Bruce Humes

Director Feng Xiaogang’s gaze graces the cover of several publications this week, and indeed, the “disaster movie” genre in China may never be the same again thanks to him.  His adaptation of Zhang Ling’s Aftershock (张翎的 “余震”) is mesmerizing the nation’s moviegoers, and this tale of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake that killed over 200,000 leaves many drenched in tears.

Even Time is writing about the new film based on the fictional work by the Chinese-Canadian author. Here’s Time’s synopsis of the plot:

As if a deadly earthquake weren’t devastating enough, a Tangshan mother is forced to decide between saving her son or daughter.Both are trapped under a collapsed building, and rescuers can reach only one of them before the structure topples. She chooses the son, but, unbeknownst to her, the daughter miraculously survives. With her mother’s betrayal fresh in her ears, the little girl flees her family and is raised by a husband and wife in the People’s Liberation Army. Thirty-two years later, she travels to help victims of the earthquake in Sichuan. There she sees how another mother is forced to make a similar choice, and the experience changes her appraisal of the past.

I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, but I just read a fascinating interview in the weekly SMW (2010.7.26 南都周刊), that offers insights into how the movie script was conceived: From Cold Novel to Warm Movie (从冷小说到暖电影).

As you read my translated excerpt (below) from SMW’s interview with Su Xiaowei (苏小卫)—the screenwriter for Aftershock, pictured above—keep in mind that she also puts in two days a week at the Film Review Board, i.e., she works for the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), the body that enforces China’s censorship guidelines.

(Note: Words inside quotation marks below are quotes from Su Xiaowei cited by the author of the article, Chen Yu (陈雨)).

The excerpt:

Besides [changes to] the structure of the story, the movie also “performed major surgery” on the theme; the basic tone of the story was altered from one of darkness and pain, to one of warmth and hope [in the film]. The novelist Zhang Ling intended to convey that even after the disaster was over, the ravaged land gradually flattened and structures rebuilt, the blood from the wounds scratched open by the earthquake in the souls of children continued to ooze silently long thereafter.

The novel emphasizes the description of how the daughter, Fang Deng, undergoes a “series of post-earthquake disasters”: her adopted mother dies, she’s molested by her adopted father, her husband falls in love with another woman, her daughter leaves home, she finds herself in a hospital unit for psychological therapy, and tries to commit suicide several times.  These somber and cruel events reflect the fate assigned to the female protagonist by Zhang Ling: Having lived through an earthquake, Fang Deng’s soul is veiled in darkness, her personality has become skewed, she cannot return to her family nor can she live a normal life. The novel leaves the reader downcast and tearful.

But “the movie is much more heart-warming, and cuts parts such as the adopted father’s sexual aggression, the husband’s infidelity and the departure of her daughter,” says Su Xiaowei. “Much more of the story is devoted to describing daily life and warmhearted emotions. After the earthquake, people overcome their grief, regain a sense of calm, and get on with their lives.”

“Film is a mass medium that speaks to greater numbers of viewers, and it’s not like a book that represents a more ‘personalized’ account,” says Su Xiaowei.  “After all, a film should offer a sense of warmth and consolation.” At the outset, Su Xiaowei was told quite clearly by the director and producer that she was to write a script for a film that would warm the hearts of the audience, not a film that would hurt their feelings and leave them in despair. The film should “cure” the daughter of her hatred for her mother.

In order to create a heart-warming theme, the movie not only cut the scene in which the adopted father violates Fang Deng, it also recasts the adopted parents as People’s Liberation Army soldiers.

