Translators, Writers and Race

Elaine Hsieh Chou’s wonderful debut novel Disorientation

1.

In 2015, a white poet who had struggled to get published, took on a Chinese female-sounding pen name and was then published repeatedly before finally achieving entry into the Best American Poetry Series Anthology for that year. The white poet’s use of a Chinese pen-name was talked about and talked about—and yes, it is still being talked about today—becoming the seed story for Elaine Hsieh Chou’s incredibly readable debut novel Disorientation.

Not unlike RF Kuang’s Yellowface and Percival Everett’s Erasure, Disorientation revolves around authorial deception in publishing and the pigeonholing of writers by publishers. In both Yellowface and Erasure, artists of color are pressured into producing work that meets the preconceived notions of their ethnic experience by the publishing gatekeepers. In Yellowface the deception is twofold. The first deception involves a Chinese-American artist being pigeon-holed by her agent into only writing books about the Chinese experience, despite the author being unable to read or write in Chinese nor having much experience in China; while the second fraud involves the theft of the Chinese-American artist’s identity by a white friend.

Disorientation revolves around similar issues of identity and publishing—but this time the story focuses on academia. Imagine a “Chinese-American Robert Frost.” A poet who peddles in Chinese tropes of the kind reminiscent of what is skewered in Sally Mao’s poetry collection. His poems are filled with shining blue-and-white porcelain, concubines and flying cranes. The images are known by all American school children. Dissertations are written. Even in death, the much loved-poet is publicly mourned.

But wait? What if the whole thing was a big joke?

What if this much loved Chinese-American poet is nothing of the sort. Yep, we are talking about black wigs, thick glasses, and strange clothing choices….

2.

Hsieh Chou’s novel got a lot of reviews last year, including it being selected as a Malala book club pick—and I would like to chime in: it is a really fun and extremely thought-provoking read.

The author tackles a lot of subjects in the novel, but I’d like to talk about a minor character: the Chinese-American protagonist Ingrid’s white boyfriend.

Stephen is a Japanese language translator. Completely self-taught, he has never been to Japan and cannot speak the language. But he loves Japanese anime and sushi. The book he chooses as his first translation is a memoir of a former mizushobai worker who has had a very rough, but scintillating life. The translation of Pink Salon takes off, and the beautiful young author becomes the next “it” girl —with Stephen being the much-applauded translator.

But since he can’t actually speak Japanese, he needs an interpreter to talk to his author. It sounds impossible, right? Though, when I worked in the Silk Road archives at Toyo Bunko in Tokyo, I learned a lot about the old school 19th century translators of Sanskrit and ancient Chinese…. they were scholars who mastered a reading knowledge of languages they really couldn’t speak, many of the scholars, adventurers and rogues could read a multitude of the languages used along the silk road.

I always liked imagining them, sitting at their wooden desks surrounded by thick and dusty dictionaries, slowly making their way through the text; stopping at every unknown character, sometimes needing to count the radicals first to figure out the character. The going was slow and there was no one to ask so they would need to consult several dictionaries along the way.

Fast forward to today—Stephen could probably go far using online sources and by constraining the learning curve to reading alone. But to translate an entire book set in the language of a country in which he has never visited? Well, I guess there are online movies and videos for him to get an idea of place and culture. And the great novelist of the Silk Road Yasushi Inoue famously never traveled to western China either—because, he said, he wanted his imagination to remain untouched by the current reality.

So, I was okay with the idea of the Japanese translator who could not speak the language and thought it was funny.

3.

Ingrid, though, who is struggling to finish her dissertation on the fake Chinese-American poet I described above becomes more and more annoyed at Stephen for first, saying he is a translator when he needs an interpreter to communicate with his author but second, she also takes issue with his history of only dating Asian women—and anyway, why Japanese? Why couldn’t he study about Chinese culture?

Ingrid for her part, always refers to herself as Taiwanese, though people are quick to point out that she really does look Han Chinese…

It gets complicated—but that is what is interesting.

In discussing the Stephen character in a short review about the novel in Electric Literature, Arielle Burgdorf says this:

When Ingrid starts asking questions about the prevalence of white translators in the Asian literary world, the reader is right there with her. As Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda put it in her essay, The Geopolitics of Japanese Literary Translation: “I am not saying the solution is for all white people to stop translating Japanese. But I am asking why it is that only white people are translating Japanese, still, today, and whether there are historical and structural reasons for that.

I have been totally unable to track down this essay by Hofman-Kuroda—but it is true that the vast majority of literary translators of Japanese I know are white. But unlike Stephen, they have devoted their lives to the study of Japan— many having families and very close friendships and deep connections. When Stephen pushes back, Ingrid says this:

 Well, Stephen dear, your job is like being the—the gateway for non-Japanese people to access Japanese culture. Have you ever considered you’re taking away opportunities from Japanese American translators? Or Japanese translators? Who have an emotional connection to the text?” By the look on his face, her words had struck a sore spot. “Well, isn’t that just a fact? Are you going to tell me you’re Japanese now?” “Please don’t belittle me, Ingrid, I know I’m not Japanese. What point are you making?” She kept her smile rigid. “So—so my point is you can’t help but exoticize Japan even if you learn to speak Japanese or live in Japan. Or marry a Japanese woman. Or—or have half-Japanese kids! Because you’re looking at it from the outside in. And you always will be. Even the presumption you can act as some kind of invisible, neutral filter into the Japanese language is—is laughable!” 

Is this really true? If Stephen married a Japanese woman and spent multiple decades there embedded within her Japanese family as son-in-law and father of the grandparents, if he worked and raised his children as Japanese, if he was fluent in the language—reading and writing, would he, in fact, necessarily always be an outsider? Speaking personally, by my second decade, I felt an insider within our family and community. I really felt accepted. And in contrast, I am struggling much more to adjust to life back in California where I was born and raised, but left at 21.

I am not sure I fit in here. And what of my son?

I always hoped he would be allowed to self-identify in a way that was comfortable for him. Maybe it took moving to Hawaii, where people are such a beautiful blend of cultures and ethnicities, for him to finally feel the question, “what are you?” was a positive thing to ask.

I can’t really say since I am the Stephen of this story, I guess… but one thing really struck me about the conversation: the part about “taking opportunities away.” This is certainly not true for literary translation, which it must be said is poorly paid and not an easy thing to do, especially if you don’t even get your name on the cover of the books you slave to produce—But that said, I do think it informs a lot about the entire discussion. Precariousness and scarcity due to unsustainable levels of economic inequality at least in the US are what I am hearing.

Now that Ingrid—and everyone else—knows the famous Chinese-American poet is a fraud, what will she do about her dissertation? She feels she doesn’t have a lot of choices left.