The question of “Who Lost China to the Communists?” became a political flashpoint in American politics. It gave rise to the McCarthy Era and in some aspects, it still lingers in Western discourse to this day. How and why China descended into full-scale civil war is what The China Mission by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan sets out to answer.
After three years in Japan, Fred Buchanan is broke, unemployed and engaged in a telepathic turf war with a feral cat behind an Okinawa convenience store. Thus begins his metaphysical odyssey back to Tokyo and a search for meaning beyond the earthly path he's followed. Along the way, symbols and sages materialize in the form of a two-fingered jazz musician, the faded tattoo on an ex-yakuza lover, an odd brood of internet cafe refugees, and Yukie, an alluring hostess with a strange power imbued in the etched eye on her fingernail. Charging through Shinjuku's neon jungle, enveloped in a boozy, nicotine-stained haze, past and present collide as an empty orchestra croons a slow dance of people and place, memory and madness, loss and love. All the while, Fred struggles to be an agent of his destiny and not another ball bearing bouncing through the cosmic pachinko.
So, over to Gordon...
Indie Spotlight is a column by WWII historical fiction author Alexa Kang. The column regularly features hot new releases and noteworthy indie-published books, and popular authors who have found success in the new creative world of independent publishing.
The publishing world is rapidly changing with technology. More and more, authors are finding new ways to offer their stories to readers. The limitations of traditional publishing have pushed many authors to leave behind the old model and try out all the new opportunities to expand their readership and get their books into the hands of the readers.
Our column today features Jeannie Lin, a USA Today Bestselling author of Chinese historical romance and historical fantasy. She is the author of the Gunpowder Chronicles, a Chinese historical steampunk series set in the Qing Dynasty that was originally published by Penguin. Here, Jeannie tells us the fascinating tale of how she took back the rights of the Gunpowder Chronicles, which was languishing under Penguin, and re-released it independently to make it a success.
Also, the final book of the Gunpowder Chronicles series, The Rebellion Engines, was just released on June 28. Be sure to check out this exciting series with a very different historical spin.
Now, over to Jeannie . . .
Editor's note: Our poetry column returns this month with a guest post by Yulia Endang, an Indonesian poet who works in Singapore. The following is adapted from Yulia's remarks at the Singapore Literature Symposium on 9th May (organised by the NTU School of Humanities' Singapore Studies Cluster), where she spoke on a panel on translation and multilingual writing alongside Tan Dan Feng and Annaliza Bakri.
More information about the Symposium, and selected proceedings, can be found here.
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I was born and grew up in a small village in West Java, Indonesia. Our mother tongue is Sundanese. During my childhood, we only used Bahasa Indonesia (our national language) at school. For us villagers, it felt quite odd to speak Bahasa in our daily life though it was alright when we were in the class. We started to learn English at Junior High School, without even any basic English in Elementary School.
I had the impression that English was strange language because the way words were written was often not the same as the way they were spoken. I never thought that I would one day be working abroad in a country where English is being spoken. All I knew was that English was one of the new subjects I had to learn, so I could pass the exam. I hated English, I always did badly for it. It never crossed my mind that one day I would be able to write in English and even win a trophy for it in a foreign land.
When I decided to work in Singapore in 2006, one of the things that worried me was language. At that time, the Singapore government still required an English Test for all migrant workers to obtain a Work Permit. I passed the exam on my first try, but the first few years here weren’t easy.
I still remember vividly that at the employment agency, one expatriate family refused to even look at the Indonesian workers' biodata, nor did they want to give it a try by interviewing us. They just insisted that they wanted a domestic helper with good English. Our grasp of English was often being compared to that of people from our neighbouring country.
It was like living a new life in a new place for me when I came to Singapore, communicating and adapting with people with different cultures, food, and beliefs etc. I learned how to learn things, in order to survive living and working here.
IN A FOREIGN LANDUnfolding days like a mapIn an unknown countryI could see more colors to be pickedTo paint my canvas of dreamsYet, I feel hopelessLonely,Shedding my tears in a placeSo called ’bedroom’Miles away,How could I give up?How could I return empty-handed?Even though day has become longerBurden on my shoulder is getting heavierBut, I shouldn't give upLike I have no choice but to keep on goingMastering the map and find my roadI know, dreams seem fading sometimesEndless obstacles waving from every cornerAgain, I'm being a strangerA stranger to unexpected realitySpend my night battling the languageWhile is a must to conquer recipesIn the midst of understanding my fellow's storyI trapped again and againIn the endless road in a foreign country
BURDEN OF THE LANGUAGEAll the letters, the words, the sentencesJostling in distressFear written all over her faceDemanding by the testShe felt tension in her chestAbout dreams that she chasesWith all hopes swirling in herShe sat in a cornerFeeling heavy burden on her shoulderTried to figure-out the futureThat seems to be a little bit cruelHer past has brought her here in an unknown countryThought she could dodge from calamity and insanityLittle did she know that she will be welcomed by catastropheWhile she has no idea what’s gonna beAll the letters, the words, the sentencesDid you know the difficultyTo embrace new vocabularyIn our memory which is troubled by unclarityAnd yes, I found smile on some faces in different placesBroadly welcoming new guestsLeft me with questions in my headas I didn’t hear any syllable being stressedBut why, why you’re late to compareAnd end up with being unfairAnd you keep on delay until all the letters,the words and sentences perishThen the rule you demolishBut you forgot to unleashThe burden of the language
It has always struck me that the sign of a good translation is that it should read as if doing it was easy. Of course, I know that is an illusion. All the same, I was impressed not only by Francesca's beautiful prose but also by her description of the sheer hard graft and hard thinking that went into it.
