‘Preface’, Clan (Math Paper Press edition, September 2022)

In 2017 I received an email from a stranger. I was in Norwich, doing my MA. The email was from Singaporean writer Soon Ailing, a university lecturer in Hong Kong. She had watched Eva Tang’s documentary The Songs We Sang and she said she liked my translations of the subtitles and xinyao song lyrics. She asked if I would be interested in translating her short stories published in the 1990s. She and Eva are old friends. They had met at Hong Kong University many years ago when Eva was doing her BA and Ailing was teaching there.

A year after that email exchange, I was back in Singapore and I heard from Ailing again. She asked me if I had had time to read her short stories. After reading her email, I went to the library to borrow her short story collection, Renye nüye [‘Of Men and Women’]. I also contacted Eva who shared a link for me to watch her short film Liuying jiasha[hereafter The Veiled Willow], adapted from one of Ailing’s short stories, Tanjia shifu [hereafter ‘Chef Tham’].

I enjoyed the film. It was beautifully made, with costumes designed by Lai Chan, a Singaporean fashion designer well known for his cheongsams. After watching the film, I agreed to meet Ailing. What struck me during our lunch was her generosity, her carefree spirit, her appetite for life. She is two years older than my parents, and like them, she had graduated from Nanyang University, or Nantah as it is affectionately known.

Ailing spends half the year in Hong Kong and half in Singapore where she has family. Since our first lunch in 2018, I’ve met her for many more meals. Eva joins us sometimes. I got to hear about their alma mater, St. Nicholas Girls’ School, in 2018 and 2019 as Eva was working on a film for the school’s 85th anniversary. More than once, either Eva or Ailing would ask why I hadn’t gone to St. Nicholas. Because they have fond memories of their secondary school years and love their school, I understood that there was a lot of warmth in this question.

***

Before Ailing, I have translated other Chinese writers, all of them poets. Translating fiction has been a new experience. I am a fiction writer myself. When I translated Chinese poets, my attention was always on preserving the beauty, or the spirit, of the poems. I have read far too many alienating translations of Chinese poets. Translation means that something that already sounds good in Mandarin has to sound equally good in English. If you want to cough up blood, try translation. I’m joking of course, but then again, if you love the text you’re translating and you don’t want to be responsible for mangling it, then you’ll understand how close this joke cuts to the truth.

Translation was the starting-point of my friendship with Soon Ailing. Since I began in 2018 on the work of translating her short stories, I have had many conversations with her about her characters and settings. We talked about her choice of names for her heroines; the liveliness and not-so-secret unhappiness of big families living under one roof; her appreciation of Chinese embroidery, jade, batik, Cantonese opera – distinctive traditions of arts and culture in China and Southeast Asia. Then there was a turn in our chats as I became properly immersed in her story worlds and began to feel compelled to go beyond the scope of translation, something which neither of us had anticipated.

This essay is my way of acknowledging the friendship and freedom that has engendered my hybrid compilation of original stories and translations in Clan. It is also a meditation of sorts on writing. To know what and how to write, the writer must engage constantly with the reader inside her. Something similar happens in translation. A sanguine description of the process might call it self-communing. But in the earlier stages of Clan, a more accurate visualization of the process would be of my translator- and reader-selves slugging it out in a wrestling match. The reader-self won, which was when the work of the writer-self had to begin.

 The experience of writing this book can be compared to a long walk which began on the familiar terrain of translation dotted with the typical difficulties of literature crossing from one language to another. Barely a year after this peregrination started, something else in me began to stir. There was a craving to do more to tackle some of the questions raised in Ailing’s stories, primarily questions about the fate of girls and women who do not conform to patriarchal norms and expectations. Sometimes the female protagonists themselves are not aware of their revolt. This made them even more fascinating to me. To play out their circumstances and conflicts with greater psychological drama – that was my secret wish. But to respond to this would be break all the rules of translation I knew.

After a period of denial and struggle, a period of self-muting (which looked a whole lot like procrastination and inactivity from the outside), I realised there was only one way to get unstuck: go deeper into the psyches of these characters whose plights had already seeped into my imagination; tap into the hidden waters that my readerly intuition had picked up on like a divining stick. I read something of Rebecca Solnit’s that resonated with me:

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophecies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long, disciplined process of making it their own.

The unknown had arrived, I had to greet it and keep the door open. I unmuted myself and went back to Ailing to seek her permission to do more than translate. This became the pattern of my conversations with her from 2019 onwards. I am grateful to her for hearing me out and for being unfailingly generous and patient.

***

Writing involves doing many things while sitting still. One of these things is observing what characters say and do in a place that sometimes seems more real than the table my forearms are resting on now as I type these sentences. Another thing that happens when I write is selection. I’m auditioning words and phrases, as it were, trying them out in my notebook or on the screen. Selection is based on something as mysterious as the chemistry between two people. One’s instinct for selection can be honed by reading but it cannot be imparted. This is probably why some people feel quite strongly that creative writing cannot be taught.

Coming back to selection, here are some examples. Would the protagonist in my title story ‘Clan’, a pregnant and unmarried sixteen-year-old use a word like ‘bog’ to describe a hostile teacher? We reveal ourselves in the words we use, characters are no different. The writer is both herself and her characters, but her characters are separate from her, they are individuals in their own right. Choosing the right words for characters to use, whether in speech, thought or feeling, can be one of the most maddening aspects of writing when the right words just can’t be found. The most obvious explanation is that the writer doesn’t know the character well enough.

