The History of a Place in a Single Object, with Multiple Variations

Nicky Harman looks at translating tools, and it's more fascinating than you'd think.

It’s not often that I, as a translator, get to do research on the place where a particular author’s novels are set. In fact my recent visit, with Dylan King, to Shaanxi province to Jia Pingwa to look at where his novels Shaanxi Opera (AmazonCrossing, forthcoming) and Broken Wings (ACA, 2019) were set, was a first. We arrived with a list of questions of the ‘What does that tool do?’ and ‘What kind of a gate entrance is that?’ variety. We were primarily motivated by wanting to get the words right in translation. But it led Dylan and me into discussing the wonderful BBC/British Museum radio series, the History of the World in a Hundred Objects, and what follows is (with apologies to Neal MacGregor) a small meditation on what a particular tool can tell us about a place and how people live there.

The tool: a stone object in two parts that grinds up grain and spices, and produces soybean milk from the raw beans. There are two variations:  碾盘nian3pan2, also known as碌碡liu4zhou, consisting of a base stone and a cylindrical roller; and 石磨shi2mo4 or 磨盘 mo4pan2, made up of磨扇mo4shan1，two circular stones, one atop the other, the bedstone (下扇) which stays still，and the upper stone (上扇) which moves around. In both versions, the top part is pushed around by a human or a beast. At least that’s what used to happen.

Guest post: Jonathan Chatwin

Jonathan Chatwin writes on travel, culture and history with a particular focus on China. His first book, Anywhere Out of the World, was a literary biography of the travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin. His essays and articles have been published by the British Film Institute, the South China Morning Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Caixin, Studies in Travel Writing and the Asian Review of Books amongst others, and he now writes regularly on Chinese history and culture for a range of publications.

Jonathan's new book, Long Peace Street, intertwines travel and history to tell the story along the so-called Number One Street of China, Chang'an Jie, or the eponymous Long Peace Street, which bisects China's capital, Beijing, and which he walked from end to end.

Here, Jonathan introduces both his book and the street, and explains what inspired his walk.

Backlist books: The Nine Cloud Dream by Kim Man-jung

Backlist books is a column by Lucy Day Werts that focuses on enduring, important works from or about Asia.

This post is about The Nine Cloud Dream, also known as The Cloud Dream of the Nine, a celebrated novel written in seventeenth-century Korea but set in ninth-century China. Often compared with Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the novel follows one man on a journey to discover the meaning of life according to a mixture of Confucian, Taoist and---most importantly---Buddhist ideals. His fate is entwined with the fates of eight gifted, beautiful and otherworldly women in a kind of alternate reality. The story is thus a kind of collective dream of nine individuals.

See below to find out what you need to know to decide whether you should read The Nine Cloud Dream, or what you should know about it even if you never do!

Nicky Harman interviews Jeremy Tiang, Singaporean writer, translator and playwright

Photo credit: Edward Hill

Nicky: When you were growing up, what were the first Chinese-language stories you came across, and what drew you to them?

Jeremy: Growing up in a former British colony can be a destabilizing experience. Singapore's official languages are English, Chinese (meaning Mandarin), Malay and Tamil, and there were always several languages swirling around me ― some of which I felt I was being encouraged to know (the English in the Enid Blyton books my parents bought us, the Mandarin they sent me to a neighbour to learn) as well as others I had less access to (the Cantonese they sometimes used with each other, the Tamil my dad occasionally spoke on the phone).  I encountered Chinese stories in all kinds of ways, on TV and in my school textbooks, but often freighted with cultural baggage: there was a weight of obligation on us, as English-educated people, to hang on to our Chinese heritage. It wasn't until I got some distance from Singapore, by moving to the UK for university, that I was able to enjoy Chinese-language literature on its own terms. While I came to appreciate the grounding I had received in Singapore, particularly in secondary school, I don't think I read a Chinese novel for pleasure till I was in my twenties. Once I was able to do that, I quickly developed a taste for it. And being a writer of English and a lover of Chinese fiction, it was a logical progression to literary translation ― the best way I could think of to get right inside these books.

