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Hao: Stories
An extraordinary debut collection of short stories by a three-time Pushcart Prize winner following Chinese women in both China and the United States who turn to signs and languages as they cross the alien landscapes of migration and motherhood.
The most common word in Chinese, perhaps, a ubiquitous syllable people utter and hear all the time, which is supposed to mean good. But what is hao in this world, where good books are burned, good people condemned, meanness considered a good trait, violence good conduct? People say hao when their eyes are marred with suspicion and dread. They say hao when they are tattered inside.
By turns reflective and visceral, the stories in Hao examine the ways in which women can be silenced as they grapple with sexism and racism, and how they find their own language to define their experience.
In "Gold Mountain," a young mother hides above a ransacked store during the San Francisco anti-Chinese riot of 1877. In "A Drawer," an illiterate mother invents a language through drawing. And in "Stars," a graduate student loses her ability to speak after a stroke. Together, these twelve stories create an unsettling, hypnotic collection spanning centuries, in which language and children act simultaneously as tethers and casting lines, the reasons and the tools for moving forward after trauma. "You'll come away from this beautiful book changed" (Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House).
The most common word in Chinese, perhaps, a ubiquitous syllable people utter and hear all the time, which is supposed to mean good. But what is hao in this world, where good books are burned, good people condemned, meanness considered a good trait, violence good conduct? People say hao when their eyes are marred with suspicion and dread. They say hao when they are tattered inside.
By turns reflective and visceral, the stories in Hao examine the ways in which women can be silenced as they grapple with sexism and racism, and how they find their own language to define their experience.
In "Gold Mountain," a young mother hides above a ransacked store during the San Francisco anti-Chinese riot of 1877. In "A Drawer," an illiterate mother invents a language through drawing. And in "Stars," a graduate student loses her ability to speak after a stroke. Together, these twelve stories create an unsettling, hypnotic collection spanning centuries, in which language and children act simultaneously as tethers and casting lines, the reasons and the tools for moving forward after trauma. "You'll come away from this beautiful book changed" (Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House).
208 pages, Paperback
First published September 7, 2021
71 people are currently reading
7225 people want to read
About the author
Ye Chun
11 books60 followersYe Chun / 叶春 (Surname: Ye) is a bilingual Chinese American writer and literary translator. She was born in Luoyang, China and came to the U.S. in 1999. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She is the author of Straw Dogs of the Universe (a novel), Hao (stories), two books of poetry, Travel Over Water and Lantern Puzzle, and a novel in Chinese,《海上的桃树》(Peach Tree in the Sea).
She has published four volumes of translations, including Ripened Wheat: Selected Poems of Hai Zi, shortlisted for the 2016 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award, and Long River: Poems by Yang Jian. Her translations of Li-Young Lee's Behind My Eyes and Undressing,《眼睛后面: 李立扬诗歌》, and Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares,《梦魇之书》, came out from People's Literature Publishing House in 2019 and 2021.
A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and three Pushcart Prizes, she is an associate professor at Providence College.
She has published four volumes of translations, including Ripened Wheat: Selected Poems of Hai Zi, shortlisted for the 2016 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award, and Long River: Poems by Yang Jian. Her translations of Li-Young Lee's Behind My Eyes and Undressing,《眼睛后面: 李立扬诗歌》, and Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares,《梦魇之书》, came out from People's Literature Publishing House in 2019 and 2021.
A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and three Pushcart Prizes, she is an associate professor at Providence College.
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May 8, 2023
‘She thinks of each word as a seed, an origin, a center where its meanings radiate.’
I find language to be utterly fascinating. While admittedly fallible, like a net with holes trying to hold the elusivity of experience, it is also such an important tool for communion with others and sharing our realities. Hao, the debut short story collection from poet and writer Ye Chun, is a dazzling collection about motherhood, language, and the multitude of ways women have been silenced through history. ‘A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language,’ wrote W.H. Auden and Ye Chun’s poetic skills flourish her love for—and insight into—language. Much like a collection of poetry, these stories feel like variations on a theme, approaching them with a light touch and abstract grace so that even the stories that feel almost too weightless to make an impact still form an overall commentary as these 12 stories all resonate as if they are caught in the same orbit together. Primarily focusing on mothers and issues of motherhood, Ye Chun details lives of women in China or Chinese women in the United States, with several stories approaching historical fiction surrounding the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Cultural Revolution, as they are often silenced and must find ways to create their own language of survival.
The title of the collection, hao, is a word that is central to several stories. ‘The most common word in Chinese, perhaps, a ubiquitous syllable people utter and hear all the time, which is supposed to mean good,’ she writes in the title story set in 1966 about an academic mother caught in the crosshairs of the Cultural Revolution, ‘but what is hao in this world, where good books are burned, good people condemned, meanness considered a good trait, violence good conduct?’ Where is goodness in a world where women are seen as property and have their voices silenced or lives cast aside at the whims of men, such as the young woman married off to a stranger who abandons her and their daughter for another wife during his service in the military. Or the mother in the story Milk wandering unhoused, still breastfeeding her son because she cannot afford food despite him being older than is socially accepted when they find the father has vanished. Or, as in Crazy English a woman who has come to marry a man in America finds he will not protect her from a stalker who is silencing her just through his presence, and only by standing up for herself using her own voice in a language she struggles with can she defend herself.
