Ritual, Ancestry, and Cultural History in Modern China, with Alice Mah
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. In today's episode, sociologist and author Alice Ma joins us to discuss her new book, Red Pockets, a deeply personal yet globally resonant exploration of ancestry, ecological anxiety, and cultural memory. Ma is a writer and professor of urban and environmental studies at the University of Glasgow. A

Originally from a small town in northern British Columbia, she has a long-standing interest in ecology and place. Drawing on her experiences tracing her family's lineage from the rice-growing villages of South China, through the Chinatowns of Western Canada where she was raised, to the post-industrial landscapes of Scotland and England where she now lives, Mao reflects on what it means to reckon with a legacy of silence, displacement and environmental degradation.

Joining now to discuss environmental sociology, intergenerational responsibility, and the often overlooked spiritual dimensions of ecological grief is journalist and book critic Maithili Rao. Let's join Maithili now with more. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Maithili Rao. Our guest today is Alice Ma. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Alice. Thanks so much for having me here.

Alice, the book starts with a journey. It's 2017. You've gotten the opportunity to go to China on a research trip as part of your work studying cities polluted by toxic petrochemical factories. And as you're planning for this trip, you decide while you're there, as a bonus, you might as well go visit the family ancestral village. What did you hope to accomplish on the trip, both from a work point of view and just from your own adjusment?

agenda. And at what point did you start to think that maybe these two goals of seeing the impact of a petrochemical pollution on a city or a village and then reconnecting with distant relatives might be connected? So, yeah, I mean, I was studying petrochemical polluted villages, maybe about a two-hour drive away from where I knew my ancestral village had been. And I grew up in Canada,

And I knew I was half Chinese and I'd read my grandfather's memoirs since I was the age of nine, documenting and accounting for this village where they came from. But nobody in our family had been to this village due to, you know, war, revolution, communism, people leaving, my grandfather dying. So we'd just never been. And it had always been a part of myself that I just wanted to know about, you know,

And so I thought, well, we're so close, we'll just do a pop over and I'll see what it's like. I'll see if it's a rice village, just like it used to be. And as it happened, I talked to my dad about that just before going and he said, oh, are you going to sweep the tombs? And maybe a lot of people know about tomb sweeping in China, but I had no idea. And I thought he was joking because he likes to joke.

So are you serious, dad? But he was serious and he'd never told me about that custom. So, yeah, I went there and I hadn't actually been hoping to find anything other than just where I came from.

But as it happened, I had a cousin who had just a few months before sought out the village herself, kind of on a similar journey, but different. She has two Canadian or Chinese-Canadian parents. And she said that she'd really found this village. It was exactly the way it had been before. And she sort of insisted on coming with me, my postdoctoral research assistant and her husband to this village. And then I was just absolutely captivated

kind of blown away by what I found. Like it was, I was expecting it to be, I guess you could say maybe more modern, or I didn't expect that there would be tomb sweeping rituals that were expected of us. I didn't expect that. Yeah, I guess that the cultural systems had endured for so long. And I was particularly shocked and haunted, I guess you could say, by what I discovered about what had happened to my family in that time. And I think it was

just discovering all the kind of terrible things that had happened to our family. You know, normal things, I guess, deaths, illness, things around war and conflict. And this notion that I left from the village that we had this tremendous sense of obligation that was part of the way the clan operated that I just felt I didn't know anything about. And so...

in a way, was a comedy of errors, of misunderstandings when I was there. But once I came back, I was just like, I owe something more. And it really intersected with the way I was thinking about pollution and about, you know, what we owe to future generations and past generations. And so it just, yeah, got at me.

I'm going to be asking you more about the ritual of sweeping the tombs and these ideas of intergenerational obligations, but maybe we can rewind a little bit first and just talk more about your family's immigration history.

It's a story that goes back to the gold rush and the railway boom in British Columbia. But, you know, maybe it's not necessarily a immigration story that is as well known as others in Canada or in North America. Can you describe a little bit about how your family came to Canada? Yeah. So, I mean, a large number of people from the part of China where my family came from in the south, an area known as Taishan,

but also the surrounding regions, for many decades in the 19th century, left that area due to a whole range of kind of factors like famines, epidemics, extreme conflicts. The land was very much destroyed.

I guess not enough to sustain people. And they had those trade networks as well. And so a number of people from the same clans, actually sort of almost through word of mouth or through their kinship networks, began to hear tales of gold in North America. They called it Gold Mountain. Actually, they called that of all of North America, initially to California and then northwards into Canada and BC and the Yukon area.

