“Hao” by Ye Chun

Ye Chun (photo: Mira Feifei Ye-Flanagan) Ye Chun (photo: Mira Feifei Ye-Flanagan)

Ye Chun’s new collection of short stories, Hao, mainly centers on the experience of Chinese women, both in China and in the United States. Hao, or “good” in Chinese, is the somewhat ironic theme that connects many of the stories, where women have decidedly not-good situations and explore the irony of their circumstances.

In the first story, “Stars”, a recent immigrant to America who had been trying to master English sustains a stroke and develops aphasia.

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… Now she will never teach again, nor will she earn a PhD. She is now a disabled person who can speak no words. Except hao. Which is a mockery. It must have survived to tell her that she has ruined her life by saying hao when she should have said bu hao. She has compromised and strived for nothing.

Hao: Stories, Ye Chun (Catapult, September 2021)
Hao: Stories, Ye Chun (Catapult, September 2021)

Ye powerfully renders the displacement felt by recent immigrants fitfully learning the language, to further highlight the cultural divide they face, and to demonstrate that they seem to have no way but forward. In the second and title story, the woman is being tortured by her former students during the early years of the Cultural revolution, illustrating some of the reasons some might leave mainland China. Ye beautifully breaks down the characters and pictograms of the Chinese, as well as revealing the subtext under saying hao in response:

 

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? … They say hao when they are tattered inside.

 

The powerlessness felt by a more modern generation under Communist rule is demonstrated in another story that focuses on a woman whose child was killed after an earthquake; the schools in particular collapsed, possibly due to faulty construction in the rush of rapid expansion. The loss of a child is particularly harrowing under the one-child policy, and some parents don’t have the ability to have another child.

 

We come again to the county government, staggering through miles of mangled land… The officer steps over to us. Sister, he says, go home now. What’s the use of standing here in front of the government and making a scene? Do you want to make things even messier than they are? You think it’s not enough that tens of thousands of people have just died, and you have to make things even worse? Now, go home and mourn for your children there… They dump us at the police station and the commissar, a woman with red eyes, says to us: I understand your feelings. I truly do. I lost a niece in one of the schools. But the government has done so much and has so much to do still. So many people have lost their lives, their families and homes. We can’t only think of ourselves. We must think of the province as a whole, the country as a whole, and trust the government will do the right thing. Then she hands each of us a paper to sign, to promise we won’t demonstrate again.

 

Under the pressure of the economic juggernaut that is modern China, these women cling to drawing, pictographs, and language despite the economic, political, and social challenges of daily life.

Ye shifts perspectives from the desperate single mother begging for food, so that she can provide the solace of breastfeeding her near school-age child, to the more privileged woman who feels guilty seeing a beggar child and mother and is moved to share food with them, as well as taking the vantage point of women in adjacent generations of the same family, between different stories. Each one closes without resolution, but remains stirring.

Although hao may be misapplied, Ye’s characters are clear about what is wrong with the situations they find themselves in and their particular struggles, as rendered by Ye, are universal and poignant.


Kristen Yee is an American writer of Chinese and Portuguese-Jamaican descent.