 'not as good as Chinese tea'. What the village elders, the cantankerous Uncle Mah in particular, actually want is for her to build a house in the village. Or at least hand out envelopes of cash – the 'red pockets' of the book's title. Mah returns from her trip with more questions than answers, and plagued by physical symptoms of escalating eco-anxiety: breathlessness, insomnia, bouts of weeping. In the second section of the book, we see a haunted, despairing woman facing the magnitude of the problem. In 2021, she is part of a delegation to the Cop26 climate conference. 'I don't know what I expected to find,' she writes, 'but I was wholly unprepared for that mass Doomsday event.' Meanwhile, her mother calls from Canada: 'It's end times here,' she says. Following a summer of drought and wildfires, landslides across British Columbia destroy thousands of homes. To cope with the panic attacks, Mah tries therapy, but gives up after a few weeks. 'My 'intrusive' thoughts about the climate crisis were not distortions; they were real,' she writes. 'My hackles were rising again, a tuning fork for what lay beneath.' All this makes Red Pockets sound like little more than a litany of despair. But in part three, Mah offers a way out of the intergenerational trauma, the possibility of 'living with the ghosts': 'There is a bridge between divided worlds, a place where all spirits can rest without sorrow … When the wind blows just right, I edge a bit closer.' Robin Wall Kimmerer's The Serviceberry (2024) can be seen as a sister book to Mah's, lighter in tone, but equally powerful. For both women, the way out of ecological and social collapse requires a different way of thinking. Cultivating gratitude and joy, alive to the debts we owe to the social, spiritual and natural world that sustains us. 'The hungry ghosts still clung to me … but I knew what I had to do,' Mah writes. 'Search for an offering. Neither fruit nor incense would suffice, nor would a set ritual. It should be something uniquely my own, but also beyond myself, communal and facing outward.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Given the subtitle, it is no revelation that the offering she is referring to is the book itself. Red Pockets offers no catch-all solution, but instead poses a question about how we ought to live in troubled times – as insatiable individual consumers or part of an interdependent community of living beings. What will you become to your descendants: hungry ghost or supportive ancestor? In that choice lies agency, and hope. Red Pockets: An Offering by Alice Mah is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Scotsman
23-04-2025
- General
- Scotsman
Red Pockets by Alice Mah review: 'sensitive and sensible'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Alice Mah grew up in British Columbia and is now Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at Glasgow University, and this work, encompassing memoir, polemic, migration and climate science, is subtitled 'an offering'; though it might as easily have been glossed as 'an exercise in hauntology'. At the end, looking from the Necropolis towards the UK's largest onshore windfarm, she sees the turbines as 'emblems of a promised future, yet already it feels post-apocalyptic'. The spark that arcs between and connects the familial and the global is Mah's visit to China in 2018. The ostensible reason was research into the effects of toxic pollution from the petrochemical industry (Mah's previous books are Plastic Unlimited and Petrochemical Planet), but this coincided with a cousin's return to Guangdong province, specifically Taishan. It is known as the 'First Home of the Overseas Chinese', and it was from here that her great-grandfather emigrated to Canada; and where he returned to die, as did her great-grandmother. