one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care
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“Reading one long listening is like walking through a rainbow of light and tears: luminous, transparent, mysterious, and moving.”
Catherine Chung, Author of The Tenth Muse
“[A] gorgeous, deeply sensory, and multilingual memoir of life and loss… The work is a playful and solemn experiment in form, yet Han’s sincerity and searching spirit remain totally vulnerable and genuine.”
Lion’s Roar
For readers of The Wild Edge of Sorrow and Crying in H-Mart—a profound and searching memoir of life, loss, grief, and renewal from one of American Buddhism’s most vital new voices.
How do we grieve our losses? How can we care for our spirits? one long listening offers enduring companionship to all who ask these searing, timeless questions.
Immigrant daughter, novice chaplain, bereaved friend: author Chenxing Han (Be the Refuge) takes us on a pilgrimage through the wilds of grief and laughter, pain and impermanence, reconnecting us to both the heartache and inexplicable brightness of being human.
Selected Praise for one long listening
“Written with the delicate ellipsis of Chinese poetry and a novelist’s eye for telling detail, Chenxing Han’s one long listening is an engaging collage of unforgettable vignettes that meander through her years of hospital chaplaincy, Buddhist studies, world travel, and the heartbreaking loss of her young best friend. Born in Shanghai, raised in America, Han offers honest and poignant stories about cultural displacement—a great challenge of our time—that will charm and unsettle you.”
Norman Fischer
Zen priest, poet, and author of When You Greet Me I Bow
“one long listening is a beautifully written, thoughtful, and thoroughly honest journey through loneliness, grief, and fulfillment. It is a book that resonates deeply, both emotionally and on a literary level, as a sentence- by- sentence pleasure whose distinctive structure distills each chapter down to a powerful essence.”
Jay Caspian Kang
New Yorker staff writer and author of The Loneliest Americans
“We need more books like this: a tender and patient act of care.”
Simon Han
Author of Nights When Nothing Happened
“In a world living in a sea of grief, this expression from our dear sister in spirit is a blessed gift for the heart and mind of all. Please benefit from this beautiful healing balm.”
Dr. Peggy Rowe Ward and Dr. Larry Ward
Coauthors of Love’s Garden
“Han’s writing, like her presence, is a radiant stream of wakeful, loving life. She plays with multiple layers of language, translation, legibility, and karmic force as she listens to the poetry, calamity, comedy, and mystery of life unfolding. The dreamlike vignettes of her own and others’ moments of despair and delight, sickness and stability, flow like a vast river, with no beginning, no end, now terribly agitated, now exquisitely calm. Reader: Exhale deeply, empty yourself to listen to Han listening. Watch how bodily and psychic pains could turn into smiles in this magic river of long, long listening.”
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Translator of Chronicles of a Village
