Ethnic ChinaLit

In January 2013, Beijing-based Chan Koonchung’s novel The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver (《裸命》, 陈冠中) was published in Chinese in Hong Kong. The closing chapter recounts how a young, naïve Tibetan chauffeur from Lhasa proudly takes his first job in the capital, working in what he refers to as “Preserving Stability Hotel” (维稳宾馆).

His job: to ensure that the hotel guests remain under lock and key until they can be “escorted” back to their hometowns. It takes a while for Champa to realize that he is just a tool, charged with carrying out a form of extraordinary (domestic) rendition with Chinese characteristics. Read the rest of this entry »

In <四成少数民族语言临危,> Wang Bo at Chinanews.com reports that up to four of ten languages native to minorities in China are threatened with extinction.

Here are a few numbers that appear in the report:

• Non-han languages: 55 officially designated “peoples” (民族) speak an estimated 130 languages
• Scripts in use: 40, including Mongolian, Tibetan, Uighur, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Korean, Yi, Dai, Lahu, Jingpo and Xibe
• Populations: one-half of non-Han languages are spoken by groups that number under 10,000 members, of which 20+ have 1,000 speakers or less
• Endangered languages: Manchu, Tatar, She, Hezhen can no longer be used for conversation; another 20 percent, such as Nu, Yilao, Pumi and Jinuo are approaching that state; and a total of 40 percent are in danger of extinction in the mid-term.
• Manchu: 11 million ethnic Manchus, but only 100 or so can speak fluently and less than a dozen read and write well.
• Jing (京族): with a population of 20,000 in Guangxi, one-half can still speak their mother tongue.

Wang Bo notes that fluency in seven non-Han languages continues to be passed on to the next generation fairly well: Mongolian, Tibetan, Uighur, Kazakh, Korean, Zhuang and Yi. He attributes this partly to the fact that they have a written script, and interpreting services are often offered at official meetings.

What he doesn’t note—like many PRC-centric writers—is the fact that except for Zhuang and Yi, these other languages are spoken and written by large numbers of  native speakers outside China.

In China, at Party Congress, Lauds Its Cultural Advances, the New York Times reports:

Last week, Mr. Hu [Jintao] declared at the opening of the Congress that “culture is the lifeblood of a nation” and that “the strength and international competitiveness of Chinese culture are an important indicator of China’s power and prosperity and the renewal of the Chinese nation.”

               Bird’s Nest: Culture hardware in place

The participants in the news conference, one of a series over the last few days intended to highlight Mr. Hu’s accomplishments, said that China had made great strides toward achieving its cultural goals.

The officials made their case with a blizzard of statistics: China produced 558 feature films in 2011 compared with 140 in 2003; it now has 9,200 movie screens versus 1,953 in 2003; it has listed 43 cultural sites with the United Nations, the third-highest number in the world; it has set up 600,000 rural reading rooms and offers a free movie each month in villages; and it has 2,115 museums that do not charge for admission. Last year, it published 370,000 books, which officials said was more than any other country in the world. China Central Television has 249 million viewers in 171 countries. And the government has spent $30.4 million over the last decade to support 55 minority ethnic groups in China.      

For examples of how some of that central government money is being channeled, see my piece on 205 projects for the translation and publication of books about the history and culture of China’s non-Han ethnic groups with help from the 2012 China Publication Fund (2012 国家出版基金).

For to deny a child, any child, their right to mother tongue, to bring up such a child as a monolingual English speaker in a society where the majority speak African languages, to alienate that child from a public they may be called to serve, is nothing short of child abuse. (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kenyan author, in Speaking My Language)

“Fed up with the education system,” runs the headline in the May 24^th South China Morning Post’s Classically Framed, “some mainland parents are sending their children to traditional schools, where the sole subject is the Confucian canon”:

Teachers at Luming School in eastern Shenzhen start every class with the same instruction: “Children, read after me.”