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Her visit coincides with the Qingming Festival, when graves are ceremoniously cleaned and cleansed, a ritual duty which the Mah family has been lax in observing. Despite her avowed atheism, the 'hungry ghosts' have a psychic foothold. So the memoir already has a nexus of responsibilities to the dead and to the unborn generations, of purifying and corrupting, of obligation and obedience. Encountering clan halls that had once been torture chambers, Mah is made uncomfortably aware that sometimes deciding that old ways – such as fossil fuels – are unsustainable has a dark counterpart in the Maoist cultural revolution, and the Red Guards' particular rejection of the 'four olds', old ideas, old customs, old habits, old culture. People place offerings on the graves of their ancestors during the annual Qingming festival, or Tomb Sweeping Day, at the United Chinese Cemetery in Macau on 4 April 2025. | Eduardo Leal / AFP via Getty Images The red pockets of the title are hongbao, envelopes decorated with ideograms for good fortune and containing cash. Mah soon realises that it has become a form of gift extortion, that those who have left and returned are forced to be charitable. There is a sinister aspect to the supposedly chance appearance of people who might have been snubbed, or the heavy hints about the ethical imperative of rebuilding heritage properties. Moreover, having once complied, the stakes are raised for subsequent visits, an exponential increase in the acceptable presents. There was indeed a time when qiaopi, financial payments sent back home from emigrants, were fundamental to the economic viability of the 'home' communities; just as the migrant labour was essential to the industrialisation of the Pacific Northwest (or Ga-Na-Dye as it was called, 'home of unlimited vastness'). Nonetheless, Mah is sensitive and sensible enough to realise that there are webs of interconnection and dependence and exploitation embedded in Chinese manufacture. She writes well about the peculiar tastes of pollution, something not quite smell but a 'chemical-sewage-cigarette tang'; more tellingly her ability to 'taste' it is suspect. The locals cannot, which is explained by nitrogen dioxide cauterizing their nasal passages. These mephitic vapours have analogues in the unshriven, spectral ancestors, and then later in the coronavirus, pathologising the air we breathe. The virus too is a transnational sojourner, an untethered eminence. This interplay between the physical and the psychological is central to the book. Although not religious, Mah finds herself attracted to secular Buddhism as a kind of coping strategy, and a means to both leave well alone, do no harm and intervene. The 'unexplained headache' is a 'creeping algae bloom' (a sewage-y blossom?) which 'maybe… was the consequence of years of studying environmental devastation, which is a different sort of demon'. Maybe it is linked to a family predisposition towards schizophrenia. Her academic work has an emotional fallout, especially around COP26: 'to see the heavy debts that you owe. And to understand, finally, the limits of knowing'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Despite the slogans of 'Hurry up please it's time', Mah is stricken by a sense of it already being too late to exorcise, exonerate, excuse or cure. She is not just 'gripped by an apocalyptic vision', but 'started to question the idea of hope'. It is when she 'lost faith' that she looked for faith. 'Maybe that was why I was so captivated by my great-grandmother's neglected grave,' she writes. 'How satisfying, after years of searching, to find something, a sin. Not even a lone one, but a grand intergenerational one. The idea that every illness, untimely death and disaster is a punishment from hungry ghosts. A divided self, a divided world, a failure to listen, a failure to honour'. How does one live when 'even sending an email was destroying the planet'? Mah seems fortuitously well-placed to be between despair and fortitude. The book seems to thrive on the sense of splicing. The family, to the Chinese, were 'barbaric, foreign devil Mah-children who would not grieve at their mother's funeral'; but the same great-grandmother gave birth to them at home to avoid the 'devil-looking' white Canadian nurses. Everyone is someone else's monster. Red Pockets neatly places different aspects and scenes side by side and lets the reader draw the connections; like the irony of the Chinese Canadian museum falling victim to climate change wildfires. She describes families migrating from rural communities because of land conflicts and losing forms of knowledge (about, for example, contaminated substances), in Scotland and China. Although it ends with a hard-won hope – 'we have fires to tend' – when Mah writes 'I am not ready to retreat into the mountains' she is compelled to add 'just yet'.