NH: Can you tell me a bit about how you got into translation from Chinese?
FJ: I studied Chinese at SOAS and moved to Beijing about a year after graduation. While at uni I had developed an interest in Chinese contemporary art, which was just starting to really catch the world’s attention at that time. Once in Beijing it wasn't long before I found a job at Chinese-art.com, a website that aimed to be a window into the Chinese art world for English speakers. So I honed my translation skills on a lot of art criticism, curators’ essays, and artists writing about their own work. Plenty of art-specific vocab to get familiar with of course, but the socially engaged nature of contemporary art meant that these texts were a great way to delve into all kinds of topics – the changing city, the loss of history and tradition to modernity, the new possibilities brought by technology, the disorienting shift in visual culture from political propaganda to consumer advertising, cultural trends and taboos and so on. Contemporary artists don’t shy away from exploring the difficulties of changing roles and relationships, whether we’re talking about painting and photography, state and individual, or rural and urban China.
For a translator then, it’s a pretty interesting field
to specialise in, the main challenges being writers who are overly dry and
academic, and those who write ‘art bollocks’. The latter put you in the same
quandary as those poor interpreters and translators who had to tackle Donald
Trump’s speeches, that quandary being: do I, or do I not, translate twaddle as
twaddle? Will the audience realise the original is gibberish, or will they
assume it’s a poor translation? Fortunately there were relatively few purveyors
of art bollocks (back then at least) in the Chinese art scene, compared to
their western counterparts.
NH: Before you translated the competition piece, did you know anything about Japanese Taiwan? Did anything surprise you?
FJ: I had only
a basic knowledge of Taiwan’s period under Japanese rule before starting this
translation so it was a great opportunity to learn some more of that history – I
possibly spent as much time reading the interesting articles that turned up during
research as I did translating. I was aware of the cultural and linguistic
Japanization of Taiwan imposed under colonial rule, and the Japanese names in
the extract were the first clue that the story was set during that period; then
of course later in the extract dates are given and Hatsuko’s parents’
emigration from Japan to ‘this island’ (as Taiwan is generally referred to in
the novella, while Japan is ‘the mainland’) is explained. The novella is
peppered with Japanese loanwords, some quite specific to this cultural and
historical context, effectively conveying the effect of Japanization on
Taiwan’s language. With standard Chinese-English dictionaries drawing a blank
on these unfamiliar terms, I often turned to a Japanese dictionary instead. So I
felt it was important for the translation to reflect as much as possible the
Japanese language environment the characters inhabited, in the personal names and
styles of address and especially place names (Tanabe
Bookstore, Nishiki-chō
etc.) as these are all real places that existed in 1930s Taichung.
I guess the novella is basically a coming-of-age
story, full of hope and loss and disillusionment as those often are. Hatsuko
longs for a life less ordinary, regarding university, work, independence and
travel as vastly more attractive than marriage. Her sense of social inferiority
(though she is attending an elite high school, her family are not well off)
prevents her from believing that such things are achievable for herself, so she
displaces that longing onto her wealthier and more glamorous classmates,
pinning her hopes on them escaping
the traditional restrictions placed on women’s lives by family and society.
Discovering that the two classmates she admires most (one of whom, Yang
Hsueh-ni, is ambitious and confident with strong feminist ideas) have an
intimate but secret friendship, Hatsuko begins to obsessively snoop on their
meetings in the library – and self-disgust at her furtive behaviour compounding
her feelings of inferiority. Too shy to ever talk to her classmates in person,
Hatsuko feels a deep sense of loss after graduation, one that makes her
physically ill, knowing she may never see the two ‘brilliant friends’ again or
know how their lives turn out. When she suddenly discovers that even Yang
Hsueh-ni, the most ambitious girl in their school, is prevented from following
her aspirations by family circumstances, Hatsuko’s sense of loss turns to
painful despair.