‘Now logic fails,’ Ye Chun writes, ‘thoughts and imagination are reserved for cruelty and survival.’ But how to survive when silenced or without language? This is best exemplified in the opening story, Stars, when a bilingual woman suffers a stroke and discovers that hao is the only word she can say. ‘The most common word in Chinese, which must have been so imprinted in her memory it alone has escaped the calamity.’ The woman’s young daughter has grown up primarily speaking English, and though her words are returning to her through speech therapy, the gulf between mother and daughter is widening without a common language to interact. ‘The limits of my language means the limits of my world,’ wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein, and so, when silenced in the many forms demonstrated in the book, to not be crushed by the ever increasing limits. finding a voice in new ways, such as drawing or even a baby communicating through its cries, becomes a central theme threaded through the collection. In the story A Drawer, the abandoned wife begins to invent her own language of sorrow and survival through drawings.
The origin of words as symbols to capture a concept is examined in the final story, Signs, where a record keeper for the Yellow Emperor (2698-2598 B.C.) is asked to ‘create a new record-keeping system’ through signs and teach them so there is a universal written language in the land. ‘An imprint of a thing that projects the thing in the viewers mind, the imprint unique and easy to draw with simple lines,’ is what he seeks, ‘but does everything leave an imprint somewhere?’ Like the woman in A Drawer he captures ideas in simple images, or the mother in Hao traces words on her daughter’s back, an act that becomes the only way to comfort the daughter. She fears the words she uses gives the daughter too much hope for a brighter future, but it is only through tracing them on her skin is she able to retain any hope herself. Similarly, a symbol literally carved into skin occurs in the story Wings.
In Hao, the woman is fascinated by the ways language has evolved, with certain symbols taking on new meaning over time either naturally or politically forced, such as the words she is forced to write as penance for her husband committing suicide instead of being executed by the State. The words no longer correlate to their symbol, or, as many women discover in these stories, words sometimes are unable to correlate simply across translation barriers. The woman in Crazy English cannot decipher the meaning of the English word ‘stalker’ at first (she is engaged in learning words through the whole story and often befuddled by them), or there is the man intimidating the pregnant woman in Anchor Baby by asking her if she is using a child for this purpose having to look up the definition of ‘anchor’ and trying to explain the term.
Intimidation is often used in these stories as ways to silence the characters, and often it is for misogynistic purposes, functions of patriarchy or racism (anti-Asian racism is particularly prevalent in the story Gold Mountain). These women find they become a symbol translated to mean a threat, an object of property, a weak target, etc. For the most part, the space they are allowed to occupy in their worlds is relegated almost exclusively to motherhood, which makes up another theme these stories all orbit around. Most often, this is depicted as a freeing role, one that gives them love and hope.
The story Wenchuan knots the two primary themes in a horrific tale about the Wenchuan Earthquake in 2008. The people are grief-stricken to discover the schools have all collapsed and their children have all perished. The buildings around the schools remained intact, and the petitions and protests of the mothers who demand retribution for the schools for poor children being underfunded and poorly built while businesses received adequate building funding and construction are all silenced by police and government officials. They are told by officials to simply become mothers again, as if this will stop their pain. This is a painful story, and one that looks at silencing as systemic and worse when intersected on class-based issues.
Ye Chun has delivered a very nuanced look at the powers of language and motherhood in Hao, though occasionally the stories can lack much power themselves. Some of the more experimental stories seem too loose to quite land, though the surreal story Wings, in which a woman hallucinates a young, birdlike child with wings who causes her to rethink her life and want a child of her own, is one of the standouts in the book. Reading these stories more as one would poetry really opens up insight into their almost fragile storytelling, as this book feels like these stories could rather quickly be transformed into poems. Still, this is an impressive debut that gives a well-rounded examination of the ideas in a short amount of space, with twelve stories coming in at under 200 pages, and the poetic beauty of Ye Chun’s writing makes for quite the rewarding read.
3.5/5
I find language to be utterly fascinating. While admittedly fallible, like a net with holes trying to hold the elusivity of experience, it is also such an important tool for communion with others and sharing our realities. Hao, the debut short story collection from poet and writer Ye Chun, is a dazzling collection about motherhood, language, and the multitude of ways women have been silenced through history. ‘A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language,’ wrote W.H. Auden and Ye Chun’s poetic skills flourish her love for—and insight into—language. Much like a collection of poetry, these stories feel like variations on a theme, approaching them with a light touch and abstract grace so that even the stories that feel almost too weightless to make an impact still form an overall commentary as these 12 stories all resonate as if they are caught in the same orbit together. Primarily focusing on mothers and issues of motherhood, Ye Chun details lives of women in China or Chinese women in the United States, with several stories approaching historical fiction surrounding the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Cultural Revolution, as they are often silenced and must find ways to create their own language of survival.
