Review by Booklist Review
Bilingual Chinese American writer, poet, and translator Ye showcases her linguistic prowess in a prodigious debut collection featuring women on both sides of the globe, many defined and confined by and reliant on motherhood. The titular "hao" recurs, meaning "Good, yes, okay. The most common word in Chinese"; its character is comprised of "a kneeling person with breasts, a woman . . . holding a child." That iconic mother-and-child scene reveals multiple layers here. In the story "Hao," a mother struggles to stay alive for her four-year-old during the vicious Cultural Revolution. They play their nightly "word game," during which the mother traces characters on her daughter's back, literally inscribing her with precious knowledge. Repeatedly beaten down, she becomes the kneeling woman, wrapped around her child; to live another day to hold her is hao. In "Stars," a stroke silences a doctoral student (and mother) except for a single word, again "hao." In "Milk," the image of a homeless woman desperately nursing her child haunts a mother trying to wean her toddler on the other side of the world. Two exemplary multigenerational stories are linked by an illiterate, silenced mother and grandmother who draws to express herself. The long-ago invention of pictographic language drives "Signs," featuring the Yellow Emperor's four-eyed record-keeper, Cangjie. Each of Ye's dozen stories astounds.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Chun's tender and skillful debut collection explores the power and shortcomings of language for a series of Chinese women in the U.S. and China over the past three centuries. In the gripping opener, "Stars," Luyao is doing graduate studies in the U.S. when she suffers a stroke and loses the ability to speak. Her speech therapist gives her exercises in English, which reminds her of when she learned the language as a child in China, though she craves the ability to speak Chinese again. In the title story, set during the Cultural Revolution, Qingxin plays a "word game" with her four-year-old daughter, Ming, tracing Chinese words on Ming's back for her to guess their meaning. "Milk" depicts a young man selling roses in an unnamed Chinese city while posting commentary on his blog about anachronisms on the streets of his purported "world class metropolis." "Gold Mountain" features an abstract but vivid portrait of 1877 anti-Chinese riots in San Francisco, as a woman takes shelter above a store and tries to decipher overheard English speech. While some stories feel like exercises, serving mainly to provide connective tissue for the overarching theme, Chun consistently reveals via bold and spare prose how characters grasp onto language as a means of belonging. Not every entry is a winner, but the best of the bunch show a great deal of promise. Agent: Caroline Eisenmann, Frances Goldin Literary Agency. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A ribbon of frustration unfurls through this collection of 12 short stories that chronicle the efforts of Chinese and Chinese American women seeking to speak the truth about their lives. The experiences of Ye's heroines--and one hero of legend, Cangjie--run from the court of the Yellow Emperor to the era of internet dating, but an inability to communicate marks all the tales. In the first story, "Stars," Luyao, a graduate student in economics who's also a wife and mother, is rendered mute by a stroke; though she's bilingual, she struggles to regain language, any language, beyond the only phrase she can utter: "hao." (Hao, the most common word in Chinese, can be translated as good and is symbolized traditionally by a kneeling woman holding a child.) In the title story, Qingxin, another young mother, tortured during the Cultural Revolution, literally eats some of her words to avoid further persecution while attempting to create the semblance of normalcy for her child by playing a calming word game. Yun, an internet bride in "Crazy English," wrestles with ways to deter a stalker she first noticed at the library, balancing the unspoken against the spoken. Ancestral experiences echo throughout the dozen stories as Ye's protagonists battle cyclical repressions and common losses: Feet are bound, children are lost, and husbands are absent, heedless, or worse. The need to understand and communicate these miseries drives Ye's women to speak in any way they can. An opposite need, that of a mother to comfort a child, propels as well. Two of the stories, "Hao" and "Milk," were awarded Pushcart Prizes, but all of these sensitive tales amplify voices that have often been silenced. These battles are fought with pens, stick figures, tender drawings on a child's back; silent screams are in the background. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