Introverted Hatsuko has no special friend to confide in
– the extract describes her longing for the unaffordable magazine ‘Girl’s
Companion’, but we can infer, from the way she buries herself in the novels of Yoshiya Nobuko, that what Hatsuko really longs for is the
kind of intimate, affectionate friendship she witnesses her classmates sharing.
Yoshiya Nobuko was one of the earliest writers of yuri (baihe in Mandarin)
– ‘lily’ or ‘girls’ love’ – fiction, the genre that Yang Shuang-zi also
considers herself to be working in. This novella though, is more of a tribute
to Yang Ch’ien-ho, made clear by the author borrowing the title (and premise)
of Yang’s 1942 novel The Season When
Flowers Bloom. Yang Ch’ien-ho, like the character Yang Hsueh-Ni, was a native
Taiwanese born under Japanese rule, and a fascinating figure who broke through
social barriers of both sex and (colonial) class, becoming Taiwan’s first female
journalist at the age of 19, and even
demanding to be paid the same as her Japanese colleagues.
NH: Your translation reads effortlessly. Was it effortless? What were the challenges in translating it?
FJ: The translation of character’s names provided some of the trickiest challenges. First there were some simpler decisions to be made such as whether to write Japanese names family name first, or in the Anglicised format with family name last. Reading on in the text, the character Sakiko mentions that because her full name is Matsugasaki Sakiko she was nicknamed ‘Saki-Saki’, the sense of which would be lost if her name was given family name last. So, preserving the Japanese/Chinese order was the obvious choice and luckily would have been my preference anyway. Further on in the text again, the author herself indicates (by including romanized Japanese in the text) that the Chinese form of address tóngxué (classmate or fellow student) is being used as a stand-in for the Japanese honorific suffix –san, so that’s another decision effectively made for the translator. As for the Chinese personal names and other proper nouns, these I gave in Wade-Giles rather than pinyin romanization because pinyin, not developed until the 1950s, would have felt anachronistic, not to mention geographically inappropriate as pinyin still isn’t used much in Taiwan.
The trickier parts had to do with the meanings of names. In two instances the most accurate translations would read awkwardly or seem nonsensical to English reader. Firstly the sentence “Her given name, Hsueh-Ni, meaning ‘snowy earth’, was an allusion to a classical Chinese poem – a very elegant and poetic name.” The more literal translation of Hsueh-Ni is ‘slush’ or ‘snowy mud’, neither of which sounds remotely elegant or poetic, particularly with the connotations of that English idiom about somebody’s ‘name being mud’. The poem referred to, one that describes the ephemerality and arbitrariness of both human lives and the traces they leave, is Su Dongpo aka Su Shi’s He Ziyou mianchi huaijiu so for inspiration I turned to this excellent article that compiles a host of English translations. . Eventually I settled on ‘snowy earth’ as being close enough to the text but conjuring a more pristine image, one of new-fallen snow lying lightly on the dark earth (before they combine into muddy slush).
Secondly there was a sentence that could have been translated as ‘their only son was named Ryuichi after his father’, but as we know the father’s name is Takao this sounds wrong in English, as we expect people ‘named after’ someone to have basically the same name. The problem here is that Japanese kanji can have different pronunciations in different combinations. In the Japanese/Chinese text it is clear that the names Takao 隆夫 and Ryuichi 隆一 share a particular kanji, so I ended up translating in a way that just described that: ‘The name of their only son, Ryuichi, shared a kanji meaning ‘prosperity’ with his father’s.’ For that paragraph it felt necessary to give the four children’s names in romanized Japanese (as would be conventional in English) and also translate the name meanings, which would be opaque to English readers otherwise. Knowing the meanings of the names gives the reader important information about the Yamaguchi family’s culture and values; in this case that they tend to choose the most obvious and unimaginative names for their offspring (certainly in Hatsuko’s view!). This was probably the paragraph I fiddled around with longest as it was quite challenging to slot in the extra info (I slipped a little ‘1920’ in there too, so that readers didn’t have to take a break to google which year ‘ninth year of the Taishō Emperor’ corresponds to) without weighing down the text too much or making it read choppily.
Of course the translation wasn’t effortless – if only! – but it’s gratifying to be told that all the struggling and polishing and ‘hmm, maybe if I do it this way…? Nah, it was better the way it was’ is invisible in the finished product. Every literary piece poses unique challenges: as well as aiming for accuracy, there are voices that the translator must do her best to recreate and sustain – the voice of the author, and the voices the author creates for her characters. There was only a tiny bit of dialogue (or interior monologue) in the extract, still I made a point of reminding myself that teenagers in 1930s Taiwan wouldn’t talk like 2020s British teenagers, or 1980s American teenagers etc. Overall, I tried to be as historically accurate as I felt the author would want me to be – and I know from reading around that Yang Shuang-zi and her sister spent a lot of time researching 1930s Taichung in preparation for writing this novella – and to capture the youthful melancholy of the piece, the fight between romance and realism that pervades it.