Focus on NIAS Press: Yuan Shikai. By Patrick Fuliang Shan

The Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS), an integrated part of the University of Copenhagen, is an academically independent Nordic research and resource centre, focusing on modern Asia from a predominantly social sciences perspective.

NIAS Press is a globally focused publisher with the rigorous academic standards expected of a university press, but with the speed and decisiveness of a commercial publisher. Its lists cover all areas of Asian Studies, but it specialises in publishing innovative research on modern east and southeast Asian society.

This week, we're exploring NIAS Press in a series of three posts. In this third and final post, one of the Press' authors, Patrick Fuliang Shan, talks about his new book, on the first regular president of China, Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal.

Dr. Patrick Fuliang Shan is a professor in the department of history at Grand Valley State University in the United States, where he teaches Chinese history, east Asian history, and world history. His earlier book, Taming China’s Wilderness: Immigration, Settlement, and the Shaping of the Heilongjiang Frontier, 1900-1931 probes the history of China’s northeastern frontier during a crucial period of historical transformation. He has published widely in journals and anthologies. He is a past president of the Chinese Historians in the United States.

Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal is the first book in more than half a century to study Yuan Shikai, his life, and his political career. It sheds new light on the controversial history of this talented administrator, valiant general, and committed moderniser - and a man who, ever since his death, has been denounced as a national thief who usurped the fruits of the 1911 Revolution which overthrew the last empire in China. The book rectifies the traditional negative view by utilizing numerous new primary sources and by citing abundant recent publications. It explains that Yuan built the first modern army and implemented a series of reforms to modernize China. More crucially, he played a key role in directing the 1911 Revolution into a less bloody national conflict. However, his fatal mistake was his imperial endeavor in establishing a new dynasty in 1916, which led to a nation-wide civil war and his own death. Overall, Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal offers a comprehensive analysis of Yuan’s life and his complex role in the shaping of modern Chinese history.

So, over to Dr. Patrick Fuliang Shan...

Eminent Historian Professor Wang Gungwu converses with Elaine Chiew on his autobiography, Home Is Not Here

Photo courtesy of NUS Press

From the book jacket:

Wang Gungwu is one of Asia’s most important public intellectuals. He is best-known for his explorations of Chinese history in the long view, and for his writings on the Chinese diaspora. With Home Is Not Here, the historian of grand themes turns to a single life history: his own.

In this volume, Wang talks about his multi-cultural upbringing and life under British rule. He was born in Surabaya, Java, but his parents’ orientation was always to China. Wang grew up in the plural, multi-ethnic town of Ipoh, Malaya (now Malaysia). He learned English in colonial schools and was taught the Confucian classics at home. After the end of WWII and the Japanese occupation, he left for the National Central University in Nanjing to study alongside some of the finest of his generation of Chinese undergraduates. The victory of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party interrupted his education, and he ends this volume with his return to Malaya. 

Wise and moving, this is a fascinating reflection on family, identity and belonging, and on the ability of the individual to find a place amid the historical currents that have shaped Asia and the world. 

China Dispatches: the best creative non-fiction available now

Paper Republic promotes Chinese literature in English translation. It highlights new writing from contemporary Chinese writers.

Along with One-Way Street Magazine(单读) and the LA Review of Books’ China Channel, Paper Republic is about to launch the second series of China Dispatches. This unique three-way collaboration focuses on translating the best non-fiction coming from China right now, and making it available online, completely free to read. Essays are first published in Chinese in One-Way Street Magazine (单读) then and presented in English by Paper Republic in collaboration with the Los Angeles Review of Books’ China Channel.

500 words from Juliet Conlin

500 words from…is an occasional series in which novelists talk about their latest novels.

Juliet Conlin’s third novel, The Lives Before Us, is published on March 28. Juliet was born in London and now lives in Berlin. Her earlier novels were The Fractured Man and The Uncommon Life of Alfred Warner in Six Days. 

