Rakibul Hasan Khan
Childish Palate by Shariff Burke (Tender Press, 2026), 242pp, $32.00
Following Rob Nixon’s formulation of ‘the unimagined community’ in his 2011 groundbreaking book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, which subverts Benedict Anderson’s famous notion of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, I often wonder whether immigrants might also constitute an ‘unimagined community’. Shariff Burke’s Childish Palate, a collection of short stories, solidifies my sense of immigrants’ place in contemporary society. The collection is a gift to the inconsolable—those immigrants who, even after decades in Aotearoa New Zealand, continue to move between the life they left behind and the life they have built here.
Like the protagonist of the story ‘Half a Life’, who attempts to connect ‘both halves of’ his ‘life together’ after spending ‘more than half his life in this country’, these immigrants inhabit two worlds at once, attached to both and fully at home in neither. This story captures something of the overall mood of the collection. It is highly inventive and imaginative, touched by a profound melancholy as the life of a dead person intersects with that of a living one, illuminating the insecurity and sadness that surround a sensitive immigrant’s existence.
Reflecting on the collection, I find myself wondering if this was partly why I was invited to review it, for I too am embracing a life that I often compare to that of a fish out of water. When I was first approached, however, I knew nothing about the book and accepted largely out of professional curiosity. As a literary scholar, reviewing unfamiliar work is part of the task, and there was also the excitement of engaging with a contemporary New Zealand author.
Before beginning the collection, I glanced at the endorsements on its covers and tried to form an impression of what awaited me. It quickly became apparent that food occupied a central place in the book, alongside the complexities of immigrant life. An uncomfortable thought arose: was I chosen primarily because of my critical abilities, or because of my immigrant background? Like the character Thiru in Burke’s story ‘A New World’, I found myself questioning whether immigrant identity had become my most legible qualification. I decided that the only meaningful response was to read the collection as carefully and honestly as possible.
That resolve was tested almost immediately. In the opening story, the appearance of a character named Zakia, a name familiar from my own part of the world, produced an unexpected sense of recognition. The collection began to offer not simply identification but a deeper form of self-reflection. With each successive story, that experience intensified. Burke’s stories resonated with aspects of my own experience so strongly that writing about them came to feel less like an assignment than an obligation. Nonetheless, a review must eventually move beyond the reviewer’s self-reflection.
The stories in Childish Palate are perceptive, assured, sad and frequently surprising without relying on dramatic revelation. Burke is interested in lives that unfold beneath the visible surface of society. His characters resemble subterranean rivers: powerful currents moving largely unnoticed by those around them. The collection raises an important question: who, exactly, fails to notice them, and what renders them ‘an unimagined community’?
The answer is complex. Burke’s stories suggest that immigrants often remain absent from dominant national narratives despite their longstanding presence within New Zealand society. This observation may seem contradictory at a time when immigration is frequently the subject of public debate. If anything, immigrants are often represented excessively, whether through political rhetoric, media narratives or moral panic, becoming an over-imagined community. Yet such visibility does not necessarily translate into genuine recognition. Burke’s characters frequently internalise the gaze directed at them and come to see themselves through it. As a result, they remain caught between hypervisibility and invisibility, spoken about but rarely understood.
Written against this backdrop, Childish Palate serves multiple audiences simultaneously. It offers non-immigrant readers insight into the emotional and social complexities of immigrant life, particularly among Asian communities in Aotearoa. At the same time, it holds a mirror up to immigrants themselves, inviting reflection on questions of belonging, memory, family and cultural inheritance.
One of the collection’s greatest strengths lies in its refusal to reduce its characters to sociological examples. The stories are compassionate without becoming sentimental and politically aware without descending into didacticism. Food appears throughout as a recurring motif, yet Burke avoids treating it as an easily consumable marker of cultural difference. Instead, meals, flavours and ingredients become vessels of memory, carrying traces of histories, relationships and migrations. Through food, the past remains present and continually reappears.
