Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction

Ploughshares is pleased to present Fei Sun with the eleventh annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her story “Half Bowl of Mengpo’s Soup,” which appeared in the Winter 2021-22 Issue of Ploughshares, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph and Poetry Editor John Skoyles. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by acclaimed writer, former guest editor, longtime patron, and member of the Ploughshares advisory board Alice Hoffman, honors a short story published in the journal in the previous year.

Of the story, Hoffman writes: “From the very first sentence—‘After I died, I found myself standing on a narrow stone bridge’—the reader is transported to a world unlike any other. A fable of endless love and endless loss told in spare, elegant prose, this is a story you can’t stop reading until the very last line.”

Fei Sun was born and raised in Shanghai and first came to the US for school. She studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then pursued a PhD in the same discipline, though she left in the third year to try writing. Afterward, she earned her MFA at Northwestern University. Since then, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades (winner of the Kinder-Crump Award for Short Fiction), Mississippi Review (fiction prize winner), Five Points, and elsewhere.

What was the inspiration for “Half Bowl of Mengpo’s Soup”?

My mother disappeared when I was nine, and—although no one had any evidence—my father got blamed for her presumed death. Then his health collapsed, and he lived only another twelve years before he died of heart disease. He was the inspiration for the story.

What did you discover or grapple with while writing the story?

For years, I tried to write a mystery or crime book that could explain my mother’s disappearance, though only in fiction. But while I was constructing “Half Bowl of Mengpo’s Soup” in my head, I realized that it was my father’s grief—or guilt—which I had witnessed as a child, that had been trying to force its way out of me.

Walk us through your writing process for this project. What works for you as a writer? What do you find challenging about writing?

I constructed the story in my head for a few days, wrote the first draft in a day, then waited for half a year to revise it. It was the first time I wrote a first draft in a day, but ever since, I’ve been trying to do the same for short stories. In that way, doubt could not catch up with me and tempt me into giving up before a story had even reached its ending. I’m not usually diffident, but I still find the concern “Have I written something stupid?” to be a formidable enemy in writing.

What authors or works have had the largest impact on your writing?

I like Jorge Luis Borges (favorite story: “The Writing of the God”), Italo Calvino (favorite book: Invisible Cities), and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (“Hell Screen”). I also love Moby-Dick—such endeavors we make in life, such endings we all head toward—and a Chinese classic called Journey to the West, by Cheng’en Wu, a fantastic, one-thousand–page-long account of a legendary pilgrimage, in which one of the main characters is a monkey born out of a stone. I love these stories and books for many reasons, one being that I’ve always enjoyed reading, thinking, and writing about the entanglement between the earthly world and the world beyond; and another: these characters plod on over mountains and seas (whether they are in the real world or in their own heads), some after freedom, or home, or revenge, and some after the promised sacred scrolls of truth—but all, I think, after that tiny bit of light in their heart, the light that we cannot describe but feel all the same.

Do you have any advice for new or aspiring writers? What’s the most valuable piece of writing advice you have received?

Write what you know, even if you are writing a ghost story or a fairy tale.