My great-grandfather was part of that migration. So he was one of the very early migrants, so in the late 1800s.

hundreds went there on his own basically as a teenager and, you know, prospected. And they weren't allowed to, you know, get the good gold claims. Like, I guess the white miners, they had to get the kind of scraps behind, but they still were able to make money from that. And then they sent it back. So the idea was that they would make money and bring it back and bring that wealth back to China.

China for their families. So he was part of that and he then went back to China to marry and had an arranged marriage effectively with a wife who would accept an overseas husband. So they started their family in China and sort of did it as a kind of international migration story already from the turn of the 20th century. So quite early on.

So that was also was around the time of the building of the railroad. So that's when a lot of Chinese migrant laborers came over both to the U.S. and to Canada to build the railroads. And my great grandfather was part of that boom, although he set himself up as a merchant who sort of serviced the railroad community in a small town in British Columbia.

using the strengths of clan networks and the money they'd made through the gold rush. But it was very much a segregated kind of community that they grew up because they weren't allowed to integrate with the white settler communities.

And when you did make this return, which you said for many, many years, no one had been able to make that journey just because of all the other historical factors that kind of presented blockades. At the time, sweeping into the tombs, like you said, was just sort of you thought your dad was joking, is a superstition. What does it even mean? You kind of go from feeling no guilt about this to by the end of the book, you're like,

You've come to terms with the guilt that you accumulate during the book. When did you stop thinking about it as a superstition and thinking about it more as like a meaningful symbol of obligation? Well, I should say that I never really thought of it as a superstition as such. I mean, it is the team sleeping festival celebrated all throughout China, across classes, across cultures. I think perhaps I just didn't

I think I didn't quite appreciate how literally it's understood, nor do I actually even know to what extent it really is literally understood. So the reason for it is to pay respects to ancestors who have become spirits and who occupy a place in a sort of, I don't know, afterworld or life where they, you know,

you know, need to be fed, need to have sustenance in that life. So that's why you would burn paper money and offer incense and foods.

And so I guess I wasn't quite able to appreciate that that would be literally what people thought, you know, as a non-religious person. That's not to say that I would think of it as superstitious as such. It was more just a certain understanding of practice and religion that I hadn't encountered before.

before. And I think in terms of coming to terms with it, without spoiling the book, I don't know that I ever fully come round to the notion that that's absolutely what one has to do. It's more just a sense that maybe they're meant not necessarily in a purely material way, but more in a sense that we do owe

our ancestors' respect or offerings in a sort of way that is not necessarily set by a particular practice, but according to our own ethics, our own values, our own connections. So I started to unpack it a little bit.

in terms of what it might mean and tried to put myself into the shoes, I suppose, of different people, how they might interpret what those obligations are. And I think what I rubbed up against more so than the belief was more just that

There are sort of gendered hierarchies as to who's allowed to participate in those. So, for example, it's typically men who are, especially in that particular village, who are meant to do the team sweeping. It's a male clan line. And so, yeah, there's a line in the book where you say, well, I wouldn't have been included. I would have been married off to another clan. So it wouldn't have even been my obligation. So throughout the book, I was sort of also grappling with like,

the fact that it's absolutely impossible to reinsert oneself back into these structures. And while there may be many lovely things about them, really wonderful respect for nature and for each other and a really tight community and really amazing knowledge about the land, at the same time, there are

you know, roles within society in terms of hierarchy and gender that, you know, I wouldn't want to return to at all. So I think I was pushing back against that. I wasn't just going to, you know, you can't just, I think that's part of the mourning in the book is you can't just, there's something that's fundamentally lost or broken in that kind of rupture between the past and the present, you know,

There's no going back. But then how can you reconnect in a meaningful way? One thing I really enjoyed was the humor you alluded to of some of the cross-cultural navigation, kind of where the book gets its title as well when you're

in the family village in South China and through a translator are starting to realize that relatives want you to give them cash and red pockets and are kind of pitching it to you as, you know, would be great if you do this or this person would really benefit from this or you kind of owe this person that or wouldn't it be fair? And the poor translator is both trying to defend you and your cousin from a

these queries and also kind of do convey what's happening here. And it's a bit of a cultural misunderstanding. It's a bit of a shakedown. They also know that you're from abroad and have different resources. It's also a demonstration of kinship. It's a kind of way of asserting intimacy and a closeness. And you owe us. We're one of you. And I guess, as you've just said,

