Latest news with #RedPockets
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.'
Asia Times
06-05-2025
- General
- Asia Times
Traveling to my ancestral village in Guangdong unearthed tragedy
My book Red Pockets explores questions of inheritance: what we owe to ancestors and to future generations, and what we owe to the places that we inhabit. It was inspired by visiting my ancestral village in Guangdong in south China, after nearly a century of intergenerational separation due to migration, war and revolution. My grandfather in his unpublished memoirs wrote about his childhood stay in this rice village, and I had always wanted to see it. In spring 2018, I finally found the chance, during a research trip to study the impacts of petrochemical pollution in Guangdong. My trip coincided with the Qingming festival in April, when people return to their ancestral villages to sweep their relatives' tombs, making offerings of food, incense and burnt paper money to sustain them in the afterlife. Remarkably, my ancestral village was still intact, among the rice fields and western-style brick buildings, largely as my grandfather had described it. In fact, there are many similar clan villages in Taishan county, which is known as the 'home of overseas Chinese' due to its history of overseas emigration during the western gold rushes of the late 19th century. Penguin It was a moving yet unsettling experience, almost a comedy of errors, navigating different cultural expectations. One of the oldest villagers still remembered my family's history, which turned out to have been troubled. My ancestors had suffered untimely deaths, their tombs were lost and our ancestral house was expropriated during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. To restore my family's place in the village would be impossible: we would have to build a new house and give all the clan villagers gifts of money in lucky red pockets. Even then, nothing could repair the ruptures of the past century. Observing the Qingming tomb-sweeping rituals on the hills, I wondered: What were the consequences of failing to sweep the tombs every spring? When I got home to the UK, I carried stories of pollution and ancestral neglect with me. They stayed with me and began to take on new meanings as I continued my research on toxic pollution and environmental injustice. I learned that, in Chinese folk religious beliefs, neglected ancestors become hungry ghosts unleashing misfortune and environmental destruction. As the climate crisis intensified, I couldn't shake the feeling that the hungry ghosts somehow embodied collective experiences of climate grief, illness and anxiety. My idea to write Red Pockets came together in the wake of disappointment over COP26 in Glasgow. As I thought about the 'heavy debts that we owe' to past and future generations, two seemingly separate ideas merged into one – the personal story of my 'return' to my ancestral village and the wider story of confronting the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. I wanted to write a book that would explore the possibility of healing alongside the impossibility of returning to lost worlds. The writing process involved wrestling not only with different ideas but with different parts of myself. The hungry ghosts were difficult to summon in a way that felt real. At first, I tried a more academic approach, researching Chinese folk religious beliefs about death and burial rituals, and extreme climate disasters unfolding around the world. But I soon realized that the metaphor felt too thin in the absence of my own voice, and that I had to talk about hungry ghosts from a personal perspective. Once they came out, they seemed to take on a life of their own. Hungry ghosts animate the connections between the material and spiritual, how environmental devastation shows up in body, mind, and Earth: 'A divided self, a divided world, a failure to listen, a failure to honor.… They want us to face up to our broken obligations.' As I moved towards more positive themes in the final chapters of the book, the weight slowly began to lift. I learned that there are ways of living with ghosts, recognizing joy alongside despair, possibilities for interconnection despite disconnection and compassionate actions to 'defend our lands and ourselves.' I found what I was looking for: an offering. Alice Mah is a professor in urban and environmental studies at the University of Glasgow. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bingeable comedy, a Jim Crow-era vampire thriller and William Morris mania – what to watch, read and do this week
I recently bought a Now TV subscription because we are in prime prestige TV season and I needed it to watch The White Lotus and The Last of Us. Deep into those big, confronting shows (which are brilliant but, let's be honest, a lot), I was looking for something that was comforting and easy. If this is what you are also craving right now, I could not recommend Hacks more. Hacks is a whip-smart and hilarious show with 30-minute episodes. It follows Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), an edgy comedy writer who isn't everyone's cup of tea, and spiky Las Vegas comedy veteran Deborah Vance (Jean Smart). This pair are shoved together by their shared manager when Ava is fired from a writing gig for making an off-colour joke on social media, and Deborah loses her headline slot on the Vegas strip as the city moves on without her. Since its first season, Hacks has provided insightful commentary on the male-dominated world of comedy. The push and pull relationship between Ava and Deborah is hilarious as they clash over generational