Selection is also about finding apposite images. When my teenaged character is cheered up by the sight of Milo’s and Kit Kat’s in a vending machine, I, her writer, am also energised by that image, but for a different reason. It was just what the story needed, to work. In translation, selection is also critical. The author of the text in the source language has her own unique voice and style. As I translated Soon Ailing’s stories, I tried to imagine what she would sound like if she were writing in the target language of English. I’ve used this technique in all the translation work I’ve done in the past, whether it’s for song lyrics or poems. Once I was hired to translate marketing copy for a Taiwanese pineapple cake company. I used this technique for that job too. The Mandarin copy was written by a seasoned Taiwanese ad man and it was elegant and lyrical. If I had translated it literally, the English version would have sounded like a corny pastiche. I explained to the client that I would try to replicate the effect of the Mandarin copy in English, but to do this, I had to be free, he mustn’t expect me to be shackled to the source-language copy.

Freedom and openness are themes in Ailing’s fiction. What has become apparent, through these years of working on them and cracking my head over the sorts of selections I could and couldn’t make as translator, is that freedom is a fundamental condition of work for me.

***

I was in the midst of wrestling with what was alright and not alright for me to do in my interventions as a translator when I happened to watch a film. Incidentally, it was Eva who brought Ailing and I to the Projector to watch Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car. That night, after I got home, I borrowed the e-book of the Haruki Murakami short story collection Men Without Women. I wanted to read the eponymous short story that the film had been adapted from. It was a clarifying experience, not only for my understanding of what is possible in adaptation but also, later on, in the evolution of my approach towards some of Ailing’s stories

The interactions between the two characters in Murakami’s short story take place solely in a car. One of them is driven around by the other. This set-up is also central to Hamaguchi’s film, as are the themes of infidelity, honesty, and guilt. But the film expands the short story’s arena of human conflict through a larger cast of characters. More importantly, it introduces a critical layer of complexity through its intertextuality with another literary work: Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov’s masterpiece Uncle Vanya. This play-within-a-play feature enriches the film in several ways. After the first half hour, attention moves from the bedroom to a theatre space, or more specifically, a rehearsal room where the characters are actors in the Chekhov play. They come from different parts of Asia; they speak their lines using their own languages. The language barrier is present and absent at the same time.

Chekhov’s play has comic and sad things to say about failure and consolation in friendship, family life and marriage. The actors present these as experiences that are universal; for even though they are each and every one of them communicating in a different language, the experiences can be understood. The wisdom and humour of Uncle Vanya and the liveliness of its presentation in the film are, for me, representative of Hamaguchi’s brilliance in adaptation. 

After the first half hour of the film, the setting moves from Tokyo to Hiroshima. There isn’t space here to talk about the significance of Hiroshima. I suspect that the director chose Hiroshima because of its sorrowful symbolism since World War II, its evocation of human frailty and the consequences of violence.

***

Before I began to translate Ailing’s stories, I watched The Veiled Willow, the film adaptation of Ailing’s short story ‘Chef Tham’. Ailing had worked on the screenplay with Eva, the director. The short story is set in Guangzhou and Huiyang in Guangdong, China, and Singapore. The film is set mainly in a Singapore Straits Chinese shophouse and its dialogue is in Cantonese.

In his essay Liujie majie [‘Majie Mythologies’ in this book], He Hua says he is heartened to see Sister Liu propelled to centerstage in The Veiled Willow. Sister Liu is a secondary character in Ailing’s short stories; she is Second Grandmother’s long-serving maid and often comes across as someone who is used to being a wallflower. The film gives Sister Liu a different ending. She dies a spinster in Ailing’s short story, where, despite having worked as a servant all her life, she is confident enough to reject the belated proposal of Chef Tham. In the film her resolve to maintain her independence is more extreme: she becomes a majie. The majie sisterhood’s ritual of initiation, a tying of the novice’s hair into a bun, signifies the vow of chastity. Sister Liu having her long hair tied into a severe bun by older majie is the closing scene of the film. The contrast with the final scene in Ailing’s short story cannot be more stark.

During my initial encounters with Ailing’s ‘Chef Tham’, what impressed me was the breadth of its settings, moving from 20th-century China to Singapore when it was still part of Malaya. The story doesn’t go into great detail about the inner lives of Chef Tham and Sister Liu; instead it provides glimpses of the power and affluence of the family they worked for, the impact of war on lives, whether rich or poor. My translation went through numerous rounds of edits. These versions stayed close to the source-language text. At some point, however, I realised that I wanted to do something more for Sister Liu.

I used certain details from ‘Chef Tham’ as prompts for ‘Table Manners’. ‘Chef Tham’ is the only translation that’s published in this book together with my re-writing of the source-language text. How Sister Liu sees her place in the world versus how she is placed by others – this is what I hope to bring out through my choice of the second-person point-of view in ‘Table Manners’. 

***

In the past, at conferences and workshops, I used a baby analogy to explain my understanding of ‘fidelity’ in translation. The author has already given birth to her text; as translator, your responsibility is to not kill the baby or make it ugly. My involvement in this project has given me a new perspective. To be faithful as a literary translator can be likened to performing a piano sonata without a piano. The translator has heard the piece and she’s been given the responsibility to perform it using a completely different instrument. I hope my translations draw readers into the worlds of the characters and keep them riveted to the end. The stories in the first half of Clan are my own, freely adapted from Ailing’s fiction. They take off from her writing in varying ways, ranging from characters’ circumstances to images like embroidered peacocks to a comment made by someone, not necessarily the protagonist. As in the case of the translations, I hope that my readers will find these stories as compelling to read as they were for me to write.