Below is a complete transcript of the live Sinica Podcast with Rebecca Kuang.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get, well, access. Access to, not only our great daily newsletters, but to all of the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s travails as it struggles to deal with a surging wave of COVID-19. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Today, on Sinica, I am thrilled to be joined by Rebecca Kuang, an amazing novelist and scholar whose latest book — Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution — was one of my absolute favorite books of 2022. Rebecca, who writes under the name R. F. Kuang, was born in Guangdong, grew up in Dallas, and was educated at Georgetown, and then at Oxford, where she has an MSc and an MPhil from Cambridge. She’s now a graduate student at Yale in East Asian Languages and Literatures. Her trilogy, the Poppy Wars, which draws extensively on Chinese history, from the Sung to the 20th century, won all sorts of awards and is next up on my list of to-reads. But today, we are going to focus on Babel, which my daughter actually turned me onto, and which was an immediate bestseller, and was named one of the best science fiction or fantasy novels of the year by numerous media outlets and book sellers.
It’s a novel about so many things, about colonialism, about the Industrial Revolution, about race and gender, about the global north and the global south; the circumstances of the opium war. It’s about translation. It’s about the way academia has been enlisted in the service of not always benign national ends. It’s also about labor activism, about revolution, and as the title suggests, the necessity of violence. If you haven’t read it, perhaps you’ll want to save this episode for after you have. There will be some spoilers. And I’m sure many of you received it for Christmas anyway, so crack into that thing and then listen. Rebecca Kuang, welcome to Sinica.
Rebecca Kuang: Thanks so much for having me, Kaiser.
Kaiser: Well, I’m so glad to have you. Because this is a podcast about China, I want to assure our listeners, first of all that, that your novel, Babel, has an awful lot to do with China. It’s protagonist, Robin, is born in Guangzhou, and at the center of this plot is an effort by Robin and his comrades to prevent what many historians regard as the opening trauma of modern Chinese history — the Opium War. His proficiency in Chinese is also the source of his ability to wield magic in this. And I suspect, and we can explore this a bit, that you had certain themes in the contemporary U.S.-China relationship in mind as you wrote the book. So, China absolutely figures into this book in very important ways. You, Rebecca, you’ve obviously maintained a very strong connection to China yourself, and that is in evidence in your whole body of literary work to date.
Can you talk a little bit about that, about your relationship to China? I mean, there’s a lot of Chinese-American writers, but you write specifically not about Chinese American issues, but about China.
Rebecca: Sure. I think I’m one of the China studies scholars who came to China studies. I’m going to psychoanalyze myself as an attempt to repair the gap to recover whatever was lost during my upbringing. I’m a first generation Chinese-American. I was born in Guangzhou, and my family moved to Dallas when I was quite young. So, I had an ear for tones and I could speak in basic Chinese at home, but because we were growing up in Texas and I was going to school and living in English, I lost my Chinese pretty quickly. And it wasn’t until I was in college that I started taking Chinese classes again and was just ferociously studying to reacquire the language, and with that, to reacquire ties to my family and knowledge of history that I didn’t grow up learning. So, my creative career coincides with my academic interest in China.
I took a gap year in between my sophomore and junior years of high school to live in Beijing for a bit. And it was the first time that I really had sustained conversations with my grandparents. I’d never been able to say things other than, “Hello? How are you doing? Hope you’re well,” etc., in Chinese before. And I was learning all this crazy stuff about my family’s history, their experiences during the tumultuous 20th century. And I really wanted to chronicle it all somehow. But as a 19-year-old, I didn’t really feel confident enough to write a family autobiography. So, I wrote it as a piece of fantasy fiction instead, because fantasy was what I was reading at the time. So, I came back to Georgetown and I changed my major to history and then wrote my dissertation on the Rape of Nanjing. And now I’m still in Chinese studies, although my interests have shifted a little over to Chinese-American studies and the intersection between Chinese-American writers and translators and Sinophone fiction. I think a lot of this is still motivated by that childhood regret at losing my Chinese and not being able to communicate with my family.
