Why does it feel so sacrilegious to throw away a book? And do the little free libraries that dot our suburbs primarily exist to assuage our guilt? Book lover Shanti Mathias debates book realist Shanti Mathias.

I was outraged to read about the Invercargill Rotary Club recycling books that weren’t sold in their annual sale! Why didn’t they give them away for free? Like maybe in one of those little free libraries at the side of the road?

Look, you and I both know the problems with the little free libraries. They are often filled with old, unwanted books in bad condition. I’ve done what I can to fix it: initially enamoured with the little libraries that proliferated around my neighbourhood when I moved to Auckland, I started to see that they were filled with trash. The plywood walls were straining at the shoddily-glued seams, filled instead with empty dust jackets, library copies of Sophie Kinsella novels with the barcodes scribbled out, pamphlets and photo albums, guides to using Windows XP from at least two decades ago. 

I started swerving past on my morning runs. If the boxes were full, I would do a little cull, and put the books I couldn’t imagine anyone ever wanting to read into the bin to dispose of them. If you think about it, isn’t that what the people who originally put them in there – or donated them to the Invercargill Rotary club – were doing too?

The way you’re starting with excessive justification suggests you’re not so sure about this. Think about it this way: haven’t we found so many good books in little libraries? The Host was a perfect reread for a rainy week; it was a joy to read The Shipping News and put it back on the shelf three days later; your copy of Sabriel, one of your favourite books, comes from a little library too. 

Lots of people – us included – have put books in the boxes that we genuinely loved, and expected other people to enjoy too; sure enough, a week later they were gone. Who are you to determine what books are good and bad? Your empathy is not boundless: some people might still have old computers and find the Windows XP guide helpful. Just because you can’t imagine this person doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. 

The little libraries are a joyous community creation for sharing, not trash baskets – they’re a wonderful way for people to get books they might not be able to afford otherwise, without a transaction involved.

Sure, I won’t deny that there are lots of good books in the free libraries, and the ethos of the sharing idea is lovely. But books are just like any other objects: sometimes they’re useful, and sometimes they’re trash. There’s lots of ways sharing books could be good for community, but these libraries are anonymous spaces, not social. Imagine them filled with a different kind of object: a snarl of secondhand clothes, a pile of crockery, clumps of discarded electronic cords. Does it seem like such a beautiful idea now? Like all those things, books are mass-produced: there are lots of them, some useful and wanted, and some, frankly, not.

There’s every reason to support ways to redistribute stuff for free: run a book or clothing swap, or leave your still-working microwave on the berm. But at the end of it, you might still have an appliance on the lawn or 500 copies of The Da Vinci Code, and you’ll also just have to chuck them away. I’m just saying: let’s acknowledge that the primary purpose of little libraries is not to share books, but to help people feel less guilty about throwing away their books. 

But books are not like other objects! They’re special! They’re beautiful! They’re funny! They’re the product of intellectual effort and thought! They’re one of the most amazing ways to understand how other people think! 

See, this kind of attitude is exactly why we have too many books in our house already. 

I love books! I need books! And I like the idea that other people who want books can get them affordably! 

OK, think of it this way: how much is it costing you to have all those books? Our bookshelf takes up maybe an eighth of the floorspace in our small room. Does it justify paying one eighth of your rent to keep a hundred or so dead trees covered in ink nearby? Storing books costs money: that’s why publishers pulp thousands of unsold copies of their books, and why New Zealand’s National Library got rid of 600,000 of its overseas collection a few years ago. Auckland’s actual library system, the biggest in New Zealand, acknowledges this problem too: books that aren’t being read are donated, sold or recycled – about 320,000 items a year. 

I love books: I just think that putting not-very-good books in wooden boxes in public space just externalises the problem into a place you’re not paying rent/a mortgage to fill. There’s no way to know who takes the books – is the good of the free libraries really outweighed by the fact that they’re publicly accessible rubbish bins for one very specific type of rubbish?  

You’re thinking about this in purely capitalist terms, as value for money. But the book boxes are a different paradigm entirely. Books can be shared! They can find their way to people who need them! They’re a way to resist the idea that the only way to appreciate something is as a transaction. 

I love the idea of sharing stuff, pursuing a common good, too. But instead of the little libraries, let me introduce you to an even more magnificent and radical idea: big libraries. They are actual buildings for books, not boxes. They are warm. Their books are catalogued and taken care of, so you’re much more likely to find something you actually want. There are staff who are paid to look at books that are coming out and buy them for the public – for people to read over and over, not just take home in an aspirational mood and never open again, like you did with Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. They also host events where people actually spend time together in the same room and get to interact with their community, not just idly wander past and wonder if someone nearby just broke up with their philosopher girlfriend and are disposing of her New Philosopher magazines. 

I worry that maybe the free libraries mean people don’t engage with their local public libraries. With lots of public services under threat at the moment, libraries aren’t in great shape; many are reducing hours or days that they’re open. There’s the oft-repeated line that no-one would invent public libraries again today – but since we have them, we should use them!