The Lives Before Us is set in 1940’s Shanghai. It explores a little-known aspect of the Holocaust and the Jewish diaspora in one of Asia’s most legendary cities, and addresses the struggles surrounding forced emigration, displacement and identity, through the story of two Jewish women, Esther and Kitty.

Esther and Kitty flee Nazi Europe for the relative safety of Shanghai. But instead of finding the safe haven they had hoped for, they encounter desperate living conditions, an almost unbearable climate, shocking crime, and a fierce battle for limited resources. Then, when Japan enters the fray of the Second World War, and violence mounts, Kitty and Esther – along with thousands of other Jewish refugees – are forced into a Japanese-controlled ghetto.

So, over to Juliet...

Indie spotlight: Shanghai Dreams

Indie spotlight focusses on self-published authors and self-publishing. Alexa Kang is a Boston-based, Chinese-American author who publishes her Shanghai Story trilogy, World War 2 historical fiction, through her own house, Lakewood Press. You can read about book 1,  Shanghai Story, here.

Shanghai Dreams is the second book in the trilogy. It tells the story of Clark Yuan, the Western-educated son of a prominent Chinese family in Shanghai who became a KMT operative, and Eden Levine, a Jewish refugee from Munich who came to Shanghai with her family to seek safety and a new life away from the Hitler regime. One of the characters, John Rabe, is based on a man who existed in real life. Rabe was a Nazi who nevertheless saved many lives.

Alexa here discusses the complexities of depicting a Nazi character in a sympathetic light.

Indie spotlight: Remembering Shanghai by Claire Chao

Indie spotlight focuses on self-publishing and indie authors.

Hawaii-based, Hong-Kong-born Claire Chao is the co-author, with her mother Isabel Sun Chao, of Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels, published by the indie publisher, Plum Brook.

Remembering Shanghai follows five generations of the Chao family over two centuries, from the time of Claire's great-great-grandfather down to the present. Mother and daughter traced their family story as far back as they could. Claire's great-great-grandfather rose from poverty to become a minister to the empress dowager, and built a large portfolio comprising hundreds of properties, a bank and a shipping company.

Isabel Sun Chao, the memoir's main protagonist, grew up the third daughter among six siblings in glamorous 1930s and ’40s Shanghai - everyone’s favorite child, cosseted by servants, wet nurses, cooks, drivers, even a resident tailor.

Soon after Mao came to power in 1949, Isabel journeyed to Hong Kong. Clutching a pink suitcase packed with party dresses to wear on her spring holiday, she didn’t realize that she would never see her father, or her grandmother, again. Claire accompanied her to Shanghai nearly 60 years later to confront her family’s past, one that they would together discover to be by turns harrowing and heartwarming.

Claire here discusses why she and her mother decided to write a family memoir, and gives advice to other indie authors.

A Death in Peking. Guest post from Graeme Sheppard

The brutal murder of 19-year-old Pamela Werner in Peking one night in January 1937 shocked the world, and the police never named the murderer. The best-selling book Midnight in Peking, by Paul French, declared the perpetrator to be an American dentist, but Graeme Sheppard, a retired British policeman with 30 years’ service in the UK, with the  Metropolitan Police, decided that conclusion was flawed. After spending years investigating the case, he came up with an entirely different conclusion. So who did it? Who killed Pamela?

Over to Graeme...

On translation, by Nicky Harman

Nicky Harman, Yan Ge, Natascha Bruce

Let’s talk literary translation, or how to keep audiences riveted by swearing at them

Last week, I was at Cheltenham Literary Festival, appearing on a panel with Yan Ge and Natascha Bruce. We had carte blanche to talk about Translating China, but decided to focus on Yan Ge’s new novel, The Chilli BeanPaste Clan (Chinese: 《我们家》) because (let’s be honest) it helps sales, and because the three of us all had plenty to say about the book.