Kaiser: I totally feel you. I mean, I had a very similar experience, although I wasn’t born in China. I had a kind of crippled kitchen Chinese that so many of us ABCs, like me, had growing up. I’m watching my son struggle with it too. I mean, I think part of him realizes he wants to pick it back up again. And he’s struggling to talk to my wife, to express himself well in Chinese with my wife. But anyway, for an author like you, somebody who has, if your novel is any indication, a fraught and maybe conflicted relationship with academia, you sure seem pretty drawn to it. I mean, you’ve already established yourself at such a young age as an important and very capable writer and an amazing storyteller, but do you see yourself pursuing an academic job and continuing to write in parallel, or do you think that you’re going to shift onto one leg or the other?
Rebecca: Oh, certainly. I’m only in the second year of my PhD right now, so I’m still in coursework, and the terrifying job market is still a little ways off. But my dream is to be a professor. I really love teaching, and I think there’s no space like the classroom. I would be very sad to ever step away from that entirely.
Kaiser: Yeah. I totally agree. I mean, that part I loved. What I didn’t love about graduate work was the idea that I’d have to spend 16 hours a day among dusty tomes in the library and not see the light of day at all.
Rebecca: Oh, see, I love that. That’s so fun for me.
Kaiser: Good, good, good. Yeah, so I loved the classroom. I loved the coursework and all that stuff. Do you keep up at all with Chinese language fiction? I mean, we all know there’s been quite a lot of very successful Chinese science fiction — Three-Body Problem, Folding Beijing — a lot of other stuff and stuff that Stanley Chan has written. A lot of it is even quite accessible to international audiences, but what about Chinese fantasy, historical fiction, historical fantasy, genres like that, that you write in? Have you seen anything like that coming?
Rebecca: That’s an interesting part of my creative practice and my scholarly interests where there’s absolutely no overlap. So, I don’t work on Chinese fantasy, and my fantasy novels have not been published in Chinese for a variety of reasons. I think Babel will be the first book that has a translation deal both in the mainland and in Taiwan. And The Poppy War trilogy never got a translation deal in Chinese. Once you’ve read them, I won’t spoil them for you, I think the reason is a bit obvious, but aside from the political content of those books, it’s also because The Poppy War trilogy doesn’t really fill a gap in the canon. Chinese fantasy is such a saturated marketplace. I’m passingly familiar with the literary ecosystem of web fiction and the quite close connection between TV adaptations and all the properties that are springing up in prose form.
So, there’s no gap in that market that Chinese readers need The Poppy War to address, whereas there is that gap in anglophone fiction. And I think that’s one of the reasons why there hasn’t been a translation. But in terms of contemporary Sinophone fiction that I do keep up with, I read a lot more science fiction, and that’s because a lot of my friends are writers or translators in that sphere. I’m working on a really exciting short story about time acceleration and the accumulation of time across different axes of society as a metaphor for a capitalist productivity, and that’s by Regina Wang. Fingers crossed — that translation will come out sometime next year.
Kaiser: I look forward to it. I also look forward to reading Yellowface, which we’ll talk about at the end here. Can’t wait to check that out. So, Babel was obviously a work of fiction, indeed a work of fantasy, but it’s set in a history that is not too far off from our own. Actually, I think it’s one of the novel’s great strengths is with any good work of historical fiction that it has quite a bit to say about, quite a bit to teach about the period in which it’s set — the 1830s in Edwardian, I suppose early Victorian England and late Qing, China. Were you nurturing any specific hopes for what your readers might learn or what they might be inspired to delve into further in terms of the real history of that period in which you set the novel?