The title of the collection, hao, is a word that is central to several stories. ‘The most common word in Chinese, perhaps, a ubiquitous syllable people utter and hear all the time, which is supposed to mean good,’ she writes in the title story set in 1966 about an academic mother caught in the crosshairs of the Cultural Revolution, ‘but what is hao in this world, where good books are burned, good people condemned, meanness considered a good trait, violence good conduct?’ Where is goodness in a world where women are seen as property and have their voices silenced or lives cast aside at the whims of men, such as the young woman married off to a stranger who abandons her and their daughter for another wife during his service in the military. Or the mother in the story Milk wandering unhoused, still breastfeeding her son because she cannot afford food despite him being older than is socially accepted when they find the father has vanished. Or, as in Crazy English a woman who has come to marry a man in America finds he will not protect her from a stalker who is silencing her just through his presence, and only by standing up for herself using her own voice in a language she struggles with can she defend herself.
‘Now logic fails,’ Ye Chun writes, ‘thoughts and imagination are reserved for cruelty and survival.’ But how to survive when silenced or without language? This is best exemplified in the opening story, Stars, when a bilingual woman suffers a stroke and discovers that hao is the only word she can say. ‘The most common word in Chinese, which must have been so imprinted in her memory it alone has escaped the calamity.’ The woman’s young daughter has grown up primarily speaking English, and though her words are returning to her through speech therapy, the gulf between mother and daughter is widening without a common language to interact. ‘The limits of my language means the limits of my world,’ wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein, and so, when silenced in the many forms demonstrated in the book, to not be crushed by the ever increasing limits. finding a voice in new ways, such as drawing or even a baby communicating through its cries, becomes a central theme threaded through the collection. In the story A Drawer, the abandoned wife begins to invent her own language of sorrow and survival through drawings.
‘She looks at them and thinks of the brush strokes she needs to put on the paper so their images will emerge the way they are—simple, singular, alive, suspended in a moment in time…her heart feels like a scroll of moon-white space that opens, and is edgeless.’
The origin of words as symbols to capture a concept is examined in the final story, Signs, where a record keeper for the Yellow Emperor (2698-2598 B.C.) is asked to ‘create a new record-keeping system’ through signs and teach them so there is a universal written language in the land. ‘An imprint of a thing that projects the thing in the viewers mind, the imprint unique and easy to draw with simple lines,’ is what he seeks, ‘but does everything leave an imprint somewhere?’ Like the woman in A Drawer he captures ideas in simple images, or the mother in Hao traces words on her daughter’s back, an act that becomes the only way to comfort the daughter. She fears the words she uses gives the daughter too much hope for a brighter future, but it is only through tracing them on her skin is she able to retain any hope herself. Similarly, a symbol literally carved into skin occurs in the story Wings.
In Hao, the woman is fascinated by the ways language has evolved, with certain symbols taking on new meaning over time either naturally or politically forced, such as the words she is forced to write as penance for her husband committing suicide instead of being executed by the State. The words no longer correlate to their symbol, or, as many women discover in these stories, words sometimes are unable to correlate simply across translation barriers. The woman in Crazy English cannot decipher the meaning of the English word ‘stalker’ at first (she is engaged in learning words through the whole story and often befuddled by them), or there is the man intimidating the pregnant woman in Anchor Baby by asking her if she is using a child for this purpose having to look up the definition of ‘anchor’ and trying to explain the term.
Intimidation is often used in these stories as ways to silence the characters, and often it is for misogynistic purposes, functions of patriarchy or racism (anti-Asian racism is particularly prevalent in the story Gold Mountain). These women find they become a symbol translated to mean a threat, an object of property, a weak target, etc. For the most part, the space they are allowed to occupy in their worlds is relegated almost exclusively to motherhood, which makes up another theme these stories all orbit around. Most often, this is depicted as a freeing role, one that gives them love and hope.
The story Wenchuan knots the two primary themes in a horrific tale about the Wenchuan Earthquake in 2008. The people are grief-stricken to discover the schools have all collapsed and their children have all perished. The buildings around the schools remained intact, and the petitions and protests of the mothers who demand retribution for the schools for poor children being underfunded and poorly built while businesses received adequate building funding and construction are all silenced by police and government officials. They are told by officials to simply become mothers again, as if this will stop their pain. This is a painful story, and one that looks at silencing as systemic and worse when intersected on class-based issues.
Ye Chun has delivered a very nuanced look at the powers of language and motherhood in Hao, though occasionally the stories can lack much power themselves. Some of the more experimental stories seem too loose to quite land, though the surreal story Wings, in which a woman hallucinates a young, birdlike child with wings who causes her to rethink her life and want a child of her own, is one of the standouts in the book. Reading these stories more as one would poetry really opens up insight into their almost fragile storytelling, as this book feels like these stories could rather quickly be transformed into poems. Still, this is an impressive debut that gives a well-rounded examination of the ideas in a short amount of space, with twelve stories coming in at under 200 pages, and the poetic beauty of Ye Chun’s writing makes for quite the rewarding read.