The Chilli Bean Paste Clan is set in a fictional town in West China and is the story of the Duan-Xue family, owners of the town’s lucrative chilli bean paste factory, their formidable matriarch, and her badly-behaved, middle-aged son. As the old lady’s eightieth birthday approaches, her children get together to make preparations. Tensions that have simmered for many years come to the surface, family secrets are revealed and long-time sibling rivalries flare up with renewed vigour. 

500 words from Robert F. Delaney

500 words from is an occasional series in which novelists talk about their new novels. Robert F. Delaney has just brought out The Wounded Muse.

Robert has been covering China as a journalist for media outlets including Dow Jones Newswires and Bloomberg News since 1995, and was recently appointed U.S. Bureau Chief for the South China Morning Post. In his spare time, he turned to writing about the personal struggles of those caught in the middle of China’s ongoing transformation into an economic powerhouse. Many of the themes for The Wounded Muse were first developed in his earlier collection, Route 1 to China. Robert now splits his time between New York City and Toronto.

The Wounded Muse, a novel based on actual events, follows Qiang as he returns to his homeland, China, from Silicon Valley, during the lead up to the 2008 Olympic Games. In Beijing, he finds wrecking balls are knocking down entire neighborhoods to make way for fancy modern structures. Qiang begins shooting footage of the tumult for a documentary. When he’s arrested, it falls on his sister, Diane, and an American journalist, Jake, to figure out how to end his detention. With different ideas about how to approach a vast Chinese security apparatus, Diane and Jake don’t know how to trust each other. Meanwhile, Dawei, an itinerant Jake befriended years earlier, returns to Beijing to retrieve a memento that has suddenly become valuable. Dawei finds himself ensnared in a plan to force the authorities to release Qiang.

So, over to Robert…

The Art of War becomes The Science of War. Guest post by Christopher MacDonald

Christopher MacDonald is Chinese-to-English translator and interpreter based in the UK. He spent a year in Xian, in 1985, and has since lived and worked in Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai, as a translator, interpreter, and trade and investment consultant. He has recently brought out The Science of War, which is supported by a new translation of the classic text, The Art of War.

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise attributed to the strategist Sun Tzu. It is composed of 13 chapters, each devoted to a distinct aspect of warfare and how that applies to military strategy and tactics. For more than two thousand years, strategists in China have followed its system of military teachings. This has now also influenced Western thinking, not only in the military sphere, but also in realms such as business and the law.

In The Science of War, Christopher MacDonald tells how military principles and teachings first crystallized into Sun Tzu’s treatise and how they guide China's leaders’ thinking to this day.

Here Christopher discusses why he chose to translate The Art of War, and why his own book is called The Science of War.

So, over to Christopher…

Backlist books: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Backlist books is a column by Lucy Day Werts that focuses on enduring, important works from or about Asia.

This post is about The Good Earth, the first volume in a trilogy that tells the story of a farmer named Wang Lung and his descendants in the early 1900s in China. In 1932 the novel won a Pulitzer Prize, and in 1938 the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2004, Oprah put the book back in the spotlight when she chose it for her book club.

The author was an American who spent considerable time in China both as a child and as an adult. Some insist that she was nevertheless a cultural outsider bound by stereotypes, while others feel her depiction of life in China was well informed and thus informative.

See below to find out what you need to know to decide whether you should read The Good Earth, or what you should know about it even if you never do!

Student bookshelf: influencing women's behaviour in Tang China

Aurelia Paul is a senior year student at Boston University, studying comparative literature and Chinese. In her fortnightly column Student bookshelf, she shares responses to texts she's reading in her classes.

Here she discusses literature that was used to influence women's behaviour in Tang China. Contrasting approaches, threatening and praising readers, are taken by two classics of Chinese literature.  The Book Of Filial Piety for Women by Miss Zheng, the wife of an official named Chen Miao takes a gentle, praised-based approach to influencing female conduct. Meanwhile, Song Ruozhao’s Analects for Women prefers persuasion via threatening language.