Rebecca: Oh, there’s so much. First of all, I hope to correct the prejudice that the first half of the 19th century was more boring than the second half. I always do this thing when I start writing in a new genre where I call it vocal training, and I read as much within the genre as I can to pick up the rhythm, the language, the colloquialisms, the prostyle. So, I was reading all this Victorian fiction, Dickens mostly and a lot of Victorian pastiche, so contemporary fiction that’s set in the Victorian era. And everybody always chooses decades that are after the 1850s. And I get why that’s when most of Dickens’s more popular stuff comes out and that’s after the Industrial Revolution has really taken off and after a number of key technologies that figure and steampunk fiction have been invented.
But I’m really fascinated in the 1830s, the 1840s as a period of great potential and change, when the Industrial Revolution was just kicking off when these technologies were just starting to be widely adopted. And there were all these questions over, what does this do to labor? What does it do to social inequality? What does this movement of people from rural areas to urban areas do to the makeup of a city? And how do you address urban poverty? And this was a period when Victorian England really was asking itself what kind of country it wanted to be. And we can get into the content of the novel, but the characters ask over and over again, what are the junctures where we can push history off of its course?
I really think that decade was a period where there was so much potential for things to go otherwise, and we ended up with the world that we did.
Kaiser:
What about on the other side of the Eurasian land mass when you’re looking at the 1830s in China? I thought I heard notes of Stephen Platt’s Imperial Twilight in there. Is that something that you might have read for?
Rebecca: Oh, yeah. I read his Imperial Twilight. I also read Julia Lovell’s book on The Opium War. I think, well, The Poppy War Trilogy –
Kaiser: I thought about that.
Rebecca: The name really gives it away. I keep coming back to The Opium Wars as this critical juncture in Chinese history, and it’s really overdetermined as one. I mean, the PRC has made it a part of its founding mythology, the start of the century of humiliation. And Julia Lovell asks, “Oh, well, was this incident really that critical in the weakening of the Qing Empire? And I thought her argument was quite interesting. But I wanted to answer the question of how critical was the opium war for the British Empire? And my answer was, it was incredibly important. It’s what reversed the silver deficit that really funded the next great wave of British colonial expansion. So, it could not have been more important, at least on the British side.
Kaiser: Absolutely. And you also sort of complicate it on the British side as well because there were people who opposed the war. I mean, it was actually quite vocal. There were a lot of very prominent British statesmen who were opposed to the war, and you put that in there as well. I wanted to ask, Julia Lovell, the surname, Lovell, is there a coincidence there? Or is that a deliberate kind of nod to her?
Rebecca: Oh, no, it’s a complete coincidence. I asked a friend who does 19th-century Victorian fiction what name to assign a stagy old British gentleman, and she said Lovell was pretty middle-of-the-road.
Kaiser: I figured you would’ve read that as well and so I was looking for some kind of connection. Now, I don’t want to suggest that you’ve drawn too extensively from your own biography in creating your characters, but it does strike me that Babel’s protagonist, Robin Swift, and you were both born in Guangzhou, found yourself at a young age, immersed in an English language environment. I mean, Robin is taught English from the time he’s very, very young. You speak Mandarin. I don’t know about Cantonese in your case.
Rebecca: I don’t have Cantonese. I wish I did. My mother speaks Cantonese, my father doesn’t, which means that he didn’t speak it at home.
Kaiser: Yeah. He was Hunanese or something if I read correctly.
Rebecca: That’s right. He’s from Leiyang.
Kaiser: Oh, okay. And then you were both raised in a country that enjoys untraveled power and it doesn’t always bring that power to bear with justice. A country that has stubborn and quite deeply ingrained social inequalities and structural racism, but also a country where… it’s pretty easy for people, even in the oppressed races in classes, to be co-opted into the system of power here. So, I thought these were all really interesting themes that maybe you personally wrestled with. I mean, is America of the 2020s analogous to your England of the 1830s? Maybe that’s too on the nose?
