Red Pockets Audiobook By Alice Mah cover art

Red Pockets

An Offering

Pre-order with offer Pre-order for $0.00
Offer ends January 21, 2025 at 11:59PM ET.
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Red Pockets

By: Alice Mah
Pre-order with offer Pre-order for $0.00

$14.95/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends January 21, 2025 11:59PM ET. Cancel anytime.

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Pre-order for $22.71

Pre-order for $22.71

Confirm pre-order
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

A poignant personal narrative about family, cultural history, and ecology, and a quest to understand what we owe our ancestors and our descendants from an unforgettable new voice.

"Part of me knew what the hungry ghosts wanted all along, what they still want. It is not vengeance. No, they want something else, but we refuse to listen. They want us to face up to our broken obligations."

Every spring during the Qingming Festival, people return to their home villages in China to sweep the tombs of their ancestors. They make offerings of food and incense to prevent their ancestors from becoming hungry ghosts that could cause misfortune, illnesses and crop failures. Yet for the past century, the tombs of many overseas Chinese have been left unattended because of the ruptures of war and revolution. Following a record year of wildfires, Alice Mah returns to her family's rice village in South China, ninety years after her grandfather's last visit and fifty years after her last relative died in the village. While she finds clan members who still remember her family, there are no tombs left to sweep. Instead, there are incalculable clan debts to be paid.

In Red Pockets, Mah chronicles her journey from the rice villages of South China to her home in post-industrial England, through the Chinatowns of Western Canada where she grew up, to the isles and industry of Scotland where she now lives. As years pass and fires rage on, she becomes increasingly troubled by her ancestors' neglected graves. Her research on pollution gives way to growing eco-anxiety, culminating in a crisis of spiritual belief.

A haunting blend of memoir, cultural history and environmental exploration, Red Pockets confronts the hungry ghosts of our neglected ancestors, while searching for an acceptable offering. What do we owe to past and future generations? What do we owe to the places that we inhabit?

©2025 Alice Mah (P)2025 Bond Street Books
Biographies & Memoirs Ecology
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about Red Pockets

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.