So, over to Aurelia…

Indie spotlight: Alexa Kang on Shanghai Story

Indie spotlight focusses on self-published authors and self-publishing. Here, Alexa Kang, a Boston-based, Chinese-American author of World War Two (WWII) historical fiction, discusses Shanghai Story, which publishes through her own house, Lakewood Press, on May 18.

Shanghai Story is set in 1936 Shanghai. It is the first book of a projected trilogy set to chronicle the events in China leading up to WWII, as well as the experience of Jewish refugees in Shanghai.

So, over to Alexa…

The evolution of City of Devils / guest post by Paul French

Paul French is a widely-published journalist and commentator on China. Previous books include a history of foreign correspondents in China and a biography of the legendary Shanghai adman, journalist and adventurer Carl Crow.

City of Devils is French’s much-anticipated second narrative non-fiction book, following Midnight in Peking which was a New York Times bestseller, and a BBC Radio 4 book of the week.

City of Devils is set in Shanghai, 1941, where even the wildest dreams seem possible. It is a true story of two friends turned enemies. In a city under siege Viennese Joe Farren rose to fame by cashing in on Shanghai’s desperate pleasure seeking. King of the chorus lines, his name was splashed in neon across the infamous Badlands nightclub ‘Farren’s’. American fugitive Jack Riley, his fingertips acid-burnt, found a future in Shanghai as ‘The Slots King’. ‘Dapper Joe’ and ‘Lucky Jack’ collided, clashed and came together again in a frantic struggle to survive the city’s last days. Paul French resurrects the denizens of old Shanghai’s ganglands, the drug-running, the gambling, and the graft, vividly restoring this long-overlooked side of the city’s history.

Here Paul explains how he came to focus on ‘Dapper Joe’ and ‘Lucky Jack’, in a book initially intended as a portrait of Shanghai.

500 words from Wayne Ng

500 words from is an occasional series in which novelists talk about their new novels. Wayne Ng is about to publish his debut novel Finding the Way.

Wayne was born in Canada to Chinese immigrants who fed him a steady diet of bitter melons and kung fu movies. He is an award-winning short story and travel writer who has twice backpacked through China.

Finding the Way concerns the life of Lao Tzu. In the sixth century, BCE, the legendary philosopher Lao Tzu 
seeks redemption and an opportunity to spread his beliefs
 in the Zhou royal court. He is confronted by a boastful king and a mad queen. But he also discovers a protégé in
 Prince Meng, the thoughtful but hesitant heir to the throne.
 Lao Tzu’s ideas of peace and natural order, however, leave him ill-prepared for palace intrigue and the toxic rivalry between 
Meng and his twin brother, the bold and decisive Prince Chao.
 Chao undermines Meng at every turn as he tries to usurp Meng’s birthright. Confucius arrives and allies with Chao, thus raising the stakes for control of the dynasty, culminating in a venomous clash between Taoism and Confucianism. With the king ailing and war imminent, Lao Tzu is betrayed; he must cast aside his idealism to fight for his life.

So, over to Wayne…

Student bookshelf. The DaodeJing and the Zuangzi by Aurelia Paul

Aurelia Paul is a senior year student at Boston University, studying comparative literature and Chinese. In her fortnightly column Student bookshelf she shares responses to texts she's reading in her classes.

Here she discusses Zuangzi's curiosity and Laozi's austerity in the DaodeJing and the Zuangzi, two foundational texts of Daoist philosophy.

The DaodeJing (Tao Te Ching ) is a Chinese classic text traditionally accredited to the 6th-century BCE sage Laozi. It deals with metaphysics, morals and politics.

The Zhuangzi contains stories and anecdotes exemplifying the carefree nature of the Daoist sage. It is traditionally accredited to Zuangzi, another influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE. (Zhuangzi, as on the book cover, is a variant spelling.)

So, over to Aurelia…