The struggle there was for you to figure out what was owed to who, how to pay it. And there's a funny moment where you're huddled in the car kind of hiding the red envelopes that you're stuffing and strategizing about who's going to get them and who's not going to get them. Can you talk a little more about that? It feels like one of the moments of the book that's one of the first places where there's a literal kind of moment of reckoning of,

Where does the payment go to? Who is asking for a payment? Who is owed a payment? What is the correct way to make a payment? And what kinds of guilt do you listen to and what kinds of guilt do you ignore? Do I have that right? Yeah, I mean, I think one could wind back a little bit in the sense that I think what made those cultural expectations all the more heightened was the fact that

that we were all coming at it from different places of knowledge. And I think if I'd gone on my own, especially if it had been the first time anyone had been at this village, it would have been completely different. And it was very different for my cousin when she went for the first time. The first time for her was really about even just finding that that was our, you know, village, like verifying the facts, because there are many, many, many villages that have our surname. And so even just being able to sort of

identify that. So in terms of that moment, I mean, I think the other thing to point out is that we knew that we had to come with gifts. Like we knew that much and I knew that much. But in terms of how the kind of communication happened as we arrived and who was there and what was communicated within the village, then it's

we sort of maybe gave gifts at the wrong moment or to the wrong person or not equitably enough. And so this sort of whole chain of events occurred whereby

I guess some of the villagers, not all of them, felt that we, in addition to hosting a banquet for them, we should give them some red pockets. And they asked the translator for this, but the translator didn't tell us until quite late in the game.

Red pockets are small red envelopes that are filled with money and decorated with Chinese symbols or characters for luck and prosperity. Traditionally, it's actually elders, grandparents, parents, and other married adults who give red pockets to children and unmarried younger relatives on special occasions. My cousin and I were familiar with red pockets when we went there, but only in a Chinese-Canadian context because we'd received...

gifts of red pockets from our grandparents called lucky money as presents. But we had never imagined that we would be asked to give red pockets ourselves. So, uh...

it was all kind of basically mediated and filtered through various kind of dynamics. So it wasn't that we didn't want to, you know, do what we were absolutely, both of us, like myself and my cousin, we were like, yeah, we'll do what we have to do to be in communion with these people. And especially my cousin, like she just, it was so meaningful for her. It was her, you know, it was like coming back home. It was like an epiphanal journey. It was very emotional journey.

And she felt like she's finding her family here. And I think that was what ultimately the translator was trying to protect because she felt that by suggesting that maybe the villagers wanted something else might be kind of

hurtful perhaps, but they were quite insistent. And, you know, they probably have their own story. So I'm a little reluctant here when you're saying, you know, what did they really want? I mean, I think the way that I write it is really to leave your one's own interpretation. And I think you could very easily read

what I've written from the perspective of somebody coming from one of these villages who would sort of read this situation entirely differently. But if you read it through, I guess, maybe for want of a better word, a Western perspective, then you might read things into it that might sound like it's, like you said, a shakedown. But I would say... Yeah, that would make it a little ungenerous of me. But it seemed like there are a couple of layers of dynamics, which... And the translator also had one...

take on in her defensiveness of you. I'm not trying to malign your village relatives, but that sense of these worlds, you said people from different cultural starting points having this meeting and a sense of like, what is the correct way to give and receive respect or whatever else it might be and how easy it is to misunderstand that or to fall short of that.

struck me as really interesting. Yeah, I think the other thing to really highlight there is that this place, the whole region, is known as the home of overseas Chinese and has this very long history of remittances and sending money back. And so that obligation is kind of written into the cultural history. And I think the translator didn't fully understand that history either because she didn't come from that history.

And I think nor did we really, because we were only kind of partially aware of that because so many generations have passed. Whereas like our parents' generation were quite acutely aware of that. And that might be why they didn't actually go back to China, because it's, you know, it's...

It's a challenging kind of, I guess, confrontation in a way. You describe how these villages, maybe not the Ma village itself, but some nearby, a few hours away, the other petrochemical villages you visit, they're places that before the 1970s were devoted to agriculture and cultivating pineapples and lychees and plums and oranges and all these things. What do they look like and smell like now, these villages? Yeah.