The pupils open their textbooks – always one of the nine authoritative works of Confucianism – and begin carefully reciting the ancient words. Line after line, the teacher leads the class in a drone of 2,500-year-old verse, assisted by two other teachers to ensure the children’s sounds are consistent and non-stop.

The process continues for six hours a day to best ensure the pupils absorb each of the Four Books and Five Classics in its entirety. When one work is finished, the teacher moves on to the next or simply begins the same one again. One book may be read as many as 600 times.

Pupils do not fear their exams. There are none. 

This is a sīshú [私塾], an old-style private school occupying a converted six-storey farm residence in the shadow of Wuton Mountain. The boarding school is one of about a dozen full-time sishu that have opened in the surrounding area in recent years as a small but passionate group of parents and educators seek a return to traditional teaching methods and the values they are thought to instil.

How popular are these private establishments? Reporter Sally Wang says it’s “impossible to know how many sishus have sprung up around the country, as few, if any have registered with the education authorities.” One website promoting these establishments lists more than 100, and Mencius Mother’s School in Shanghai—which debuted in 2002—is “widely believed to be the first full-time sishu to open as part of the latest revival.”

However, many see the study of classics as “complementing rather than replacing conventional schooling,” so weekend sishu are gaining in popularity.

Cao Ying’s translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (安娜·卡列尼娜，草婴译)—which sold several million copies—paid so poorly that all he got out of it was enough money to buy a plane ticket to the US for his daughter, says Cao’s wife in a recent report published in Changjiang Newspaper (仅够买张机票).

A few other factoids from the article:

• Literary translation into Chinese generally earns .05 to .08 renminbi per character (around 1 US cent)

• Chinese publishers normally refuse to pay the translator any royalties on modern works, claiming that the high portion of royalties claimed by the foreign rights holder and/or author mean that profit margins are already too thin

• A handful of “star” translators of worldwide best-sellers such as Shi Xiaowei (施小炜) who translated Murakami’s 1Q84, and Fan Ye (范晔) who rendered Gabriel Marquez’s Cien Años de Soledad, reportedly received very handsome translation fees
  

  Translation fee: Enough for a plane ticket out of China

• Translators looking for better pay are increasingly turning to older classics which are no longer covered by copyright, in which case they can negotiate as much as 10 percent of royalties instead of accepting the traditional per-word fee.

One example of the latter (not mentioned in the article) is Li Jihong (李继宏) whose new version of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (老人与海) will soon be launched by Wanrong (万榕) under the imprint of Hunan Literature and Arts Publishing House (湖南文艺出版社).

In Key to China, Lu Xün translator Julia Lovell brings us up to date about two new China-based, English-language literary magazines showcasing Chinese fiction, Pathlight and Peregrine (English-language supplement within Chutzpah):

To readers familiar with anglophone literary magazines, Pathlight begins rather oddly, with a 50-page introduction to China’s pre-eminent state literary award, the Mao Dun Prize. There are prize speeches full of strange analogies (one author likens himself to an overstuffed silkworm; another describes the world as a prehistoric egg yolk). There are stilted synopses and unedifying excerpts drawn from much longer works (one of which is 4.5m words in the original) by luminaries of the Writers’ Union. These 50 pages read more like an anodyne government sales brochure for Chinese literature than a grandstand for punchy, technically polished short fiction.

For however much it might protest otherwise, Pathlight is more than a showcase for unjustly ignored Chinese fiction. Published by the Writers’ Union—an organisation funded by the government’s propaganda department—it forms part of China’s widely publicised soft-power drive (running to billions of dollars) of recent years. “With a wide scope and an open mind,” the magazine’s editors have declared, “we choose articles that truly exemplify and represent the abundant and complicated realities of our country, past and present.” But almost in the next breath they observe, with disarming frankness, that “literature, if promoted effectively, will also… boost the country’s soft power.”

