Meditating on the power — the necessity? — of restraint when attempting to hold enormous emotion (and clearly offering a clue to her own poetics), Emily Dickinson wrote, “Why Floods be served to Us – in Bowls – / I speculate no more – .” The fiction writer Hortense Calisher called the short story “an apocalypse served in a very small cup.” Lapidary, understated, unflinching and intimate, the pieces in Ye Chun’s debut short story collection Hao offer at the same time a prismatic, expansive, historical vision of the complex, often dire circumstances of a host of Chinese female characters across time and place.
Ye is a gifted visual artist and author of two stunning, lyric poetry collections, a novel in Chinese, and three volumes of translations. In this foray into a new genre, many of Ye’s poetic “flood subjects” are evident — the vulnerability of childhood, the relationship between word and world, the crucial bond between visual grammar and language, the way place shapes self. The new book deepens especially into the terrain of mothers and their offspring, and into the challenges of protecting and nurturing children in circumstances imperiled by abandonment, racism, poverty and violence. An academic transplanted to an American university suffers a blinding stroke that leaves her unable to utter anything but “hao,” meaning good, okay. A “second wife” shipped from China to San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1870s is kept house-bound and pregnant by her husband in a small apartment until, in the wake of the raging Riot of 1877 against Chinese immigrants, necessity forces her, knife in hand, to venture forth with her two children. A professor being “re-educated” and abused by her former students during the Cultural Revolution endures all manner of escalating indignities to keep her young daughter safe. Abandoned by her husband, another woman from the provinces is forced to become a street beggar in the city, nursing her five- or six-year-old son to keep him alive. A girl is raped. One cuts herself to relieve a legacy of girlhood pain. Yet another longs for a child and is unable to conceive. In “Signs,” a mother encourages her disabled, four-eyed son to invent a new alphabet of signs for the Yellow Emperor (2698 – 2598 B.C.), offering an account of the genesis of the Bone Oracle Script (an ancient precursor to modern Chinese characters, “the beginning of Chinese written language’s bloodline,” Ye writes in “Hao”), whose beautiful, poetic ideograms accompany each story in Hao.
These haunted and haunting stories do not tie up their tangles neatly. There is rarely “resolution” and often the stories conclude in precarity, uncertainty, and with more questions and hurt than those with which they began. However, unfolding like the triangular planes of a hand-held paper “fortune teller” game (also called “chatterboxes”), the series of stories opens and conceals and closes and reveals in a way that allows the circumstances of one protagonist to “answer” or mirror or rhyme with or deepen our understanding of the others. And binding all of the stories is the mother/child bond and its inextricable enmeshment in language, especially writing.
Calligraphy, of course, means “beautiful writing,” and this collection is full of it. Ye’s sentences are both lyrical and muscular: spare and acutely alive. And the stories abound with all manner of “script” — a face reflected in a pail of water, pictures traced by a mother’s finger on the back of her child when they lie in bed in a windowless closet, the wing-like cuts a troubled young woman makes on her own thigh. An illiterate wife and mother, abandoned by her husband, takes up drawing to alleviate her grief:
“And when she is able to do it just right, with the right amount of ink, tone, and shade, with the right strokes of energy and precision, the images will float out of the paper as if on an exhaling breath, and then she will feel a peace she seldom feels.”
In a scene from the title story, the persecuted professor accidentally writes something offensive about Chairman Mao and attempts to eat the pages on which she has transgressed before she is discovered by member of the Red Guard (“She’s shoving the last handful of paper into her mouth when the door unlocks”).
It is often through language that children also save their mothers. The stroke victim in “Stars,” Luyao, must now be read to by her young daughter, Xinxin, at bedtime. They read a book called A House Is a House for Me. As she listens to her daughter read aloud, she remembers a night before the stroke when she asks her daughter to make up similar verses. “What is a window a house for?” she asks her daughter.
“A window is a house for outside,” Xinxin said.
“Wow, that’s beautiful . . . . What is outside a house for?”
“Outside is a house for future.”
“Hmmmmm, I like it. And future?”
“Future is a house for everyone.”
“That’s really nice. What about everyone?”
“Every is a house for bones.”
Remembering this conversation, “Luyao thinks of Xinxin’s poem again: Future is a house for everyone. / Everyone is a house for bones. She repeats the lines in her mind, and the paradox seems to be making a clearing in its thickets. A small clearing, but nevertheless she feels that as long as she can squeeze in and lie down there, she’ll be all right for a while.”
Each of the stories in Hao creates, even in the most unfathomable situations, “a small clearing” — for love, for self, for connection. On the ground at night in their tiny, windowless janitorial closet, the mother in “Hao,” regularly beaten and humiliated by the Red Guard during the day, plays a word game with her daughter at night, drawing pictures on her back. “She thinks of each word as a seed, an origin, a center where meanings radiate. Then, when she draws a word on her daughter’s back, that clean slate, that virgin land, she will be able to imagine she is writing it for the first time. She is planting a seed, and together they will name it, nurture it, give it new meanings, and salvage it.”
“Stars” (and how not to hear an echo of “scars” here, scars from repeated beatings the mother endures to keep her child safe) ends with a passage that evokes a character from the Oracle Bone Script that is a leitmotif throughout the collection: a sign depicting a woman kneeling and holding a child (interestingly, this is the precursor of the modern Chinese character for hao, good):
So, in the narrow room with no light, she draws a sun and a moon on her daughter’s back. She draws a lake of clear water and a heart. And then, she draws a kneeling person with breasts.
“Why is she kneeling?” Ming asks.
“Why do you think?”
“Because she is tired?”
“Yes, she is tired,” Quingxin says, “but not too tired to hold her child.” She draws a child by the woman.
“That’s us: you holding me.”
“Yes, that’s us.” And she lets her hand rest on her daughter’s soft, unscarred back.
[Published by Catapult Books on September 7, 2021, 208 pages, $26.00 hardcover]