Yeah, so I think that's what's special about the Mao village is that it's preserved. It's like a rice village. It's still like it used to be. But where I was doing research are these, or I guess what you'd probably say is a much more typical picture in a lot of rural China where...

the former agricultural uses have given way to industrial development. And so the villages that we were looking at were in the shadow of massive petrochemical industries. So the industry that converts oil into petrochemicals, which go into basically making plastics. And so the

There was still a living memory, so among migrant workers and among villagers, some of them remembered those lychees and the pineapples and sort of were sad that they had been lost. But they still cultivated some of those foods afterwards.

and still ate them in the shadow of this very, very noxious petrochemical plant. And so, yeah, I do talk in the book about the experience of going with the researcher there through the petrochemical villages, which were just so full of heavy dust, full of kind of acrid chemical air. And it was just,

It was very overwhelming. It was unlike anything I've experienced before in terms of... I would say it's not even like a smell. It gave me headaches. But by the end of the day of being there, I lost my sense of smell for the rest of my time. So that during my time in China, I had no sense of smell. I mean, I think it was a real insight into the ways in which...

People have to live with such intense pollution and many of them reported that they didn't really notice it. And I think one of the reasons why they didn't notice it is because their senses do get kind of desensitized through that exposure, but also because they have to get on with their everyday lives.

So it's, yeah, it's, it doesn't resemble, I mean, I've done research in quite a few different petrochemical areas where there've been different kinds of politics around it, different environmental justice movements and different people resisting or, you know, struggling over that. And there, we didn't see any struggles there, but in a way it was a more viscerally obvious sort of

Extended pollution. Just looking at and sensing what was going on.

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As your trip concludes and you head back, you describe a kind of unraveling and the kind of anxiety that takes hold. And as I mentioned at the top of our conversation, you know, I thought that was something that was so unusual and remarkable about this book is how you

take that on directly? You're a professor, you think about urban studies, you think you write research papers. Were you worried about framing this as in some ways a ghost story, in some ways as a direct confrontation with anxiety? My sense is, you know, when you write about the COVID pandemic a lot too, my sense is that since the pandemic, there's a greater cultural appreciation of

how unusual and difficult the times we live in are. But I was wondering about how you decided to tell the story in this way. Well, in terms of academic work on the climate crisis and on pollution, I mean, I have more or less come to the conclusion that the climate crisis is as much, if not more, a spiritual crisis as it is a material crisis. And, you know, I have heard environmental experts

writers and researchers say the same thing. I mean, it's something that we all grapple with in different ways. So the reason I wrote about it in this way is, I think I'm quite careful to talk about hunger growth in ways that one could

read again, like in the beginning, like read it in different ways. So you could think, oh, I literally believe in hungry ghosts. I think that something has manifested and my great-grandmother's ghost is inhabiting me. You could take that reading. You could also take the reading as, well, a metaphor for illness, for the climate destruction. And so it's sort of deliberate. I mean, I think

Initially, the way I had wanted to write it was perhaps a bit more academic, more about around the folk beliefs and making those the more metaphorical connections. But I think what I thought about writing and what felt really real to me, and that's why I went with it, is that when I got home to the UK after going to China, I did really carry the burden of stories of pollution, of illness, of

and of death with me. And I was especially troubled by this sort of moral tale that was told by one of the elders in the community about the neglected grave of my great-grandmother and how it was almost like our family had been cursed because we hadn't gone and attended to her. So I was really disturbed by that. And I think looking back, it was almost like they were sort of saying, "Shame on you, shame on your ancestors." And I felt this kind of like almost like defensiveness about my ancestors.

And I didn't know, just like I didn't know about team sweeping, I didn't know about hungry ghosts. I'd heard the words. I thought it had to do with addiction or about like a Buddhist sort of idea. But I didn't know that it was actually in a folk belief, this idea that if you neglect your ancestors, if you fail to sweep the tombs, then your ancestors could become hungry ghosts who unleash illness and ecological destruction on their descendants. And I thought...

are they saying that my ancestors are going to, is that what happened? Are they saying that that's what happened to them? And if so, like that's part of me.

And I think at that moment, I mean, that was 2018. And I said, I'm talking through the times of the climate crisis intensifying, all the media, of course, through the Fridays for Future struggles and the reports really like percolating then through the pandemic. So you have this real heightened sense of kind of, I guess, the dooms of our times happening.

And I just felt like, I really did feel that that story just kept staying with me and it kept bugging me.

And I began to think on whatever level it could be, a spiritual level, it could be a material level, that Hungry Ghosts did and do somehow embody something about the experience of climate grief, of illness, like psychosomatic illness, where illness shows up in the body through stress and anxiety. And I thought...