3.5/5
September 28, 2021
3.5 stars
A powerful short story collection that centers the lives of Chinese women both in China and the United States, with an emphasis on themes of motherhood and migration. I loved how Ye Chun showed these women doing their best to survive and resist oppressive forces in their lives, ranging from sexism to native speakerism to state oppression and more. I most enjoyed the stories that followed a single character in a more in-depth way. Thus, my favorites in this collection included “Stars,” about a graduate student who loses her ability to speak after a stroke, “Anchor Baby,” about a woman who moves to America to give birth and encounters an intrusive American man, and “Wings,” about a woman who sees an apparition that motivates her to make changes in her life. I did not vibe as much with the more experimental short stories, though I generally feel that way with short story collections across the board, not just with this one.
A powerful short story collection that centers the lives of Chinese women both in China and the United States, with an emphasis on themes of motherhood and migration. I loved how Ye Chun showed these women doing their best to survive and resist oppressive forces in their lives, ranging from sexism to native speakerism to state oppression and more. I most enjoyed the stories that followed a single character in a more in-depth way. Thus, my favorites in this collection included “Stars,” about a graduate student who loses her ability to speak after a stroke, “Anchor Baby,” about a woman who moves to America to give birth and encounters an intrusive American man, and “Wings,” about a woman who sees an apparition that motivates her to make changes in her life. I did not vibe as much with the more experimental short stories, though I generally feel that way with short story collections across the board, not just with this one.
August 23, 2021
When her husband, Gaoyuan, arrives at the hospital, with one of his jacket collars tugged under the neckline, all she can say is one word, hao. The mellow-voiced doctor asks how she feels, she answers hao; asks her to name pictures of dogs, dolphins, and roses, she replies hao. Good, yes, okay. The most common word in Chinese, which must have been so imprinted in her memory it alone has escaped the calamity. She says hao even when she is shaking her head and slapping her hand on the threadbare sheet of the hospital bed.~ Stars
The twelve short stories in Ye Chun’s debut collection, Hao: Stories, mostly center on the lives of Chinese women (with a couple of male perspectives thrown in and the final story, Signs, telling the story of Cangjie; the Imperial record keeper who devised the ideogrammic method of Chinese writing in the third millennium B.C.), and while these tales each capture interesting and broad-ranging slices of life, they don’t have that crackling mental provocation of what I consider to be the experience of really well-written short fiction. Ye’s writing is polished and evocative, I was interested in what she had to tell me about the experience of these women, and I am happy that I read this collection, I just like short stories that go beyond “slices of life”. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Soon, a woman with big feet and clipped hair comes to the village, her army uniform cinched at the waist with a buckled belt. In the center of the village square, she announces that women are free now. No more bound feet, no more arranged marriage, no more slavery at in-laws’ house, no more discrimination against baby girls. Women, she announces, are equal as men, can hold up half of the sky.
She goes home on her small feet that she knows cannot be stretched back to their natural size. ~ A Drawer
Other than the final story (with Cangjie inventing writing at the dawn of recorded history), these stories are set from the 1870s (with a Chinese woman regretting her arranged marriage and immigration to America in the face of racism and the anti-Chinese San Francisco Riot) to the present (with more than one modern Chinese woman regretting her decision to immigrate to America in the face of racism and limited opportunities). Along the way, there are several stories set in China — sketching out the evolution of women’s experiences from footbound village wives, to Party members separated from their husbands during the Cultural Revolution, to modern day lonely hearts; learning English and joining international dating sites — and throughout, women are trying to find their voices (drawing pictures in the sand when they have not been taught writing), desperately wanting children (even if they can’t feed them, even if they only have baby girls), and looking for meaning in their work (even if it’s caring for the mother-in-law who despises you). Many motifs carry across stories (and especially the word “hao” itself, which we are ultimately told was based on a sketch of Cangjie’s own kneeling mother holding him as an infant), and throughout, the experience of Chinese women does not seem a happy one.
She is thinking of words that do not signify the natural elements, the rudimental, everlasting things that will outlive this upturned world. The word 好, for example, the polar opposite of the word 坏 that is on the cardboard she carries every day. The most common word in Chinese, a ubiquitous syllable people utter and hear all the time, which is supposed to mean good. But what is hao in this world, where good books are burned, good people condemned, meanness considered a good trait, violence good conduct? People say hao when their eyes are marred with suspicion and dread. They say hao when they are tattered inside.~ Hao
Again, if you’re interested in a dozen vignettes of (mostly) Chinese women’s experiences — and I was interested in everything I read here — then this might be a great read for you. As for me, I look for a particular frisson from short stories that wasn’t present here and can only rate it middling against collections that worked better for my own tastes.
September 29, 2021
What a gorgeous and humane collection of stories. Never sentimental or over-argued--they just felt truthful to me, in the way of the best fiction. I'm often moved by what I read, but I've rarely felt the depth of feeling that some of these stories gave me, including most of all the first story in the collection, "Stars," about a woman who experiences a stroke--within the first few sentences I felt both physical anxiety and a sense of profound loss as well as a sense of helplessness. I'll be buying this book and reading it again carefully and then reading it again. My thanks to NetGalley and to Catapult for the ARC.
