Red Pockets by Alice Mah review: 'sensitive and sensible'

A mixture of memoir and polemic, Red Pockets cleverly connects the familial with the global, writes Stuart Kelly

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.

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”.

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”.

Red Pockets, by Alice Mah, Allen Lane, £20