Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai

Tiny Moons is a collection of essays about food & belonging. Nina Mingya Powles journeys between Wellington, Kota Kinabalu & Shanghai, tracing the constants in her life: eating & cooking, and the dishes that have come to define her. Through childhood snacks, family feasts, Shanghai street food & student dinners, she attempts to find a way back towards her Chinese-Malaysian heritage. 

"A pair of pink plastic chopsticks. A bowl full of instant noodles. The smell of chicken stock & jasmine tea. Steam starts to tickle my nose. Popo, my grandmother, watches me from her lacquered chair. This is one of my very early memories, where the shapes are blurred & colours flare out in waves. Pink & yellow plastic, deep blue Tibetan carpet. I don't know if all the parts are real, but I do know what happened next. When no one was looking, I flipped the bowl. The rim hit the table with a clatter, flinging out noodles & sending my chopsticks onto the floor. My mother..."

“We must have been fourteen or fifteen, eating burgers at our favourite expat American diner in Shanghai, licking salt & ketchup off our fingers. We were best friends: two half-Chinese girls, one with hair darker than the other, one a little taller, both with our nails painted black. An older white man came up close to our table. ‘You two must be hungry girls,’ he said, raising an eye-brow & walking on. We stared after him, mouthed What the fuck. Then we looked at each other & started to laugh because we didn’t know what he meant exactly, only that it was true.”

Nina Mingya Powles is the author of several poetry zines & chapbooks, including Girls of the Drift & field notes on a downpour, & Tiny Moons, a food memoir. In 2019, she founded Bitter Melon, a poetry press that publishes handmade chapbooks by Asian writers. Her debut collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, was published by Canongate in the summer