April 23, 2021
***Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review***
This outstanding book travels across time and place to tell short, but vivid stories about language, loss, love, and so much more. The length of the stories does nothing to blunt the impact of the emotions that arise, and I am in awe of Ye Chun's ability to evoke feelings of such depth over and over again. Her writing went straight to my heart. Highly recommend.
This outstanding book travels across time and place to tell short, but vivid stories about language, loss, love, and so much more. The length of the stories does nothing to blunt the impact of the emotions that arise, and I am in awe of Ye Chun's ability to evoke feelings of such depth over and over again. Her writing went straight to my heart. Highly recommend.
August 1, 2021
Haunting and beautiful stories of motherhood, with a particular focus on language, writing, and signs, set in China and the US, today and in the past.
November 11, 2021
3.5 Stars
Focus of stories show the oppressive forces against women in Chinese society. RTC
Focus of stories show the oppressive forces against women in Chinese society. RTC
October 13, 2021
Palpable and visceral, these stories reveal the heartbreaking nature of surrender: surrender of self, surrender of autonomy, surrender of dignity. The ideograms are replaced by pictograms, literally slashing away the past with new brushstrokes, wiping away the origins of meaning.
The author painfully depicts the unique burdens which women carry, and their raw grasping for a kind of language through which to express their pain. The overall emotional impact is one of repressed rage, that silent scream about one's own powerlessness. That's probably why the little vignette about shout therapy was most resonant.
The author painfully depicts the unique burdens which women carry, and their raw grasping for a kind of language through which to express their pain. The overall emotional impact is one of repressed rage, that silent scream about one's own powerlessness. That's probably why the little vignette about shout therapy was most resonant.
October 22, 2021
This short story collection really took me by surprise. I fell in love with Ye Chun's prose. These 12 stories are full of emotion and complex characters. The only story I didn't love is the last one. It wasn't a weak story, it just didn't resonate with me like the others. "Stars", "Gold Mountain", "Milk", "A Drawer", and "Crazy English" were some of the standouts. These stories deal with some heavy topics like: racism, sexual violence, stalkers, enslavement, and natural disasters. A very powerful book. Not for the faint of heart. I can't stop thinking about it.
Thank you, Netgalley and Catapult for the digital ARC.
Thank you, Netgalley and Catapult for the digital ARC.
June 29, 2021
A poignant and glorious collection of stories that span from the present to centuries past, Hao is centered around the lives of Chinese women-- wives, mothers, and many more. Each one is a tale of enduring resilience, a rebuttal to the stereotype of small and quiet domesticity that husbands, families, and strangers project onto each protagonist. It's easy to become immersed in the sparse prose and emotionally layered lives of these women scattered throughout history.
September 8, 2021
Hao is both a heart-warming and heart-wrenching collection of twelve short stories spanning centuries of Chinese history with a marked focus on female characters. I can't quite point a finger at how this book made me feel. The events and experiences that these women go through are undeniably dismal, gushing with longing, dearth, and torment. Husbands leave wives, children and unborn babies leave weeping moms. Yet, I was still captivated by the ever-so-thin silver lining that kept these women trudging along in their misery. Even though I only saw them in a limited span of pages, I cared for them, cried with them, wanted to caress them tenderly as their cavernous pain pierced through the pages. It was a magnificent experience to become so immediately attached to a fictional character, only to drop her and become engrossed with another.
The women's identities are inextricably tied to their role within a family, making it impossible to see them for who they are. Or perhaps that is who they are: mothers who put their duties first, their needs second. Some of these stories had through-lines and continuities; others didn't. I love how Ye left breadcrumbs throughout the book to show that a character in one might be the same from another. I also love how she was able to weave such a breadth of history and tie these disparate events and places with a singular focus on the Chinese woman and her life in China and abroad. They were fictional characters going through almost unbelievable real-life events.
I guess one area where I was left wanting was wishing that Ye pushed the limit on our imagined representation of this prototypical female Chinese figure. I'm thinking particularly of the non-Han ethnic groups in China and how their experiences as women are further complicated by their minority status, how their stories and representations are so absent in our imagination, and how a story so spanning as this could also have its limitations through its silence and exclusion. The short story in Hao that touched on Tibet reminded me of the colonialist tactic that had been used frequently in the past, where imperialist powers would depict their captives as ancient, stuck in the past, never moving forward, always there for us to admire and ogle, never here to participate in the treasures of modernity and civilization. Not that I think that was the tactic that the author was emulating intentionally, but China's role in modern politics and the havoc it wreaks across ethno-nationally, culturally diverse groups of people is something that I wish were addressed in the form of a story.
But if I put my analytical mind aside, and I return back to the way this book made me feel, I would absolutely recommend this as a readable but riveting book that stays with you for a long time. Thank you to the publisher for making this ARC available through Netgalley!
Cups of Tea | Blog | Bookstagram
The women's identities are inextricably tied to their role within a family, making it impossible to see them for who they are. Or perhaps that is who they are: mothers who put their duties first, their needs second. Some of these stories had through-lines and continuities; others didn't. I love how Ye left breadcrumbs throughout the book to show that a character in one might be the same from another. I also love how she was able to weave such a breadth of history and tie these disparate events and places with a singular focus on the Chinese woman and her life in China and abroad. They were fictional characters going through almost unbelievable real-life events.