“All these requirements were decided after discussion with the producer,” says Su Xiaowei frankly. “We didn’t reject a melodramatic approach to the story, but everyday life can also fully express a person’s emotions. In everyday life, the great majority of fathers would not molest their adopted daughter. We chose to represent good relations between the father and adopted daughter as in a normal life. And our film is not rated—adults and children can view it—so we intentionally altered this part.” [end excerpt]

Paper-Republic interviews Gray Tan at The Grayhawk Agency, the up-and-coming agency whose stable now includes Zhang Ling (Gold Mountain Blues), Mai Jia (Decoded), Ai Mi (Hawthorn Tree Forever) and Chi Zijian (Right Bank of the Argun):

The biggest advantage of being based in Taipei is having access to the most sophisticated publishing and the widest selection of books in the Chinese world. A lot of books either banned or censored in China are available in Taiwan, and it’s very easy to buy simplified Chinese editions too. I am different from most other agents of Chinese authors in that I’m a native Chinese speaker who also has experience in handling international bestsellers. My understanding and appreciation of Chinese novels is probably very different from a non-native reader. I don’t need to rely on reader’s reports to find books; I can always read the Chinese original myself.

Just starting 波斯少年 (The Persian Boy), the newly launched Chinese translation of Mary Renault’s classic tracing the last years of Alexander’s life through the eyes of his young male lover. Amazingly, this rendition by Silvano Zheng (郑远涛) represents Renault’s first appearance in Chinese.

When I read about 海神家族 (Mazu’s Bodyguards) in Asiaweek, I had to go and get a copy.  Taiwan-born author Jade Y. Chen, who did tertiary studies in France and emigrated to Germany, will appear today (Jul 23) at the Hong Kong Book Fair. It’s her protagonist’s background (and her own, I believe) that piqued my interest: Mongolian great-grandfather,  father left mainland for Taiwan at 18, Japanese maternal grandmother. . .

I chose 就说你和他们一样 (Say You’re One of Them), a collection of short stories by Uwem Akpan, partly because so little from or about Africa appears in print in China. But the book is misrepresented on the spine where the word America (美国) in brackets precedes the name of the author who was born and raised in Nigeria, not the US. I’ve written elsewhere about the way that Chinese publishers mislead readers about the ethnicity and language of foreign authors. The first short story, about the Rwanda genocide in 1994, seems to have been so heavily edited in the Chinese that I can hardly follow what is going on. So I’ll have to get the English original and compare before I can figure out what has happened: Disjointed original? Poor translation? Heavily censored? Hopefully I can locate the translator Lu Xiangru (卢相如) and get the low-down.

The China Daily features a piece on the third and final novel in a trilogy exploring the border on either side of Yunnan and Tibet:

At last author Fan Wen (范稳) has his reward for a decade of immersion in the multicultural wonderland along the Yunnan-Tibet border: Canticle to the Land (大地雅歌), the closing novel in his longish trilogy, has just been published in Chinese.

Why locate the tale there? “It’s my own ‘creative paradise’, an inspiration of sorts,” explains Fan, a devout Catholic from Sichuan province. “You can interpret this as a summons from God, or as a writer who has been vanquished by a certain spirituality, the cultures and beliefs of the people of this realm.”

That day in 1999 when he came across the “lonely” grave of a martyred Swiss missionary in Lancangjiang Canyon, Father Maurice Tornay, he realized he had found his “sacred vocation”. Indeed, the area straddling the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan and Tibet autonomous region is an anthropologist’s dream. One finds Tibetans, Han, Naxi, Yi, Lisu and other ethnic groups living together.

“I find describing the interaction – and collisions – between different cultures a challenging and engaging affair,” Fan says. “Conflicts have taken place due to differences in culture and faith, like wars between Naxi and Tibetans, and Tibetans and Han. Irreconcilable contradictions occurred between Tibetan Buddhism and Catholicism when the latter was introduced.”

St Jerome Publishing has just launched Readers, Reading and Reception of Translated Fiction in Chinese exploring how Chinese readers experience a translated novel:

Chan draws on insights from textual and narratological studies to unravel the processes through which readers interact with translated fiction. Moving from individual readings to collective reception, he considers how lay Chinese readers, as a community, ‘received’ translated British fiction at specific historical moments during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Case studies discussed include translations of stream-of-consciousness novels, fantasy fiction and postmodern works.

One chapter that sounds interesting to me: The Popularity of Youlixisi (尤利西斯) and the New Reader of Harry Potter in Translation.