Big public libraries are more pleasant to visit, have a bigger selection of books that people actually want to read, provide heaps of services to the community. And get this: they’re also free. 

But the publishing industry is struggling. It’s well known that mass-market, wildly popular books – your Sophie Kinsellas, your James Pattersons, your Atomic Habits – subsidise the books industry as a whole. The books you’re so ready to characterise as rubbish five years later are what makes it possible for the literary novels you like reading to exist. Publishers need us to buy – then maybe later donate – these kinds of books so that authors can get paid. 

Little libraries mean that people who didn’t read The Kite Runner in 2005 can read it now. Books aren’t food. They don’t expire. What’s the problem – is recycling books really a better option? 

Yes, it is beautiful that books can store knowledge and stories of all kinds for years – and the economics of the publishing industry are certainly difficult. When it comes to wanting to buy things to support nice stuff in the world, and also not wanting to buy things, perhaps I can refer you to this excellent argument that Gabi Lardies had with herself. 

Books, unlike most clothing, don’t contain much plastic (although their covers and glue can). They can be recycled and repurposed. Left to their own devices, they can also rot – and that’s not a bad outcome, is it, to be a home for fungi? Little libraries aren’t the worst option, either, but I think using them sometimes prevents us from looking straight at the truth that we have too much stuff. Too many books, too many clothes, too many knick-knacks. The little libraries, like op-shops, means that instead of shame or guilt about accumulating objects then throwing them out, we feel the warm altruistic goal of donating something. Even if all we’ve done is make it someone else’s problem! 

It’s great that things can be repurposed – but it’s also good to acknowledge that if you want your World of Warcraft fantasy art book to be read again in the future, putting it in a free library is not your best bet. 

OK then, random Auckland journalist who has decided that you’re an expert in the current book publishing model – what should I do with all the books I’ve read and don’t want any more then? 

Ideally, take them to a second-hand bookshop instead, where they actually know how to assess a book’s value and take care of it. That’ll give the book the best chance of finding another reader. Op shops aren’t ideal, as workers don’t always have time to sort through books and order them on the shelf in a way that helps people find them. If it’s a book you genuinely love, maybe you can share it with a friend with a heartfelt recommendation, and thereby increase the chance of it actually being read. 

What I’m hearing is that there are lots of ways to get books I no longer want into other readers’ hands… but… if it’s a recently-released, good-condition, relatively popular book… it might still be OK to put it in a free library. I’m writing to the Invercargill Rotary Club right now!

Wait, wait, before you post your letter, can you add in this pamphlet advertising my ruthless book disposal services? I want to leave it in little free libraries around the country.

Chris Tse reviews Lee Murray’s genre-breaking book about women of the Chinese diaspora in Aotearoa.

Reading Lee Murray’s Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud is a full-body experience: your pulse races and your skin prickles in response to the searing and visceral imagery, and the heaviness of the injustices that Murray describes feels like weights wrapped around your ankles. This is apt, given the book’s conceit: the titular fox spirit slips on the skulls of nine women to feel their physical and emotional pain. The book is unflinching in its presentation of historical racism and violence as Murray borrows a well-known Chinese myth to uncover taboo stories about the lives and deaths of Chinese diaspora women in Aotearoa.

Although the book constantly shifts through time and space, pinging from one tragic story to another, the many voices it holds share something in common: they speak from a dark and cruel past, one that our country fostered in an attempt to mitigate the threat of Chinese immigration.

According to New Zealand’s 1867 Census, Chinese made up only 0.56% of our young country’s total population. Chinese women were an even smaller subset – there were only six of them in the country at the time. It would take more than 120 years for the gender balance between Chinese men and women to be equal in New Zealand.

The long journey to New Zealand and harsh reality of a pioneer life kept many Chinese women in China. These “gold mountain wives”, as historian Manying Ip describes them, stayed in their home villages in China while their husbands earned money overseas to support them. Even if these women did want to join their husbands, legislated restrictions born from New Zealand’s anti-Chinese sentiment made it practically impossible to do so. The poll tax on Chinese, which increased from £10 in 1881 to £100 in 1896, meant that Chinese men could not afford to bring their wives or children with them. Other restrictions and deterrents included the abolishment of naturalisation for Chinese New Zealanders, the exclusion of Chinese from the Widows Pension Act and, later, the exclusion of women from quotas of entry permits for Chinese. This is only the tip of a very large, very racist, iceberg.

We can demonstrate the cruelties of our history through statistics, legislation and historical records, but often the most glaring omissions are stories of actual lived experiences. These are the stories that are the hardest to gather, record and protect, particularly when they belong to marginalised groups or there is a reluctance to speak of the pains of the past. In Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, Murray (who is of Chinese and Pākehā descent) seeks to address this imbalance in our literature by drawing upon true stories to highlight the isolation and prejudice suffered by Chinese women in New Zealand from the early 20th century to the present day, all of whom were trying to survive “dangerous, dangerous days. Lonely days.” 