I guess one area where I was left wanting was wishing that Ye pushed the limit on our imagined representation of this prototypical female Chinese figure. I'm thinking particularly of the non-Han ethnic groups in China and how their experiences as women are further complicated by their minority status, how their stories and representations are so absent in our imagination, and how a story so spanning as this could also have its limitations through its silence and exclusion. The short story in Hao that touched on Tibet reminded me of the colonialist tactic that had been used frequently in the past, where imperialist powers would depict their captives as ancient, stuck in the past, never moving forward, always there for us to admire and ogle, never here to participate in the treasures of modernity and civilization. Not that I think that was the tactic that the author was emulating intentionally, but China's role in modern politics and the havoc it wreaks across ethno-nationally, culturally diverse groups of people is something that I wish were addressed in the form of a story.
But if I put my analytical mind aside, and I return back to the way this book made me feel, I would absolutely recommend this as a readable but riveting book that stays with you for a long time. Thank you to the publisher for making this ARC available through Netgalley!
Cups of Tea | Blog | Bookstagram
January 31, 2022
I was deeply affected by a few of these stories, and then found some of the others almost unreadable. That makes this a pretty typical short story collection. Almost all of the stories deal with mothers and daughters and involve written language in some way. I thought the stories set in specific historic eras were more successful than the others, especially "Gold Mountain" and "Hao" (the latter made me tear up). My favorites were at the start of the book - the first three stories are very good - and my enjoyment tapered off from there.
November 26, 2025
(3.75) this collection of stories follows chinese women in both china and the united states as they face various forms of abuse and tragedy. most of the stories have similar themes including motherhood and violence at the hands of men. the prose is gorgeous, but i found myself unable to fully connect to these women. i think this collection suffers from being over-saturated with sorrow. i love sad books, even seek them out, but without any respite from the pain, a book can start to feel exhausting and unapproachable. still, i think these stories on their own are very well done.
February 1, 2022
A beautiful collection of short stories by a Chinese American writer and poet. I first picked up this book because of its beautiful cover and I’m so glad I did. The stories all take place in China or the US and touch upon motherhood and struggles of being a woman, specifically an immigrant woman, and all end on a note that’s hopeful and resilient.
September 9, 2021
In Chinese, hao is one of the most common words you'll hear. Meaning good or well, it's in the ubiquitous greeting, nihao, and is also used to express agreement or approval. The written character combines the words for woman (女) with the word for child or offspring (子), conforming to the Confucian idea that when a woman is holding a child, all is well. Hao is a debut short story collection by Chinese American writer and translator, Ye Chun. Within these twelve stories, the themes of language and motherhood are a consistent thread that ties together the lives of very different characters from very different times across China and the US.
Some of the stories in this collection are stronger and more memorable than others. In the opening story "Stars", a woman suffers a stroke that renders her unable to say anything except the word hao, and locked in her internal world, she meditatively thinks back on how a life of saying hao led her to be unhappy and alienated as a PhD student in America. "Hao" is a harrowing account of a woman held captive by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution who plays writing games with her young daughter amidst tremendous suffering. "Wenchuan" is an absolutely heartbreaking and haunting story told in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. And I really enjoyed the last story, "Signs", which envisions the legendary figure Cangjie inventing the writing character system that would be a precursor for the modern Chinese language. As a whole, I felt that many of the stories ended abruptly and without resolution. But they're so beautifully and evocatively written that I was always left wanting more.
Some of the stories in this collection are stronger and more memorable than others. In the opening story "Stars", a woman suffers a stroke that renders her unable to say anything except the word hao, and locked in her internal world, she meditatively thinks back on how a life of saying hao led her to be unhappy and alienated as a PhD student in America. "Hao" is a harrowing account of a woman held captive by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution who plays writing games with her young daughter amidst tremendous suffering. "Wenchuan" is an absolutely heartbreaking and haunting story told in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. And I really enjoyed the last story, "Signs", which envisions the legendary figure Cangjie inventing the writing character system that would be a precursor for the modern Chinese language. As a whole, I felt that many of the stories ended abruptly and without resolution. But they're so beautifully and evocatively written that I was always left wanting more.
February 1, 2022
4.5 what a beautiful debut collection of short stories! They portray women in China and USA turning to languages, signs, motherhood, migration. There were so many passages that will stay with me, I found this so poetic! Picked this up on a whim knowing nothing about it, strictly being drawn to the cover hehe
September 5, 2021
Thank you Catapult for this beautiful gifted copy of Ye Chun's Hao, out on September 7! Ye Chun’s Hao explores so many themes — immigration, violence against women, grief, motherhood — but what moved me the most was her portrayal of language.
Ye Chun opens with “Stars,” where a Chinese immigrant, Luyao, struggles with stroke recovery and its resulting language loss while reflecting on a more long-term language loss that happened after she reluctantly immigrated to America. The only word she is able to remember how to say post-stroke is 好, meaning good, but it is a word that Luyao sees as a reminder of all the ways she acquiesced and gave in even when it wasn’t 好. Through Luyao, I cannot help but think of my own parents and the ways they lost parts of this Chinese and struggled to half-fill it with an English that my sister and I would later easily master.