Brigitte Duzan at Chinese-shortstories.com has a neat piece (La Chine en dix mots, publication numérique) on how popular Chinese writer Yu Hua (余华) is publishing short reworks of China in Ten Words in a way—via microblog downloads—that takes advantage of Chinese consumers’ willingness to read on their phones, and effectively allows him to publish parts of his book that would probably be heavily censored or even banned if published in hard copy form in China proper. And the icing on the cake: the downloads are paid for by the mobile phone owner. Reports Duzan:

C’est une première dans le monde de l’édition chinoise : Yu Hua (余华)  publie ses articles de microblog, mais uniquement sous forme numérique.

Le ‘livre’ s’appelle « Yu Hua @ ». On le trouve, depuis début septembre, sur la « plateforme de lecture en ligne Tianyi » de China Telecom (中国电信“天翼阅读平台”). Le système est très astucieux, et capitalise sur le phénomène exponentiel, en Chine aujourd’hui, qu’est le développement de la lecture sur téléphones portables : on peut le lire en ligne, mais également en téléchargeant les articles sur son portable ; on paie alors une somme modique en donnant son numéro de portable, et le total est débité sur le compte chez China Telecom.

La formule est adaptée au lectorat chinois, le contenu aussi. C’est une suite du précédent livre publié par Yu Hua : « La Chine en dix mots » (1), qui a été traduit en français puis en anglais, mais n’a pas été publié en Chine (la seule mention de la Révolution culturelle suffit à en rendre l’éventualité très peu probable). L’idée générale est la même, mais le traitement totalement différent.

Controversial German Sinologist Wolfgang Kubin was recently in Shenzhen where he spoke at some length on three subjects: What makes for “good literature” (好的文学)? “Good language” (好的语言)? And if a Chinese author writes in a foreign tongue, what sorts of changes occur?   On August 10, China Reading Weekly (中华读书报) published What is Good Chinese Literature (什么是好的中国文学)?, a record of his talk at the He Xiangning Art Museum (何香凝美术馆) which, the article notes, has not been proofed by Kubin. But I assume that he spoke in Chinese and that this represents a fairly accurate transcript.

Over the next few days I’ll translate a few excerpts. Here’s one on so-called popular writers:

Not a few Chinese writers have been very successful in Germany. How can we define this success? That’s a rather thorny issue. I’m talking about novelists here, not poets. For example, books by Hong Ying (虹影), Ha Jin (哈金), Mian Mian (棉 棉) and Wei Hui (卫慧) are selling quite well in Germany. Each one of them can publish several tens of thousands of books with each earning $2 to $5 per copy, so after they’ve published a book in Germany, they make a fortune.

Readers of  Hong Ying, Ha Jin, Mian Mian and Wei Hui are quite numerous, but the works of this bunch belongs to the popular literature category. It’s basically not conceivable that professors or writers would read their works, and Germany’s most important newspapers wouldn’t publish reviews of their books. So their works seemingly don’t exist in the German literary world, and can exist only among the common people and general readers. Personally, I feel that Hong Ying and Ha Jin have no future whatsoever, and their works will be quickly forgotten.

Regarding Chinese novelists and their knowledge of foreign tongues:

In the past I’ve said that contemporary Chinese authors don’t generally know a foreign language, and aren’t willing to study them.   Read the rest of this entry »

Writing in the China Daily (The Slim Years), Chitralekha Basu looks at how translated Chinese fiction has fared since 2000:

The last book to have notched up outstanding sales in the English-speaking market is Shanghai Baby [上海宝贝] by Wei Hui (translated by Bruce Humes/Robinson Publishing UK) in 2001. The somewhat morbid tale of a waitress-turned-writer of erotic novels—torn between an artist who overdoes on heroin and a German businessman who she knows is cheating on her—is thought to have sold over 300,000 copies.

Please note—that sales figure wasn’t provided by me! But if you’d like to know a bit more about that translation project, see Bruce Humes and his Shanghai Baby.