“Hao”, by Ye Chun, is a debut short story collection. It contains twelve short stories centering around Chinese women’s lives and life experiences both in China and in the US. Language and linguistics also play a central part in some of the stories, and are significant to the life experiences of the women in the stories.

The stories that resonated most with me were “Wenchuan”, about the collective suffering in the aftermath of an earthquake, “Hao”, about a woman interrogated by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, “Crazy English”, about a young immigrant woman being followed by a stalker, and “Anchor Baby”, about a pregnant woman in an uncomfortable, tense encounter with a neighbor.

The writing was beautiful across the whole collection, and it really placed Ye Chun on my radar for future books. I initially requested this book a long while ago because of the gorgeous cover, but kept postponing reading the actual stories. The moment I actually started reading it though, my attention was captured, and I wanted to kick myself for waiting so long to read it. Still, I’m happy I did eventually get to it, and recommend it now to fans of subtle prose and women experiences. Thank you to NetGalley and Catapult for the e-arc. All (very late) opinions are my own. “Hao”, by Ye Chun has been available since September 2021.

"Hao", a collection of short stories by Dr. Ye Chun, follows several Chinese and Chinese-American women as they navigate the world and their internal struggles. One women is illiterate and invents her own language to communicate through a pictorial writing system (the precursor to modern Chinese characters), while another has lost all verbal communication except for the word "hao". Chun's experience as a poet is on display in the collection with the lyrical prose within "Hao".
A wonderful collection of short stories.

Book review published in The Rupture: https://www.therupturemag.com/rupture/hao

Pain is the entry point to Ye Chun's story collection Hao, a "swirling, crackling kind of pain, as if an electric eel is twisting inside her skull." The pain is that of Luyao, a Chinese Ph.D. student and lecturer, experiencing a stroke in "Stars." As the stroke happens, she remembers watching an eel at the St. Louis aquarium: "the tank lit up every few seconds with lights powered by the eel's own voltage charges." The collection reads the same way: live, wriggling, electric—illuminating the tanks of its stories with a dangerous lightning.

More than anything else, this is a book about language, about its powers and limits, about the pain of being separated from it and the consolation it can provide. For Luyao, the temporary pain in her head is eclipsed by the ongoing pain of losing her ability to speak. She wakes up in the hospital unable to say any word but 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." Her response, which she can't express, is rage—rage at losing her hard-won facility with English, at losing her ability to speak to her daughter, but also at her husband and father whose plans have pushed toward this silent life in the United States. She is lucky, the doctors tell her, that she can move all her limbs, as if language is a less vital limb than her others.

Yun, in the story "Crazy English" is another Chinese woman living in the U.S. who understands how the limits of language can limit a person's place in the world. She's having enough trouble studying arcane GRE vocabulary before a stalker attaches himself to her and disrupts her sense of safety. Though she's already unsettled by him, she doesn't feel she can refuse when he asks if he can sit next to her at a library desk. "If it was an American woman," her unsupportive white husband tells her, "she would just say no to the guy, say I'm not interested." Yun wishes it was so easy, longing for her early days of language learning at the "Crazy English center," where crowds shouted English words together to push past the hesitancy of trying to pronounce foreign words. When she takes her husband's advice, though, and confronts the stalker in public, the man isn't cowed, and the crowd does not come to her aid. The meaning of her accusations is clear, but, because her delivery is short of native fluency, her words do not carry power. Much like "Stars," "Crazy English" conveys how the power of language is not the same for everyone. It can be diluted. It can be lost.

The collection's title story goes on to show how language can be used as a weapon. This is the story of Qingxin, a teacher of Chinese, suffering as a prisoner of her former students during the early years of China's Cultural Revolution. She's beaten, tortured, and taunted, made to slap the corpse of her husband, and separated from her parents. Qingxin's two private consolations are her four-year-old daughter, Ming, and her relationship to the Chinese language. The story is punctuated by her reflections on characters from oracle bone script, a precursor of modern Chinese characters, that she uses in a word game she invented for her daughter, tracing words on the girl's back as the two of them trace the words' origins. During the day, words are used against her. At night, however, she draws words for natural wonders on her daughter's back, conjuring mountain caves and springs, but with ambivalence.