Zülfü Livaneli, the Turkish writer, musician, singer, journalist and member of parliament, recently toured China to promote the launch of the mainland Chinese translation of his popular novel, Bliss (Mutluluk), or 伊斯坦布尔的幸福.

Now a movie as well, Bliss is a melodramatic tale of a young village woman who is raped by an elder relative. When she doesn’t hang herself out of shame, as is expected, the task of restoring honor to the family (by ending her life) is assigned to another male relative. The novel takes us from Van in the southeast to Istanbul, touching on most every controversial aspect of “Turkishness,” from honor killing to the Asia-Europe divide represented by schizophrenic Istanbul, and the guerrilla war waged by the Kurds against the Turkish state.

But how many Chinese readers will notice that this quintessentially Turkish novel has been translated from the . . . English?

Not many, I’d wager. The spine of the book features “Turkey” in brackets above the author’s name, implying that the book and its author originated in that country, and cites the translator (贾文浩). The credits page gives the same information without identifying the source language. It should be noted that this is standard procedure in the People’s Republic. Thus the only reference to the fact that this Chinese edition is a translation of the English translation is in the last line of the translator’s Foreword.

I interviewed Shen Zhixing (沈志兴), the Chinese translator of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, several years ago. He studied in Ankara in the 1980s and worked from the Turkish. The earlier Taiwan edition of the book was based on the American, and Pamuk—apparently very displeased with this approach—insisted that Shen translate from the Turkish original.

Shen told me that in his estimation, “only a dozen or so” translators in China had the background in Turkish and literary Chinese to translate a Turkish novel into Mandarin. In a country which has over ten million speakers of Turkic languages living in Xinjiang alone, that’s a bit odd.

But there are several obvious reasons why China lacks Turkish translators. One is that many native speakers of related languages like Uighur have poor Chinese skills, and most Uighurs would find getting a passport valid for study in Turkey—seen as a haven for pro-splittest groups—next to impossible.

The other reason is a bit more worrisome: the intense focus on Chinese-English translation that leads Chinese students and scholars to ignore the study of what are referred to as “minor languages” (小语种). Turkic languages, spoken from Turkey through Central Asia to Xinjiang, count at least 100 million speakers; hardly minor, one might think. But outside of several West European languages, Russian and Japanese, in reality China has precious few high-quality translators, particularly for African and Middle Eastern languages.  Several currently popular Israeli novels in China were translated from the English, not Hebrew, for example.

Author and translator (below)

Lin Shaohua (林少华), who translated Murakami Haruki’s writing into Chinese for two decades, on how he recreates the rhythm of the Japanese original in his rendition:

Murakami says that he learned about rhythm from music, especially jazz. But I don’t know jazz, so where does the rhythm of my translations come from? Principally from the cadence of ancient Chinese.

Julia Lovell, translator of Lu Xün’s The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China, on the therapeutic qualities of the author:

With the PRC now in its swaggering 60s, I would prescribe – to counter the excesses of Beijing bombast – a stiff dose of Lu Xun: for his intensely crafted, sympathetic insights into the blackness of modern China; and as a biographical lesson in the Communist party’s energetic, though unsuccessful efforts to neutralise the country’s critical conscience.

Read the full text of China’s Conscience in The Guardian.

April 2010:

China’s Best Selling Fiction

Ranking Compiled by OpenBook

Published by China Publishing Today

(Comments by Bruce Humes)

Murong Xuecun has gained a name for himself through his unflattering vignettes of gambling, drinking, whoring and corruption in contemporary China. His best-seller, Leave me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu (成都，今夜请将我遗忘), prompted the authorities to convene a conference solely to critique the novel for sullying the Sichuan city’s image.

But in a change of tack away from fiction writing, early this year the author decided to experience—first hand—just how a “direct selling” operation in Jiangxi’s Shangrao recruits and gains control over its members. His revelations hit the stands as the cover story for Southern Metropolis Weekly’s April 19 edition: “Murong Xuecun—Undercover 23 Days in a Pyramid Selling Organization” (慕容雪村卧底传销23天之一).

Read my interview with Murong Xuecun about how he did it, and why.