#40 Guest Episode: Jennifer Feeley, Part 2 (English)
This episode features the second portion of our conversation with the award-winning literary translator Jennifer Feeley. Where last time we learned about her journey to Cantonese and her work translating the poetry and prose of the Hong Kong author Xi Xi, this time we hear about her recent translation of the psychological thriller Tongueless, by Lau Yee-Wa. Set in a Hong Kong secondary school, it zeroes in on the pressure-cooker environment faced by contract teachers as they navigate the shifting linguistic landscape between Cantonese and Mandarin. Make sure to tune in next time for the third and final installment of our conversation where Jennifer shares tips for getting into literary translation.
今集係我哋同得獎文學翻譯家費正華 Jennifer Feeley 對話嘅第二部分。上次我哋了解咗佢同粵語嘅淵源同埋翻譯香港作家西西嘅詩歌同散文作品，今次我哋會聽佢最近翻譯劉綺華嘅驚悚小說《失語》Tongueless 。小說以香港一間中學為背景，講述合約教師喺廣東話同普通話之間變化緊嘅語言環境之下面對嘅無形壓力工作環境。下次記得收聽埋我哋對話第三部分最後一集，Jennifer 會分享有關文學翻譯嘅竅門。
Jennifer: …what I really appreciated was, my editor, even from the first draft, she got it. There's a point in the novel when these teachers who have been teaching Chinese in Cantonese are being pressured to take these exams to prove their proficiency in Mandarin, so they're having a lunch with this principal from Nanjing and they're asked to introduce themselves in Mandarin. These characters, who you might have known as Miss Ng or Miss Wu or Miss Ip, suddenly now you're learning that Miss Ng is Miss Wu, Miss Wu is Miss Hu, Miss Ip is Miss. Ye and so on. My editor made a comment in the margin that said, “This is very sinister.” And I loved that she got it, because this was not a person who's coming to this from a background in Chinese studies or Hong Kong studies, but she could still tell that this has some very… there was something sinister about the undertone to her, and I love that she got that, and I hope other readers will get this.
Cameron: I hope they do too. The other thing that I think is so fascinating about the novel is, yes, it does deal with the language politics in a really interesting way, but it also touches on a ton of other social issues in Hong Kong with an incredible depth and complexity that I think for people who've lived in Hong Kong will resonate very deeply, but also for people who maybe don't know as much about Hong Kong, it's a great opportunity to learn some things, whether it's about the property market, immigration complications, and what it's like for people who immigrated to Hong Kong from the mainland whether 40 years ago or in the past couple of years. But when you try and describe the book—I’m thinking like in Hollywood, you know, they say, “What's your elevator pitch?”—what's the quick pitch you've given to English readers to try and get them to think about picking up the book?
Jennifer: Oh gosh, I was not prepared for that. That's really hard. I guess the pitch I would say is, we just got a starred Kirkus Review for the book, which shocked me because I didn't even know that the publisher was sending it to them and for them, and for them to star… and again, to really appreciate this book. I think I still haven't processed it, like, I and, I'm just—
Cameron: A huge congratulations on that, that is a big deal!
Raymond: Yeah, congrats!
Jennifer: I mean, I'm excited for the author, it's really all her. But I think in the review they said something about the weaponization of language, and I think it really does show the power of the weaponization of language and the consequences of that, like the very deadly consequences, and how desperate these people can be in this cruel environment. I think it makes a really interesting contrast to some other recent depictions of Hong Kong in the media… Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I should name them or not, but I think we can all probably think of some.
Cameron: I think a lot of people probably know Hong Kong through visual media, right?
Jennifer: Yes.
Cameron: They've probably watched films or watched television, and I know when we had a back and forth before the interview, I referenced something that Dung Kai-cheung once said about how many Hong Kongs there are out there circulating on the TV screens, on the film screens, but sometimes literature—Hong Kong literature in particular—helps make the invisible visible, and I wonder if there's anything in particular that you find being made very visible in Tongueless.