Language, though lost, can be reclaimed. In “Hao,” We follow Qingxin, a victim of the Red Guards, as she fights to reclaim parts of her language that have been infiltrated by the ideology of the Cultural Revolution. Every night, after beatings and reeducation, she traces Chinese characters on her daughter’s back, “words scripted with love, free from malice…[a]s though she’s recreating the world."
Ye Chun closes this book with “Signs,” which tells the story of the origin of Chinese characters. Cangjie, a record keeper to the Yellow Emperor, creates a series of signs with the people to record their history. He at first creates the character for woman as a figure kneeling in the submissive way they are often perceived and the character for mother as this kneeling woman holding a child (the character seen on the cover of this book). And yet in his dream, he is walking towards his mother and helping her up to her feet.
Full review: https://medium.com/hilaryreadsbooks/l...
Ye Chun opens with “Stars,” where a Chinese immigrant, Luyao, struggles with stroke recovery and its resulting language loss while reflecting on a more long-term language loss that happened after she reluctantly immigrated to America. The only word she is able to remember how to say post-stroke is 好, meaning good, but it is a word that Luyao sees as a reminder of all the ways she acquiesced and gave in even when it wasn’t 好. Through Luyao, I cannot help but think of my own parents and the ways they lost parts of this Chinese and struggled to half-fill it with an English that my sister and I would later easily master.
Language, though lost, can be reclaimed. In “Hao,” We follow Qingxin, a victim of the Red Guards, as she fights to reclaim parts of her language that have been infiltrated by the ideology of the Cultural Revolution. Every night, after beatings and reeducation, she traces Chinese characters on her daughter’s back, “words scripted with love, free from malice…[a]s though she’s recreating the world."
Ye Chun closes this book with “Signs,” which tells the story of the origin of Chinese characters. Cangjie, a record keeper to the Yellow Emperor, creates a series of signs with the people to record their history. He at first creates the character for woman as a figure kneeling in the submissive way they are often perceived and the character for mother as this kneeling woman holding a child (the character seen on the cover of this book). And yet in his dream, he is walking towards his mother and helping her up to her feet.
Full review: https://medium.com/hilaryreadsbooks/l...
December 27, 2021
Hao is a beautiful collection of stories. As readers, we're thrown into the intimate perspective of six different characters. We see them at their most vulnerable and for the rest of the book, carry their sadness and grieve with them.
This book is heavy in a "these aren't true stories but they very well could be" kind of way. I will carry this book with me for the rest of my life, I'm sure.
This book is heavy in a "these aren't true stories but they very well could be" kind of way. I will carry this book with me for the rest of my life, I'm sure.
May 30, 2021
These are outstanding stories about motherhood, migration, and language. The use of oracle bone signs is highly evocative and adds great cohesion to the book.
March 17, 2022
A lot of figures being drawn with sticks 😂 (iykyk).
Blown away by this slim, beautiful collection about language, art, love, and motherhood.
Blown away by this slim, beautiful collection about language, art, love, and motherhood.
March 5, 2024
Short story collection about Chinese women in China and the US, facing struggles with sexism, racism, migration etc.
I adore the premises of the stories and the message they attempt to convey, but the stories didn’t touch my heart, and it took a while to finish b/c they were not gripping in the way I’m used to.
I’m going to say “it’s not the book, it’s me”.
I adore the premises of the stories and the message they attempt to convey, but the stories didn’t touch my heart, and it took a while to finish b/c they were not gripping in the way I’m used to.
I’m going to say “it’s not the book, it’s me”.
June 30, 2024
review to come but so so emotionally powerful
October 19, 2022
in ye chun’s stories, the women are captured as they are giving birth, kneeling, followed, afraid. their milk overflowing from their bodies.
she writes of language - pictures, mandarin characters, words – as a muscle that chinese women exercise. something of theirs that can be strained, show strength, or grow limp. language to represent an understanding of a culture, between grandmother to mother to daughter like an umbilical cord feeding heirlooms of a life lived. its presence felt more deeply when cramped, locked in place and locking the women in their place. chun’s women suffer and sacrifice. forced into silence and solitude amid cultural revolutions in their home country. riots, strokes, and stalkers in their new. but they do not setting for just “hao” or to allow their children to forget words, simple as they are. each moment is a transformation, tightening their grip on language and its dues.
“at the burial mound, my mother found the knots that once lived inside her mother now within her”
she writes of language - pictures, mandarin characters, words – as a muscle that chinese women exercise. something of theirs that can be strained, show strength, or grow limp. language to represent an understanding of a culture, between grandmother to mother to daughter like an umbilical cord feeding heirlooms of a life lived. its presence felt more deeply when cramped, locked in place and locking the women in their place. chun’s women suffer and sacrifice. forced into silence and solitude amid cultural revolutions in their home country. riots, strokes, and stalkers in their new. but they do not setting for just “hao” or to allow their children to forget words, simple as they are. each moment is a transformation, tightening their grip on language and its dues.