Like Luyao, she reflects on the word hao: "which is supposed to mean good. But what is hao in this world, where 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."

Here, the core paradox of the collection emerges more forcefully than anywhere else: language is the only thing powerful enough to console us against the world, but the world may be damaged beyond all consolation.

The prose itself is a testament to this conflict. Ye's bursts of lyricism draw beauty into a collection full of painful and desperate situations. She writes that the death of a character's mother-in-law "looks so similar to her last year of life she finds it hard to believe that her stasis has concealed a movement, the final one, the final step into the other realm. She must have been inching toward it like an old turtle, patiently approaching without leaving any trace, without even changing her facial expression." In a linked story, that character's daughter also reflects on the matriarch's death, and how "at the burial mound, my mother found the knots that once lived inside her mother now within her." So often in the collection, this kind of beautiful, philosophical writing emerges in response to tragedy, as if the heartache is a vacuum the language is desperate to fill.

With its gorgeous, insight-laden prose, the collection leaps across oceans and generations, cities and historical epochs. While leaping across them, though, it threads them together. The suffering of a mother in revolutionary China is connected to the suffering of a mother in the contemporary United States. One story "Milk" makes these connections explicit with structurally daring jumps, moving from a man who kicks a begging child to the mother who comforts the child with her breastmilk to the blogger who photographs them to a mother a continent away who is struggling to wean her own child. That may be the collection's most formally inventive story, but the way those themes are laced through the collection bring an elegant unity to it.

Hao is capped off with a leap almost five-thousand years into the past. "Signs" offers an account of Cangjie, the legendary figure credited with inventing the Chinese system of writing by carving the first symbols into a turtle shell. As record keeper for the Yellow Emperor, he was tasked with creating a new system for recording history to replace the older, more limited system of knots tied in rope. Through dreams of his mother's face and memories of her guidance, he reaches his epiphany about the carving of symbols. Then, he embarks on journeys to experience the world and record it, an act of naming that is also an act of creation.

This is the creation of the same oracle bone script Qingxin taught as history before the Cultural Revolution, the precursor of the same hao that is the only word left to Luyao. These are the words Ye's characters hold inside them, whether or not they are able to speak and be heard. These are the words they use to meet the world. Ye's protagonists all share a nation of origin, but it's their shared language that binds them together, offering an intimacy among characters who will never meet. Language, the collection suggests, is a kind of miracle. That miracle may not be strong enough to keep the world from collapsing, but it is still powerful enough to hold you like a mother when it does.

What a brilliant collection of short stories! Beautifully written stories mainly about Chinese women and their experiences in China and USA. Centering language, migration, motherhood, this is a collection that introduce characters seeking to create their own vocabularies. There is a rare depth of emotion across these stories that remains authentic. Great debut!

A deeply cutting collection of short stories, Hao investigates the intimate intersection of language, womanhood, motherhood, and history with a focus on Chinese women. The first story definitely made the strongest impression on me; however, a few of the other stories left lingering images that have stayed with me. Ye's work strikes readers with honesty and emotion, and through this collection, simultaneously encourages readers to dig deeper into the history that inspired these stories.

I don't typically gravitate towards short story collections because I find it difficult to connect with the characters and become invested in their stories. Despite the brevity of these vignettes, the elegance and poignancy in which these stories are told drew me in immediately. This is a book that thoroughly takes advantage of the short story format. We are able to see the bigger picture represented through the few shared scenes and experience numerous narratives. The emotion that is conveyed through these stories is tremendous and heartbreaking, a tiny glimpse into an impossible situation.

The stories focus primarily on the struggles of Chinese women, from various periods in time. Chun is able to perfectly capture the essence of what Chinese people have gone through, as foreigners struggling to assimilate, as citizens navigating the convoluted Cultural Revolution, as survivors of unforgiving illnesses; highlighting their humanity and ability to persevere. She covers a vast array of experiences through these personal stories, many of which are not told in books or movies.

