Reviewed by Ethan Chatagnier

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.