By Katherine Jin

Horrified, soothed, enraged, inspired— these are just a sample of the emotions I felt while reading Ye Chun’s short story collection Hao. The twelve stories in Ye’s debut collection revolve around Chinese women in China and America discovering themselves and their place in the world, sometimes while facing tremendous persecution from outside forces. Ye’s characters, however, aren’t simple victims of their predicaments or of this or that nation-state’s regime. They resist, they dream, and they create. It is Ye’s recognition of humans’ capacity for both good and evil that makes her stories devastating and realistic. I’m grateful Ye Chun shared her stories with us, and agreed to chat with Soapberry about her stunning collection.

Katherine Jin: The title of your story collection is Hao. It’s a word which means something to Chinese speakers, but is little more than a sound to non-Chinese speakers. The meaning of hao is explained in the first story “Stars,” then a deeper exploration is offered in the title story “Hao,” where it’s revealed that the word originates from a drawing of a woman kneeling and holding a child. Could you talk about how this collection came together, and why you chose Hao as its title? 

Ye Chun: We’re living in a multilingual reality, but here in this country there still lingers a discomfort toward linguistic signs other than English. I was aware of that when I decided to write a book with Chinese signs as titles, co-titles, and with Chinese characters interspersed in the text. It was a way to meet that unease. 

In terms of the book title, I actually think of the oracle bone sign, , as the real title of the book. Hao is merely its pinyin, or romanized spelling: its function is to provide an auditory complement to the ideogram. The ideogram itself dates to the ninth century BCE, depicting a kneeling figure, a woman, holding a child. The sign holds many connotations for me. Although kneeling was the proper sitting posture for ancient Chinese, regardless of gender or status, to represent women with this one posture seems to accentuate the social immobility of women, if not their deferential position. Holding, on the other hand, suggests fortitude, resilience, and connection. For me, the sign embodies the many facets of motherhood that I wanted to look into while writing the book. 

KJ: Many stories in Hao explore the challenges of communicating and of being understood. In “Stars,” Luyao struggles to communicate with her loved ones after a stroke renders her only able to say the word “hao.” In “Milk,” city dwellers cannot empathize with a migrant mother and child begging on the streets. In “Crazy English,” a Chinese immigrant avoids verbal confrontation and carries a gun to fend off a stalker in America. The only instance of communication in Hao that seems impervious to misunderstanding or language defect is that between a mother and her baby. As a writer, poet, and translator, how do you navigate the challenge of being understood? Do you strive to be understood by all readers?

YC: That’s such a good question. I suppose writing this book was also a way for me to express those difficulties in communication. As you point out, the difficulties are not limited to immigrants struggling with language proficiency: they also exist well among people sharing the same language, and even among loved ones within the same family. I sometimes wonder if it’s ever possible to truly communicate with another through language. If we see language as an artifact, it cannot fully correspond to its referents, which makes transparent communication an illusion. But at the same time, language is what we have. As a writer and translator, I depend on language for communication, even though I also use language to convey challenges in communication—both the sense of falling short and the desire to reach toward. Meanwhile, I also try to use language skillfully and precisely so that finding the right words and forming the right sentences become an end in itself—an earnest encounter with reality. 

KJ: A central motif in Hao is a return to beginnings, especially linguistic beginnings. Every story in the collection is announced by a single Chinese character, not in its modern script, but in its original oracle bone script. The protagonist in “Hao,” branded a counterrevolutionary and reduced to such pejoratives as 牛鬼蛇神 by Red Guards who torture her, teaches her daughter the evolution of one Chinese character a day as an “amulet to save them from harm.” The final story in the collection, “Signs,” imagines Cangjie’s journey in inventing the first Chinese writing system. What makes beginnings and the lineage of language so fertile for exploration? 

YC: Different impulses converged while I was working on the book. I knew from early on that the book would be about motherhood, a subject I was compelled to explore as a new mother. Also quite early in the process, I became interested in the oracle bone script, which is the earliest known Chinese writing dated to the twelfth century BCE. Maybe because I was teaching my daughter Chinese as I wanted her to be a natural bilingual, or because I was losing some of my own Chinese as English became more and more my dominant language. I felt as if tracing my native tongue’s bloodline to its origin was a way for me to hold onto the language at its root. After all, motherhood is not separated from mother tongue, matrilineage, creation and transformation, all of which came together with this writing. Also, I simply found those early pictograms and ideograms beautiful. I enjoyed looking at them and saw their meanings expand.

