荒·苏 is a literary collection by Alicia Cao that inhabits the space between two Chinese characters: 荒 (huāng) — desolation, the wilderness, what has been left untended — and 苏 (sū) — revival, awakening, the return of breath and consciousness.
The work does not narrate a single story but accumulates a landscape: essays, lyric prose, fragments and images that circle around questions of what it means to survive emptiness, to find form in the formless, to begin again when beginning seems impossible.
Written in Chinese and reaching toward English, the collection explores how language itself negotiates between desolation and revival — how words fail and how, despite that failure, something essential continues to be said.
A meditation on endurance, solitude, and the particular quality of attention that only quiet can produce, 荒·苏 is among the most personally resonant of Alicia Cao's works — and among the most precisely crafted.
荒，是一切开始之前的旷野。
苏，是那之后，依然选择醒来。
而这之间的距离，就是我所有的写作。