The Girl Who Played Go is a historical novel by Chinese author Shan Sa, originally published in French, translated into English. With that many international filters, it is surprising how well it evokes the Chinese mindset, but also, the Japanese side as well.
Editor's note: Our poetry column takes a break this month! Still an history undergraduate at heart, I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity to review this new border-crossing book on the anti-imperialist heroes of Underground Asia (just published by Harvard University Press and Penguin UK).
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| (Photo by Theophilus Kwek) |
Underground Asia examines a period “when local nationalisms were still nascent, and when the political future of the colonial world seemed uniquely open”. Out of the ferment of commerce and conquest arose individuals who, coming of age in “a world connected and transformed”, minted new allegiances around a dream of a more equal and borderless world. They made their home in what Harper calls the “village abroad”, an international network of cosmopolitan solidarities in universities, port cities, and metropolitan nodes where Thanh and his circle crossed paths with such like-minded figures as Tan Malaka, M.N. Roy, and the young Deng Xiaoping. Though the life-histories of these men form the book’s core, Harper is quick to acknowledge the “ubiquity and tenacity” of the era’s women revolutionaries, who despite their “relative invisibility” in surviving colonial records, are at critical moments the true movers and shakers of his narrative. He also pays compelling tribute to the invisible hands of global revolution, such as the dock workers and cabin boys who helped ‘Seaman Ba’ leave home in 1911 and facilitated ‘Ly Thuy’s’ return via Hong Kong almost two decades later.
We now know, of course, that though these revolutionaries would each shape the post-colonial world in indelible ways, the moment of cosmopolitan dreaming was eventually lost – to the violence of imperial policing, to the anxious diktat of an ascendant Comintern, and to a new generation of rebels who held, by conviction or compromise, to the “dismal nationalisms” of later mass movements. By the end of the period the revolution had faded to a “waiting game”, and it is testament to Harper’s humane and meticulous treatment of this cast of fallible characters that we experience so keenly the pangs of their disenchantment. Most tragic among the disappointments is Tan Malaka’s final imprisonment and summary execution at the hands of an Indonesian republic he had prophesised years earlier; other strands of the tale, like Zhou Enlai’s and Deng Xiaoping’s, lay a trail for the world-historical events to come. Meanwhile, Harper excels in capturing the fusion of geography, ideology and youthful élan that led the revolutionaries to formulate the enduring ideals of their time (and ours); or how indeed, in his memorable words, “the universal revealed itself to [them] in a continuum of port cities”.
Harper’s sympathetic and highly sophisticated storytelling allows us to trace the contingent turns of this intellectual history through what can appear, otherwise, as an overwhelming – and motley – mass of historical detail. If the number of letters read by the French postal censor in a given fortnight in 1920, for instance, might seem too fine-grained a footnote for the grand narrative of global revolution, we ought to remember that every wrinkle of colonial policy factored into the daily calculations of a community in exile whose many aliases and alibis are only just coming to light. On occasion, however, and particularly in the first half of the book, Harper’s efforts to join the dots of this “connected wave of revolution” risk pre-empting the story somewhat. In his telling, a global web of radical connections, at least in the sense of a self-consciously cosmopolitan network that, even if not formally coordinated, shared similar values and a common vocabulary, only became more apparent as the revolutionaries converged in Europe and Russia after World War I. Prior to this, the sporadic flashpoints of rebellion (among others: bomb attacks in India, shootings in Hong Kong) certainly augured a gathering wave of discontent, but given how admittedly “fragile” the connections were, it is debatable if they arose collectively “out of the resources of the country of the lost” as Harper suggests.
It’s hard not to reflect on the revolutionary lives so vividly recorded in Underground Asia without imagining how they would map onto our own. A century on, rail and shipping routes no longer hold the same novelty as they did for Harper’s protagonists, but new conveniences – afforded by the global commons of the internet and, at least before COVID-19, the commodification of budget travel – have enabled a new kind of the “everyday internationalism” they once experienced. So, too, it might seem that our interconnections are once again putting global solidarities within reach: especially when today’s spectres of xenophobia, inequality and climate change denialism are no more territorially-bound than colonialism ever was. Harper’s analysis of the forces that thwarted the dreams of earlier cosmopolitans should give us pause, or at least help us identify and resist the dismal nationalisms of this era. In the same vein, Harper’s project of fleshing out these “lonely” figures on the margins of a changing continent should not grieve us for possibilities lost, but attune us to those still to be won. The important work of recovering these “small voices of history”, as fellow historian Khairudin Aljunied puts it, reconnects us with the “ideas and visions […] that were shunned and unaccepted in their day and age, but have become the framework for thought and action in our time”.