Actually, I'm not telling a story just about myself. I mean, I'm talking, this is a collective experience and it's not even necessarily about the climate as such. I mean, a lot of people have heightened fears of anxiety due to, you know, wars and famines and all these things are kind of entangled. So I felt it was an authentic story to tell because it, you know, coincided with society

experiences that were felt. And I felt that by sharing that, that it would bring people into thinking about climate issues through a different way. Because I think often people are kind of brought into climate anxiety through telling them terrible things about what's happening to the planet. And so instead of doing that, which is what some of my other work does, it was more about like, how does it feel to actually be kind of

filled with this sense of grief and anxiety. And also, interestingly, what comes with that is a real love, like a love for our planet, a love for what we're losing. And so that's what I wanted to show is that kind of journey, not just to scare people, but more to think in a really deep way about

What does it mean to live in times that are going through such ruptures? Shouldn't we think about different forms of knowledge, different ways of imagining futures or pasts? Who says that any one way of seeing things is better? One thing I really liked about the book was that sense of you looking for making meaning and making progress.

a path forward and kind of synthesizing these different difficult threads and thinking about how to continue doing the work you do and how all of us carry on in a polluted and broken planet.

You describe some small rules you make for yourself, sort of what you call it a private bargain with the ghost to keep them away. Without being too literal about those rules, can you describe them a little bit and how they've served you? I don't know if I've actually written them all down. I mean, I think I talked about, I mean, a lot of them come from kind of humility, I guess you could say, and about staying grounded, so staying close to

close to family, having gratitude for what one has in life and one's family and connections, and being in your place, like where you live, not traveling all over the planet to do research or to follow consumption patterns, to try to live more in accordance with my values. I think part of that was about

I don't know, like in academia, there's a lot of a lot of like in any part of life, I think in the modern world, there's elements of like when you go to the supermarket and you're in everything's wrapped in plastic and everything shipped from somewhere else. You couldn't go through life often without feeling. Yeah, you could easily get sucked into this kind of guilt about virtually every step that you take.

And so I never imagined that I would, that that's even a productive thing to do. But I just sort of thought being more grounded, more focused on, I mean, I think what I ended up reflecting on, this is a reflection partly on, not just on an environmental writing, but on sociology as well. It's kind of like this narrow focus often on

Stories of damage or stories of injustice, which are sort of problems, which are very abundant in the world we live in. And they're sensationalized often by the media outlets.

And if you look for just that, or if you see just that, or if you research that for a long time, then that can fill your mind and it can all be true, right? But there's so much else. So it's sort of also like panning out and thinking, well, there's so much joy alongside that. There's things we can really appreciate. It's not that our whole world is destroyed. That's kind of a, I mean, much of it is being destroyed in terms of climate crisis.

crisis and it's involves a huge amount of suffering and so on and that we need to recognize that loss and not invent you know stories of hope that are implausible or denying those realities but I think I started to

My search for an offering, which is ongoing, it's not complete, but through the last section of the book, which is looking more towards thinking about possibilities to bridge those divides, to think about interconnection and small forms of healing are really about where can you find connection with other people, with plants and animals, with trees, with music, with learning, with...

positive action. And so it's the sort of incremental steps towards that. And yeah, I don't know. It's always with the recognition that it's an imperfect step and that there's all this trouble and contamination and so on.

So it's not that we should ignore that, we need to sit with that, but we also, you know, and myself and those who can, can look to see the joys as well and the gratitude as well alongside that.

Well, a final question for you. The book itself is obviously an offering. That's the subtitle as well, and it's an elegant offering. What kind of reader do you hope the book reaches? Who do you hope connects with the book? I hope for readers from all different kind of backgrounds and walks of life to connect with the book. I think people who have ever thought about reading

climate and the loss of environmental things that they sort of treasure. People who are migrants or who have a sense of disconnection with where they live. Like maybe they might not be a migrant, but not in recent history, but might feel like they don't have roots. So there's a kind of a search for roots there that I think a lot of people can connect with.

One person once told me that they read a book and it made them feel whole again when they finished reading the book. And I thought, oh, that is kind of what I'm going for, is someone who might sort of feel this sort of like, I don't know, sadness or loneliness or disconnection. And then they read this and maybe in an unexpected way, it opens up something different. It doesn't obviously fix anything, but it just sort of makes them feel, oh, you know, it's not so bad. They get something like that about it. So I don't know.

Well, Alice, thank you so much. Thanks so much. That was Alice Ma, author of Red Pockets, which is available now online or at a bookstore near you. I'm Maithili Rao. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts.

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