Jennifer: The author herself—I mean, I can kind of cheat because I saw the materials that she was preparing for agents and for publishers in Taiwan explaining the book—one of the things that she really stressed when she was trying to pitch the book to the Taiwan market or to literary agents was the fact that this is one of the rare books to talk about politically apathetic people in Hong Kong, because I think right now there's a lot of interest in people who have been part of the protest, you know, into people who are writing about these very important movements in Hong Kong, but her characters, I think there's one point where one of the protagonists, Ling, is even annoyed by the protests because it makes it harder to get to work. She's more obsessed with beauty treatments, in these luxury fashion brands, and this other character, Wai, is just obsessed with learning Mandarin. Of course, you can bring in a lot of political readings to the book, but the characters themselves are not these activists, they're not really engaging—at least overtly—with the politics around them.
I think that's very interesting because, in fact, I think there are a lot of people in Hong Kong, perhaps at least outwardly, they were not necessarily engaging with the protests, they were just living their lives, trying to get by—maybe for certain reasons they didn't want to express their opinions one way or the other. But I have found in my own experience when I'm trying to get works from Hong Kong published in English—I don't want to generalize—but I have noticed that publishers oftentimes are gravitating either towards works that are surrealistic or overtly political, and so the works that might have a more realist bent but are not necessarily directly engaging with politics, I'm seeing those often have a harder time finding a home. And I think it's really interesting because this book, I mean the characters, whether it's because they are so desperate just to survive, they can't imagine engaging with what's going on beyond this, but I think it's showing something different. It's entrenched in the politics of what's happening in Hong Kong, yet they themselves are not these kinds of social activists. I don't know what you think, you have read both versions of the book…
Cameron: I think I was also thinking about that question of visibility because a lot of times in America, the news media that people have consumed about Hong Kong, especially over the past five years or so, it's been very easy for people to see visual representations either of protest or of Chinese nationalism, and so they see two ends of a polarity…?
Jennifer: Yeah.
Cameron: And so when you're talking about how do you represent apathy, or ambivalence, or something in between—
Jennifer: I think of it sort of as they’re ambivalent.
Cameron: Yeah. You also talked about the novel being a psychological thriller, and that's the other thing I really admire about the novel, how it also forces you to sit in a space where there're a lot of characters and situations where you're not entirely sympathetic to a character, but you also sympathize with them, and you're put into this really strange space as the reader.
Jennifer: Yeah, there are a lot of people in this book who are not… I don't want to say they're unlikable, because I understand why they behave the way that they do, but they come across as very terrible people. But perhaps they're victims of their circumstances.
Cameron: I think the other thing it does a very good job at is… This is something where I think of my own experiences studying Cantonese alongside students who came from the mainland, at a night class taught at CUHK. I was studying mostly with women from the mainland, and their motivations and their experiences learning Cantonese, how people looked down on them for speaking imperfect Cantonese, also really resonated with some of the scenes in the novel, because it deals with people who are feeling pressure to see perfect Mandarin and people who are feeling pressure to speak perfect Cantonese.
Jennifer: Yes, and I am glad that she showed that. The other thing I was just thinking about is, I realized in this book that there are very few men. There is a principal from England who is male, there is a problematic student who is male, and really any other men are just very briefly mentioned—they might be patrons of a sex worker—but this is a novel that easily passes the Bechdel test. It's a very female space, because most of it is in a school and in the teachers’ lounge, and all of these teachers are women.
Cameron: There're two parallel mother daughter relationship in this novel that are fascinating…
Jennifer: ..and both characters are raised by single mothers.
Cameron: Yes. We think not only about gender dynamics but also how family dynamics can have certain linguistic specificity and cultural specificity. Was that something that you were thinking about when you were trying to bring those relationships into an English reading space?
Jennifer: Oh, definitely, I was thinking of these relationships and how to translate the way, you know, Ling refers to her mother and the way her mother refers to herself when she's talking about herself in the third person, calling herself Ama and everything, how do I put that into English. I wanted to be colloquial. The other thing that is related to that is my editor, when she asked me to write a translator's note at the end, she wanted me to bring up some of these issues because she was very perplexed why these characters who are adult women are still living with their mothers, and to me, I thought that seemed very normal, because I have many friends in Hong Kong, and they're often living with their parents well into adulthood. But she said, “Why?” It wasn't enough that I explained it in the margins—she thought this would be of interest to readers, because she thought it was a curious phenomenon, so that's why it brought this into the translator’s note at the end, both because of the economic issues but also just culturally, there are certain reasons as well. But yeah, I was thinking about all of this in the translation, because I think that the mothers, they're interesting to talk about with regard to mirrors, mirrors are a motif that run throughout the book both literally and figuratively, and I think the two protagonists are really mirrors of their mothers.