KJ: The stories in Hao are mainly narrated in first and third person. “Wenchuan,” a story describing the grief of parents of children who perish under collapsing schools during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, is narrated using the collective “we.” “We dig,” narrates the chorus of parents. “For days we dig until the soldiers come. Then we carry our children’s portraits and wait.” How did you arrive at this voice to tell the story of Wenchuan victims and their families?

YC: “Wenchuan” was the hardest story to write in this collection. It took me many years and multiple drafts to arrive at the current form. Initially, I’d narrated the story in the third person, telling three individual mothers’ experiences, but that felt thin. I put the story aside several times, feeling incapable of writing about a tragedy on such a tremendous scale, but it didn’t let me go. Each time I picked it up, I was also compelled to learn more about the event and its aftermath. To convey the collective trauma and communal suffering, the plural “we” point of view began to make more sense, but even with the new voice, I couldn’t trust myself to do justice to the immensity of loss these parents were subjected to. It was not until the tenth anniversary of the earthquake that I revisited the story once again, and I recognized that what I was trying to do was not to fully express their suffering, which is not possible, but to participate in the mourning, to honor and share their loss as sincerely as I could. That, I felt I was able to do. 

I recognized that what I was trying to do was not to fully express their suffering, which is not possible, but to participate in the mourning, to honor and share their loss as sincerely as I could.

Ye Chun

KJ: In some of your stories, the characters are named and in others, they remain nameless. What does a story gain when you name the characters, and what does a story gain when you leave out the names?

YC: The choices are sometimes intuitive, sometimes planned. Some narratives seem to call for a name, while others don’t. In the cases when characters are named, I tend to choose the names for their specific meanings. For example, in the title story, “Hao,” the characters’ names are integral to the narrative. The mother’s name, Qingxin, means clear-water heart, and the daughter’s name, Ming, which is pinyin of the ideogram combining the sun and the moon, means bright. Both names convey their namers’ wishes and, in times of peril, gain talismanic powers. In other stories, while not overtly pronounced, the meanings of the names are often deliberate too. In “Sun and Moon,” for instance, the protagonist’s name, Lanlan, means blue, which in my mind is the dominant color of the story about spiritual seeking and renewal. 

With the few unnamed stories, the reasons behind my choices varied. In the case of “A Drawer,” a re-imagining of my maternal grandmother’s wartime experience, I didn’t feel like using her real name or making up a fake name. By not giving the character a name, I was not aiming at anonymity or universality, but rather, more intimacy. It was like using the first-person point of view without having to say “I.” Another example is “Anchor Baby.” It starts as a he vs. she story, but the gender divide eventually gives way to the elemental experience of she giving birth to a child and he reliving his own birth. Because there’s no pronoun confusion in their encounter, names do not seem necessary even though they’re both particular characters. 

KJ: Endings can make or break a story. One thing I love about your endings is that they don’t feel heavy-handed or theatrical. Instead, they feel both gentle and realistic in the sense that the characters don’t disappear as the prose comes to an end— they seem to live on, continuing their lives and facing their challenges somewhere out there. What is your approach to endings? At what point do you know how the story will end?

YC: I’m glad you find the endings of the stories work. I don’t really have a uniform approach to endings. Sometimes, an ending seems to come effortlessly, while other times, it takes many tries to get it right. Occasionally, an ending is pre-written, that is, I know how to end a story before I have the whole story. In general, when I end a story, I want the characters to arrive at a place they haven’t quite been before—whether it’s a moment of clarity, a sense of connection, a feeling of acceptance, or even a recognition of more difficulties lying in store for them. I also want an ending to point at a story’s aboutness. It doesn’t state what the story is about or pin it down, but gestures toward it, so that as the story closes, it also opens up. And as you put it, the characters continue their lives. They continue to learn and change as we inevitably do. 

Hao is available from Barnes & Noble, Blue Cypress Books, Bookshop, The Last Bookstore, and Loyalty Bookstore.

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Katherine Jin is a short fiction writer currently based in New York. She was longlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story prize, and has work forthcoming in The Margins by the Asian American Writer’s Workshop.