In Red Pockets, the writer Alice Mah confronts a question that many are too frightened, or too distracted to ask: What do we owe the dead, and what do we owe the land beneath our feet? Blending memoir, cultural history, and environmental meditation, Mah’s debut is both an intimate narrative and a sweeping exploration of inheritance, both familial and spiritual.
By Klaudia Hostynska – Features Editor
Alice Mah, who works at the University of Glasgow in social and political sciences, has delivered us a haunting figure of the hungry ghost, drawn from Chinese folklore. The book Red Pockets focuses on ancestors. During Qingming Festival in China, it’s customary for people to sweep the tombs of their ancestors, making offerings to please the spirits and prevent misfortune.
When Mah returns to her family’s rice village in South China after a year of catastrophic wildfires, she discovers that there are no tombs left to tend. Her ancestors, like many across a century ruptured by war, displacement, and revolution, have become nearly forgotten. “I wrote this book after I came back, it was so impactful in a very unexpected way,” said Mah.
This theme of obligation across generations, continents and across a rapidly collapsing climate is what encourages Mah’s journey. From the quiet rice fields of South China to the post-industrial cities of England, and to the Scottish isles she now calls home, Mah seeks a thread that can connect her fractured identities and landscapes. What begins as ancestral reconnection evolves into a crisis of belief: how can we live meaningfully in time of spiritual and ecological unravelling?
Credit: Alice Mah
“I was genuinely curious and wanted to see what she will say about the current problems and the climate issues, it’s just so upsetting how everything almost got lost in those fires,” said Radek Kovac, 29, who works as a chef in Cote. The emotional weight of that experience is everywhere in the book’s detail-rich prose. “I wrote a huge amount of notes, I was spending nights scribbling things. This was to include as much detail as I could,” said Mah.
Mah does not offer easy hope. “I am not a perfect human, I cannot look at the news at the moment, it’s very hard to say how we can now move forward,” she says. Her eco-anxiety is palpable, sharpened by her academic background in environmental research. “With this anxiety, I love looking at the trees outside from where I live, I actually don’t think we should be comprehending what’s happening to billions of people in real time all the time,” she said.
“She seems like such a moving person, even the way she speaks so softly about everything, convinced me to read this book in the first five minutes,” said Kovac. Red Pockets is an offering that soulfully attempts to reconcile the ghosts of our past with the uncertain future. In a world increasingly driven by data and disaster, Mah reminds us that memory and place still matter.
Credit: Klaudia
Alice Mah speaking at Waterstones Gower Street
Add comment
Comments