differences on everything from comedy to sexuality. The show has been rightly lauded for its brilliant writing, which manages to go all the way up to the line without being hateful – a skill many comedians who argue that it's hard to make comedy in our politically correct age could learn from. Now in its fourth season, our reviewer, Jacqueline Ristola, an expert in the media industry and comedy, says Hacks has managed to maintain the quality (and hilarity) while finding new ground to explore women's precarious place in the entertainment industry. Read more: Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here. If you are in the mood for something a bit moodier and serious, then Sinners might be for you. The film follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who have returned home to Mississippi in an attempt to leave their troubles behind. What they find waiting for them, however, is much worse. Sinners is set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi, a time of harsh segregation and racial injustice. While the horrors of this period are certainly enough to scare anyone, director Ryan Coogler has decided to tell a story grounded in supernatural evil. Vampires aside, there is a lot of history in Sinners too. Criminology expert Rachel Stuart found it interesting how the real stories of Irish and Choctaw oppression informed the film. Read more: If you're looking for something to read, we recommend the memoir Red Pockets. In this piece, Alice Mah, a professor in urban and environmental studies, writes about why she was inspired to create this book after a personal detour to her ancestral village she took while on a research trip. In Red Pockets, Mah chronicles her journey from the rice villages of south China back to postindustrial England. Her research on pollution leads to growing eco-anxiety, and paired with this trip leaves her in spiritual crisis. Part memoir, part cultural history and environmental exploration, this book explores what we owe our ancestors and also future generations. Read more: Also moody and brilliant is the Victor Hugo exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. I did not know that the French writer was an avid artist, and this exhibition is a wonderful and rare opportunity to gaze into the dark and surreal world of the mind behind Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hugo's inky paintings and drawings of townscapes and watery underworlds invoke a sort of nightmarish and apocalyptic reality. The low lighting in which these extremely fragile works must be kept adds to the whole foreboding atmosphere. The exhibition's title comes from Van Gogh's opinion of Hugo's work as 'astonishing things', and they really are. Our review, expert in fine art Martin Lang, found 'the sense of uncertainty to feel oddly relevant to today'. Read more: Another man whose art has had enduring appeal is designer William Morris. Most people probably have or know of someone who owns something adorned with one of his hypnotising patterns. His work has remained incredibly popular since he first started producing it in the 1860s. A new exhibition at the William Morris exhibition, Morris Mania: How Britain's Greatest Designer Went Viral, explores how his work proliferated to such a degree. While you may be able to spot a Morris, you might not know much about the man. He was a fervent socialist who championed a principle of handmade production that didn't chime with the Victorian era's focus on industrial 'progress'. These ideals sit in opposition to how his work has come to be used today. Our reviewer, an expert in applied art, found that the exhibition was sensitive to this, championing 'ethical and bespoke production, while confronting the darker currents that move objects around our world'. Read more: This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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.
The Herald Scotland
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
'One of the most unusual and powerful books I've read'
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 Nina Allan Riverrun, £20 A Granite Silence by Nina Allan (Image: Rivverrun) The murder in Aberdeen in 1934 of eight-year-old Helen Priestly horrified the nation and had a shattering impact on the overcrowded 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 Room on the Sea by André Aciman (Image: Faber & Faber) 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. 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. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Countryside Patrick Galbraith William Collins, £22 According to popular belief, access to the countryside in England is highly restricted, while in Scotland, with its Right To Roam legislation, the situation is idyllic. In this hard-hitting account, Patrick Galbraith sets out to destroy the clichés surrounding this inflammatory subject. Making a point of talking to "people who are often forgotten" - among them salmon poachers on the Isle of Lewis, grassroots activists, and much-loathed landowners - he shows that land access is much more nuanced than provocative headlines suggest. Not only are things far from perfect here, but in England there is better access than many people realise. Galbraith's informed and passionate analysis of those tussling over the land is essential reading for anyone with opinions on the countryside. Back in the Day Oliver Lovrenski Trans. Nichola Smalley Hamish Hamilton, £14.99 Back in the Day by Oliver Lovrenski (Image: Hamish Hamilton) 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. 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.