The Herald Scotland
23-04-2025
- General
- The Herald Scotland
We cherish Scotland's right to roam but our freedom is a myth
Red Pockets: An Offering Alice Mah Allen Lane, £20 One of the most unusual and powerful books I've read in a long time. Chinese Canadian-British writer Alice Mah is Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow. Red Pockets – the red envelopes used in China to give money to family and clan members – describes her return to her ancestral village in South China, and the reverberations of that disturbing visit. In a soul-searching narrative that charts her escalating despair over the global climate emergency, she addresses the ways in which the world's plight is connected with unresolved issues from the past. Drawing on the cultural and economic histories of China, Canada, England and Scotland, Mah navigates her own fretful response to her family history and her fears for the future. Clear-eyed and sensitive, Red Pockets is a moving and imaginative memoir of facing up to the wrongs of the past, at the same time asking what we owe to previous generations, and to those who will inherit this planet from us. A Granite Silence (Image: free) A Granite Silence Nina Allan riverrun, £20 The murder in Aberdeen in 1934 of eight-year-old Helen Priestley horrified the nation and had a shattering impact on the over-crowded tenement community where she lived. In this closely researched account, Nina Allan creatively explores the many elements exposed by this dreadful crime. Wild Fictions Amitav Ghosh Faber & Faber, £25 In the run-up to the Iraq War, Indian-born novelist Amitav Ghosh clashed with a well-known American editor, who refused to see the USA as anything but a benign and altruistic force. In the years since he has produced a drawerful of highly-researched pieces, now brought together in this collection. Covering some of the most pressing subjects in recent decades, from 9/11, the ongoing legacy of imperialism, Hurricane Katrina, the refugee crisis and disasters such as the 2004 Indonesian tsunami - the natural and the political cannot be separated, he argues - this is an unflinching portrait of our times from a refreshingly original perspective. Room on the Sea André Aciman Faber & Faber, £12.99 Meeting while awaiting jury selection, New Yorkers Paul and Catherine covertly take stock of each other. She reading Wuthering Heights, he looking every inch the dapper Wall Street type. What starts as nothing more than a brief encounter becomes more serious, and soon a life-changing decision must be faced. André Aciman is a romantic with a melancholy soul and an eye for detail that makes his fiction read as if real. Read more Of Thorn and Briar Paul Lamb Simon & Schuster, £20 'It is during the shortening days of the autumn months, when the September mists return and the morning dew settles on the pastures once more, that the hedger begins his work.' So writes Paul Lamb, for 30 years a hedgelayer in the west country, who lives in a converted horse box. An enlightening and beautifully told monthly journal of following an ancient craft, and the benefits it brings to the countryside. Back in the Day Oliver Lovrenski Trans. Nichola Smalley Hamish Hamilton, £14.99 On publication in Norway in 2023, Oliver Lovrenski's debut novel Back in the Day swiftly became a bestseller. Norway's Trainspotting is a deep dive into the chaos, terror and black humour of teenagers locked in a cycle of deprivation. Ivor and Marco, who live in Oslo, have been on the downward slope since they were 13, when they started getting high. At 14 they were dealing drugs, and a year later began carrying knives. This bleak tale, told with brio, offers a fresh take on what it is to be young in an environment where a positive future is but a dream. Hitler and Mussolini (Image: free) The Einstein Vendetta: Hitler, Mussolini and a Murder That Haunts History Thomas Harding Michael Joseph, £22 Robert Einstein, Albert's cousin, lived with his family in a villa near Florence. One summer's day in 1944, while he was safely in hiding, a unit of soldiers arrived at the villa. When they left, 12 hours later, Robert's wife and children were dead. Their murder has never been solved, but in this scrupulously researched account, Thomas Harding takes on this notorious case, asking who ordered the killings, and why was no-one brought to account? The Eights Joanna Miller Fig Tree, £16.99 In 1920 Oxford University finally admitted female undergraduates. Joanna Miller's debut novel follows a group of young women, all living in rooms on Corridor Eight, who become close friends. From varied backgrounds - privileged, hard-up, politically engaged - all are hopeful of what lies ahead. All, too, are scarred by the recent war. With an influenza pandemic terrorising Europe, their time in Oxford promises to be eventful. Victory '45: The End of the War in Six Surrenders James Holland and Al Murray Bantam, £22 To mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two, James Holland and Al Murray have joined forces to illuminate how peace was finally achieved. Between May and September 1945 there were six surrenders: four in Europe, two in Japan. Describing the events leading to each, and telling the stories of the people involved, from generals and political leaders to service men and women and civilians, Victory '45 memorably brings history, and those who made it, to life.