Cameron: Raymond, was there anything that you wanted to add to the discussion of the novel?
Raymond: Yeah, sure. The last thing I want to point out is my master thesis actually is on the topic of a language and education policy in secondary school in Hong Kong—
Jennifer: That's great!
Raymond: Yeah, I went back to my alma mater and collected data from the students and from my former teachers, and then I got a lot more backstory from them, and when I started reading the book, this is what came to me first, just recalling that there is a lot of behind the scenes that you don’t understand a lot, especially now that I'm a language teacher myself, and understanding all the power struggles, the language politics, and then the social economic issues in Hong Kong. This is fascinating to read. I just started reading it, and I can't wait to finish it and also go back going back to the original version.
Jennifer: Yeah, definitely, and if you're reading the original version, what's interesting is the version in Taiwan is a little bit different from the original version published in Hong Kong. I mean, the plot is the same, nothing has changed, it's just that even though she retained the Cantonese for the version published in Taiwan, she sort of toned it down a bit, so there's not as much Cantonese. When I was doing the translation, I was working with the Word document that she had prepared for the Taiwanese publisher—but before it had been edited by the Taiwanese publisher, because she didn’t have a Taiwanese publisher at that point—but I was also working with the hard copy that was published by Wheatear Publishing in Hong Kong, which is a smaller press. It was only after I had turned in my first draft of the translation last summer and when I was having dinner with the author that she gave me a copy of the Taiwan version, but then when we were going through rounds of editing this past year, and I'd looked something up, it would kind of like I'd be looking at all the versions, just to kind of compare things, and sometimes I realized in the Word document I had that there was a really strange section break and I was like, “Maybe that was me accidentally pressing enter on the key, so I’d better go look at the book.” But it is a little bit different if you look at the Taiwan version. They retain the Cantonese, and then she has footnotes with the translations, but there's just not as much Cantonese as the original.
But talking about schools, so the author herself has worked as a secondary school teacher, I believe, on a contract basis, so she's writing this from experience. And actually, after I translated the book, when I was writing the translator’s note, I had done a draft, and then I wasn't happy with the original draft. It felt like an impossible task because it's supposed to be short, you know, have a word limit. It's not supposed to be the kind of thing that has footnotes, it's not an academic piece, and it's supposed to be comprehensible to the general reader and to help them understand these things. As you guys know, there's so many things, I just want to footnote everything and cite this study and cite that study, but I could not do that, so my first draft of the note, I felt, didn't go into things quite as much as I wanted. One of the things I worried about, especially in light of the discourse surrounding Lulu Wang's Expats and a tweet that she made about Cantonese that got a lot of viral attention, is that I didn't want my note to make readers think Cantonese is a dead language or a dying language. I thought, “Okay, I need to make it clear that that's not the case.” The book is talking about anxieties toward what could be a very real threat, so I wanted to change that a little bit, because originally the author, when I was talking with her and looking at some of her materials, she was emphasizing the pressure that secondary schools were having to switch to Mandarin. But then I was reading all these things where people were saying actually, that's not true. She showed me some studies that were done in Hong Kong where some schools switched [to Mandarin], but then they switched back to Cantonese because it wasn't working, and even though schools may have more and more cross-border students, a lot of those students are from Guangdong and they know Cantonese. They may not know it well because they were educated in Mandarin, but they might speak a little bit at home and are able to pick it up. So, I wanted to change things a bit, because one of the things I hope that readers realize is that Cantonese is still a very rich and vibrant language, and I think many people have pointed out in light of the discourse around Expats that there are other Chinese languages that are much more at risk than Cantonese. Still, I think what the author is depicting here is something very chilling, the pressure of having to prove proficiency in this language—that in terms of spoken language is a bit foreign to you and is not the language you grew up speaking, it's not your mother tongue—the pressure that in order to maintain your job security, even if the classes are still being taught in Cantonese, there's this pressure that you must pass these exams with the satisfactory score. In her depiction, which maybe is exaggerated a bit, it has these very deadly consequences, where these characters go to extremes to try to survive in this space where they are feeling very desperate.