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.
