Archives par étiquette : Chun Ye

STRAW DOGS OF THE UNIVERSE de Chun Ye

The story of a Chinese father and daughter in the late 19th-century American West: the daughter as she searches for her father, the father as he seeks a new life in a difficult land.

STRAW DOGS OF THE UNIVERSE
by Chun Ye
Catapult, Fall 2023

Following a devastating famine in her village, ten-year-old Lin‘s mother reluctantly sells her to a human trafficker, who promises to bring Lin to a better life in America. Her mother gives Lin the profits of the sale as well as a photo of her absent father, Guifeng, who had travelled to Gold Mountain years ago before cutting off communication with his family back home. STRAW DOGS OF THE UNIVERSE follows Lin’s brave journey through the unforgiving landscape of the American West—a place particularly hostile to Chinese immigrants—in hopes of finding her father and reuniting her family. The novel simultaneously traces the story of Guifeng who, little known to Lin, has found his attempts to build a new place for himself destabilized by both a long-lost passion from home and the seemingly inescapable violence of this new land.
A deeply felt generational story of little-known immigrant history in the vein of Pachinko, STRAW DOGS OF THE UNIVERSE considers what makes or breaks the ties of family, and shows the strength and courage it takes to survive in a new world.

Ye Chun (first name: Chun, surname: Ye) is a former NEA Literature Fellow and a three-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize for poetry or fiction. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. Her short stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, and The Georgia Review, among other places. She has published two books of poetry: Travel Over Water and Lantern Puzzle, which won the Berkshire Prize. Her novel in Chinese,《海上的桃树》(Peach Tree in the Sea) was published by People’s Literature Publishing House in 2011. She has published three volumes of translations, including Ripened Wheat: Selected Poems of Hai Zi, shortlisted for the 2016 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award, and Long River: Poems by Yang Jian. Her translation of Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes and Undressing came out in 2019 from People’s Literature Publishing House, and her translation of Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares is forthcoming in 2020. She teaches at Providence College.

HAO de Chun Ye

An extraordinary debut collection of short stories by a three-time Pushcart Prize winner 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.

HAO
by Chun Ye
Catapult, September 2021

The haunting stories in HAO follow Chinese women in both China and America attempting to find language to navigate not only the immigrant experience but the strange continent of motherhood. Confronted with vast silences of gender and identity and trauma, these characters search for words to form fragile intimacies across alien or inhospitable landscapes. In the title story, “Hao,” a persecuted teacher attempts to survive the Cultural Revolution through a word game she plays with her daughter. In “Crazy English,” a woman who comes to America on a fiancée visa struggles with her anxiety around the English language and the looming menace of a stalker. In “A Drawer,” an illiterate teen mother in mid-20th Century wartime China tries to invent a language for herself through drawing.
By turns expansive and visceral, HAO is a tightly thematic portrait of the immigrant experience and a moving meditation on motherhood which will appeal to readers of Sour Heart and Sabrina & Corina.

Ye Chun (first name: Chun, surname: Ye) is a former NEA Literature Fellow and a three-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize for poetry or fiction. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. Her short stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, and The Georgia Review, among other places. She has published two books of poetry: Travel Over Water and Lantern Puzzle, which won the Berkshire Prize. Her novel in Chinese,《海上的桃树》(Peach Tree in the Sea) was published by People’s Literature Publishing House in 2011. She has published three volumes of translations, including Ripened Wheat: Selected Poems of Hai Zi, shortlisted for the 2016 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award, and Long River: Poems by Yang Jian. Her translation of Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes and Undressing came out in 2019 from People’s Literature Publishing House, and her translation of Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares is forthcoming in 2020. She teaches at Providence College.