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.

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 throughlines 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 tied 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.

This book was outstanding and I will now be on the lookout for anything else Ye Chun writes.

This collection of 12 short stories mostly center on Chinese women and motherhood and migration and language, but spans across history and locations, from the 1877 race riots in San Francisco's Chinatown to the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan and more.

The prose was beautiful, as if each word was chosen for a specific reason, and as someone who has studied Mandarin (though with questionable success), I particularly loved the focus on language throughout the collection. Most of the stories felt almost as if they were "slice of life," just a glimpse into that particular pivotal moment of time in China or the Chinese diaspora.

The collection is short but it packs quite a punch and deals with some really heavy topics, such as racism, torture, confinement, sexual violence, and more.

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 interesting 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", "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.

Thank you, Netgalley and Catapult for the digital ARC.

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 frisson of what I consider to be the experience of reading 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”.

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.

Hao is a tremendous collection of short stories! I’m not a huge fan of short stories but I loved each of these. I will definitely be buying this collection and look forward to reading more by this author.

Ye Chun’s collection of short stories tells about Chinese women in China and the US, in the present and the past. Her work is lyrical and focused on language, it’s meaning snd origin.

What really strikes me about Ye Chun's slim story collection, Hao, is how care (in all its many forms) is so tightly interwoven in all the stories. Ye is primarily concerned about women in precarious situations--women who have been left by their husbands, women bereft of their children, women who have found themselves in America, perhaps not entirely happily or of their own volition. Her stories span both China and the United States, as well as from the 18th century to the present day. Every single story feels bracing and vital.

"Hao" is a collection interested, if not utterly obsessed, with language. Every short story in the collection is ornamented by a small pictorial drawing--a drawing in the "ornamental bone script" that is a precursor to the Chinese character it will become. In Ye's collection, words are inextricable from images, and characters constantly navigate the tension between the two: what happens in the transformation from an image to a word? What is lost? Words are undeniably powerful: misuse can lead to torture and censorship; transform a graduate student into a janitor. But drawings, and the words they become, are also what offer her characters solace. For the act of writing a character which refers directly to an image is a powerful one, an act intimately tied to Chinese history and movingly communicated in English, with our poor phonetic alphabet.

A particularly powerful image that recurs in the collection is that of a mother who writes characters onto a child's back with her finger, using it to both teach her child as well as offer a primal form of solace and communication. It is tactile, and thus the threat of the violent constantly hovers over it, as it does over every story in the collection. When does tracery become pressure, or carving? Herein lies the risk of delving deeply into language and where it comes from, of really loving language, of realizing it into written word, and it is one that Ye is always willing to take. The result is a virtuostic, often painful, but always intimately felt collection.

I'm not the most avid consumer of short stories, but "Hao" held onto me and wouldn't let go. After reading this collection, I would read anything Ye Chun wanted to write.

This collection of short stories focuses on the daily lives of Chinese women in China and the United States.

I really enjoyed reading all the stories in this collection which is rare for most short fiction. <i>Hao: Stories</i> had diverse perspectives, settings, and characters but were all tied together with a thread of connection – of Chinese womanhood. A few of the stories have really left me thinking long past when I finished. They are the perfect combination between gritty circumstances and sweeping, beautiful writing. I especially loved the relationships between mothers and daughters in this book, some of the scenes were powerful and heartbreaking.

If you’re a fan of short fiction or are interested in reading fiction set during some iconic, influential moments in Chinese and Chinese-American history, this is a great place to sample some different eras and subjects before you commit to a deep dive. I’m inspired to do some research into the events covered and how they affected women especially. I’m excited to check out other works from Ye Chun and keep an eye out for future collections.

**Thank you NetGalley for providing me with an eARC to review this upcoming title.***

<b>content warnings</b> for: racism, physical illness, torture, confinement, children in danger, self-harm/cutting,

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.