“at the burial mound, my mother found the knots that once lived inside her mother now within her”
November 27, 2023
HAO is a collection of short stories in which women find their own language to express their experience.
In "Stars", a teacher (Luyao) lost her ability to speak and only remembers the word 好 /hao/ (a ubiquitous word that means 'good' or 'well' in Chinese) - this is an interesting examination of language, mainly the way it impacts one's life. This is a story that resonated with me the most: Luyao's relationship with her daughter in a bilingual family and cultural heritage. Being disabled, roles are inverted and Luyao desires to go back to the roots ( "reread all of Jin Yong's wuxia novels" is the cultural affinity that I treasured). In "Gold Mountain", the mother-daughter relationship offers so much tenderness and I love the connection with zheng 箏. In "Hao", a woman (Qingxin) is the victim of Cultural Revolution - Chun brilliantly plays with Chinese ideograms and this story is gloomy yet tenacious. The collection closes with "Signs", a story rich with Chinese history that focuses on the origin of Chinese ideograms.
Through vignettes, Chun meticulously exposes violence against women, motherhood, dependence, immigration and racism. There are mothers and daughters manifesting signs of survival, relearning how to live their lives while leading readers into the same journey. Sometimes surprisingly ironic, I favored some stories. Regardless, each story germinates into new meanings and leaves a unique imprint.
With a exquisite prose that deeply firms one's understanding, Chun delivers a singular debut collection. If you're into an intense exploration of language and womanhood infused with cultural elements, read this book. I am excited to read what Chun writes next.
[ I received a complimentary copy from the publisher - Catapult . All opinions are my own ]
In "Stars", a teacher (Luyao) lost her ability to speak and only remembers the word 好 /hao/ (a ubiquitous word that means 'good' or 'well' in Chinese) - this is an interesting examination of language, mainly the way it impacts one's life. This is a story that resonated with me the most: Luyao's relationship with her daughter in a bilingual family and cultural heritage. Being disabled, roles are inverted and Luyao desires to go back to the roots ( "reread all of Jin Yong's wuxia novels" is the cultural affinity that I treasured). In "Gold Mountain", the mother-daughter relationship offers so much tenderness and I love the connection with zheng 箏. In "Hao", a woman (Qingxin) is the victim of Cultural Revolution - Chun brilliantly plays with Chinese ideograms and this story is gloomy yet tenacious. The collection closes with "Signs", a story rich with Chinese history that focuses on the origin of Chinese ideograms.
Through vignettes, Chun meticulously exposes violence against women, motherhood, dependence, immigration and racism. There are mothers and daughters manifesting signs of survival, relearning how to live their lives while leading readers into the same journey. Sometimes surprisingly ironic, I favored some stories. Regardless, each story germinates into new meanings and leaves a unique imprint.
With a exquisite prose that deeply firms one's understanding, Chun delivers a singular debut collection. If you're into an intense exploration of language and womanhood infused with cultural elements, read this book. I am excited to read what Chun writes next.
[ I received a complimentary copy from the publisher - Catapult . All opinions are my own ]
September 11, 2021
Ye Chun's Hao is a stunning debut collection of short stories. I have rarely read such a cohesive short story collection. Ye has crafted a stunning, emotional, and vibrant collection about how different Chinese women navigate life, particularly as mothers and women who seek to be mothers. It is sincere and soft and sometimes (okay quite often) painful and uneasy. Each story still tumbles around in my brain as different examples of the complexity not just of motherhood, but of Chinese womanhood.
I can't give you any favorites because I loved them all so much. I will say that the final story, "Signs," is a perfect close to a deeply emotional collection.
**** Catapult provided me a finished copy for review ****
I can't give you any favorites because I loved them all so much. I will say that the final story, "Signs," is a perfect close to a deeply emotional collection.
**** Catapult provided me a finished copy for review ****
April 12, 2022
A poignant, thought provoking and poetic description of womanhood, immigration, motherhood, fertility, and oppression. This opened my eyes to quite a lot of struggles; some I’ve faced personally and others that I couldn’t dream of facing. Ye Chun beautifully intertwined the nuances of women in both China and the United States; past and present. Although these stories are short, they have a lot to say.
August 3, 2021
A collection of short stories all focused on a specific pain that a woman might have. The writing is both descriptive and precise as if each word was thoughtfully considered and chosen. Highly evocative, these stories will stay with you long after you finish reading them. Hao.
July 27, 2023
Beautifully written. ✨
A collection of powerful and poignant short stories of Chinese women and their complex journeys of motherhood throughout the history of time and culture - filled with love & loss, isolation & longing, estrangement & alienation, racism & injustice. Highly recommend!
A collection of powerful and poignant short stories of Chinese women and their complex journeys of motherhood throughout the history of time and culture - filled with love & loss, isolation & longing, estrangement & alienation, racism & injustice. Highly recommend!
May 27, 2021
Great stories. Worth reading!
December 17, 2021
Great stories!
Thank you to Catapult for my gifted review copy!
Thank you to Catapult for my gifted review copy!
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