A debut collection of short stories following Chinese women in both China and the United States who turn to signs and languages as they cross the alien landscapes of migration and motherhood.
... stunning ... It's a powerful collection that explores what happens when lives break down, when it becomes hard to find a word—any word—to express profound loss and anguish ... There's not a story in Hao that's anything less than gorgeous. Ye, who's also a literary translator, has an uncanny ability to explore the vocabularies that we build around ourselves, the ways that we communicate, and what happens when those break down. It's a beautiful collection that looks at people who have nothing but their words—until they don't.
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 ... 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.
... beautiful, poetic ideograms accompany each story ... 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 ... 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 ... Each of the stories in Hao creates, even in the most unfathomable situations, 'a small clearing'—for love, for self, for connection.