At the end of one of her poems, Murray references an old newspaper article from 1881 about the arrival of “a real Chinawoman in Wellington”, who the newspaper describes as “an almond-eyed difficulty”. Depictions and descriptions of Chinese in New Zealand at that time were notoriously racist and designed to stir up fear about the Yellow Peril. In some ways, Chinese women posed a greater threat than their male counterparts due to their ability to procreate, which could have devastating consequences for the burgeoning British colony. Therefore, those who did make it to New Zealand, some brought here against their will, found themselves in a strange and hostile land, exacerbated by language barriers and the lack of a support network: “You understand that there is no place for you in New Zealand or China or anywhere else. You are a strangeness and a stranger, and you belong nowhere. Your world is shrinking”. 

In her author’s note and interviews to support the book, Murray has discussed how she was motivated to write Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud after the rise of anti-Asian sentiment during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the misogyny that fuels anger directed specifically at Asian women. Although not overtly explicit, the book does invite the reader to draw parallels between how Chinese were treated and depicted in the past with contemporary experiences and reporting.

The book’s central figure and narrator is the nine-tailed fox spirit, 狐狸精 | húli jīng, which frequently appears in Chinese folktales and mythology. The fox spirit can be either benevolent or malevolent, so its presence can be interpreted as both a good or a bad omen depending on an individual spirit’s intentions for interacting with humans. Some stories depict the fox spirit’s ascension to heaven to become a celestial fox, which is what Murray uses as the central premise for her book. 

Murray, who has earned considerable success and international recognition for her horror writing, adapts the fox spirit’s ability to assume a human form as both a narrative framework to tell the stories of nine women and to imbue the book with its own shapeshifting properties. Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud blends genres, forms and source material in a startling and haunting way, often to emphasise the gap between the promises sold to migrant women and the cold reality of life in a distant, unforgiving country: “You wonder if there has been some mistake, some foul perversion or ghostly occurrence that has caused you to lose your way, leaving you placeless, faceless.”

The choice of the fox spirit as a narrator also allows Murray to play to her strengths as a horror writer, using supernatural elements to hold the collection together as a whole rather than simply presenting the women’s stories as discrete, unrelated poems. The overall effect is that the fox spirit becomes a rounded, compelling narrator that begins to embody the reader’s own frustrations and heartbreak as each story complicates the fox spirit’s own selfish desire to be free of the pain and suffering it must endure before reaching heaven. Even the fox spirit, who scuttles between different states of reality, is overcome by their own feelings of displacement (“This is no place for foxes”) before understanding the purpose of their journey: “You will bear witness. You will give these women voice and nourish them with hope. You will sing their spirits to the mountains and shout their stories from the tips of the red turrets. You will give them flesh and make them real.”

Historical cultural and societal expectations of Chinese women, and Asian women in general, have often relegated them to being subservient or treated as possessions. They were expected to be meek and silent, and to not have their own aspirations (“A wife should not wish for too much. What good is wishing?”). The nine women of this book are not named but reduced to the roles they were expected to play for others: wife, mother, daughter, girl, woman. Their stories are full of heartbreak, dashed dreams and mental health struggles, culminating in tragic endings that underscore the neglect and violence they endured. Some take matters into their own hands, driven by anger and rage to commit unspeakable acts themselves. Even then, their actions are dismissed as being “a woman’s act” – there is no desire by the men in their families or officials to understand what could motivate them to do such things. Once again, they are reduced to being objects that do not operate within the same moral boundaries set by Pākehā: “a strangeness”, “so alien”, “so unnatural”.

In a recent interview, the actress Anya Taylor-Joy spoke of how she has challenged directors about scenes where her characters were expected to cry instead of letting them erupt with the more realistic response of rage: “We have reactions that are not always dainty or un-messy.” This constant tension of whether or not we should let rage guide or consume us is prevalent throughout the book, emphasised by its structure of alternating fox spirit/woman chapters and Murray’s subtle use of repetition.

Murray’s book arrives not long after the publication of Grace Yee’s acclaimed Chinese Fish, which also repurposes historical records and old news articles as source material to depict the lives of Chinese diaspora women in New Zealand. Both books have been billed as verse novels or prose poetry collections, although I’d argue that neither label is entirely accurate given the slippery nature of how Murray and Lee tell their respective stories. There’s something to be said about both authors taking an approach to telling the stories of Chinese women that resists tradition and expectation while also challenging the roles prescribed to these women in both the family unit and society. Both books feel transgressive and fresh, long-awaited entries into our growing canon of literature exploring the Chinese New Zealand experience. 

Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud is a unique and spellbinding book that will hopefully introduce Murray to a wider readership in New Zealand. Murray breathes life into stories that would otherwise have been lost to time, working against the age-old reluctance to speak of topics such as hardships, anger, mental health or suicide. As much as societal structures contributed to the silencing of Chinese women, a lot of it was internalised as well to save face or not bring shame upon their families. We have a responsibility to honour the light and the dark of our histories, particularly when the stories and experiences from minority or marginalised communities have been absent or considered too upsetting or unpalatable. Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud reminds us that there is still so much to learn from our past.

Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud ($28, The Cuba Press), is available from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.