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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'.