Not every story centres on immigration. The collection is broader and more varied than its title initially suggests. The phrase Childish Palate implies simplicity, selectiveness and perhaps even immaturity. It also reminds me of Ted Hughes’s intriguing poem ‘A Childish Prank’ and its childish trickster Crow. Yet there is very little in these stories that could be described as childish. Beneath their often understated surfaces lie questions of loss, loneliness, ethical responsibility and social exclusion. The stories also engage with the discovery of queer intimacy, especially in the eponymous story, ‘Childish Palate’. If traces of childhood remain, they do so as repositories of vulnerability rather than innocence.
The standout story, in my view, is ‘No Girls in KB’. It is also the longest and perhaps the most ambitious piece in the book. At a time when anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Muslim prejudice continue to shape public discourse across many Western societies, Burke turns his attention to Muslim life with remarkable nuance and patience. New Zealand is not exempt from these broader currents, and the memory of the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks inevitably informs contemporary conversations about Muslim communities and public belonging.
Set in a Wellington suburb, like most of the stories in the collection, ‘No Girls in KB’ follows Khairul, whose Singaporean Muslim mother and Pākehā New Zealand father place him in an uneasy position between different religious, cultural and ethnic worlds. His father’s family operates a pub near a local mosque, a proximity that becomes a source of tension when members of the mosque community oppose the pub’s presence. Khairul, initially presented as a reluctant Muslim, finds himself acting as an intermediary between the two groups; a role he undertakes with considerable hesitation.
What unfolds is less a story of ideological conflict than one of gradual self-discovery. Through his repeated encounters with the imam and other mosque attendees, Khairul begins to reconnect with a dimension of himself that he has long kept at a distance. The mosque offers him something he has not fully recognised he lacks—a sense of belonging. Burke handles this transformation with admirable restraint. Rather than presenting identity as a sudden revelation. Rather than presenting identity as a sudden revelation, he depicts it as an incremental process shaped by relationships, conversations and acts of mutual care.
The ending is hopeful without feeling naïve. In a literary landscape where stories about Muslims are often framed through fear, conflict or suspicion, Burke’s portrayal offers a welcome alternative. Without explicitly arguing against Islamophobic narratives, the story quietly dismantles them through the richness of its human detail.
Another memorable contribution is ‘The Falling Sky’. Unlike many of the other stories, it is not centrally concerned with migration or cultural identity. Instead, it expands the collection’s thematic reach by engaging with questions of environmental ethics, ecological destruction and the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. The story centres on Liam, a middle-aged man who enters into conversation with a rat. At first glance, the premise appears to belong to the tradition of magic realism, but the story’s achievement lies elsewhere. The encounter between human and animal becomes an occasion for rethinking the assumptions that structure human relationships with the natural world. Burke invites readers to imagine forms of ethical attention that extend beyond the boundaries of the human. In doing so, he reveals a broader philosophical concern that runs quietly throughout the collection—an investment in empathy not only across cultures and communities but across species as well.
This story adds another dimension to an already impressive and diverse collection. Indeed, diversity may be Childish Palate’s most striking achievement. While immigrant experiences provide an important thread, Burke never allows them to become the sole organising principle of the book. His stories move between questions of belonging, faith, ecology, memory, class consciousness and everyday human connection with a confidence that feels both generous and intellectually ambitious.
Reading Childish Palate was an enriching experience, not simply because I recognised aspects of my own life within its pages, but because Burke consistently pushed beyond the limits of recognition itself. The collection asks readers to attend to lives that often remain peripheral to dominant narratives and to do so with care, patience, empathy and imagination. Immigrants and non-immigrants alike, whether long-settled New Zealanders, recent arrivals or readers from elsewhere in the world, are likely to find something here that unsettles, moves and illuminates. That, in the end, is what the finest short fiction achieves, and Burke’s collection accomplishes it with remarkable skill.
RAKIBUL HASAN KHAN is a Bangladeshi-origin bilingual poet and scholar based in Dunedin, where he works at the University of Otago as a professional staff member.
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