Rebecca: Oh, I feel like that’s such a big question. Any possible answer to that would make so many historians upset. But in thinking about how Robin relates to power, I mean, I’ve studied at a lot of elite institutions. So, I went to the UK on a Marshall Scholarship, which along with the Rhodes is one of those prestigious UK fellowships that finds a crop of 30, 40 Americans and then sends them over to England in hopes of culturing a lifelong Anglophilia, which certainly worked in my case. But while I was there, I had a lot of conversations with people in my cohort about how institutions like this effectively defang people who come in with very radical projects, and who find that it’s actually really comfortable and fun to go to champagne parties and be toasted all the time, and then they graduate and then go work for McKinsey or Goldman, etc.
So, I think a lot about what am I doing in these institutions and am I changing who I am because of who I’m surrounded by? And Robin struggles with this constantly. Though the other autobiographical aspect that is huge for Robin’s character is his very fraught relationship to language and identity. He is so terrified of losing his Chinese. And he finds that as he assimilates further and further into white English society, he stops streaming in Chinese, and it takes hard work to declaw his way back to it and make sure that it remains a part of him. And I’m constantly bothered by this. I do Chinese studies, and it’s been quite a few years now since I’ve lived in China or Taiwan or Hong Kong for any period of time. And it’s just this great irony that I do Chinese studies, but only in the U.S. and the UK, and hoping to fix that soon. And I should spend most of this coming summer in Taiwan.
Kaiser: Oh, good. Good, good. Griffin, who you might see as Robin’s alter ego is… Well, I won’t put too many spoilers in here, but Griffin has lost the ability to dream in Chinese and thus some of his ability to work magic. And we’ll get to that magic system, which I think is just brilliant. It was just one of the greatest inventions of the novel. But I wanted to ask you, because having you stand in for Robin here and talking about being defanged by coming in, Babel is a novel about activism, about resistance and revolution. I know from following you on Twitter that you are also quite committed to labor activism; that you thrill to a good just and righteous strike — all that. I’m curious about a couple things. First, did that commitment drive the writing of the book? Did it prefigure the writing of the book, or did you find your sympathy for labor activism deepened in the process of writing? Or maybe both?
Rebecca: A bit of both. So, a lot of things about this were coincidental. I wrote this book in 2020. The HarperCollins strike didn’t start until this past November, and that is the labor cause that I’m angriest about and feel like I have the most leverage to make some sort of intervention in because these are the people that I work with. My publicist went on strike; my editorial assistants went on strike. Basically, my entire team, aside from the senior level editors, right? They’re no longer working on my books because they’re on strike to ask for a wage that is livable in New York City, which seems eminently reasonable to me. And it pains me to see the HarperCollins leadership just ignoring them. Assuming that they can starve them through the holidays, to think that everybody will look away, and that the strike will be invisible enough not to impact the bottom line.
And I think that as time goes on, as authors get more and more upset as the union, which by the way has been very good at social media outreach to the same people that HarperCollins relies on to, to spread reviews about their books, to do free publicity about the books, right? Young people on TikTok, on Instagram, on Twitter — this is really caught on. And I think it’s grown into something that the leadership up-top can’t ignore. So, we’ll see what happens in January. But I think certainly the process of writing Babel and… Well, I didn’t know how I wanted to conclude the fifth act. And then I started reading around labor activism in the 1830s and reading about the history of strikes in the UK. I didn’t come into this book wanting to write about strikes, but it ended up seeming like the only possible plan of action for Robin and his friends to fight the fight that they’ve chosen.
Kaiser: It goes beyond strikes to actual revolution, though. I was also curious about your attitude toward revolution and how that was affected by, and maybe how it affected your writing of the book. I don’t know much about your family, but I did read somewhere that you had Guomindang for bears as I do, like so many Chinese people in diaspora, you had family, I suppose, on both sides of the Chinese Revolution and the Civil War. My mom just passed last week. So, I’ve been thinking about my parents and their weird politics as children of establishment KMT families, they both, for a while at least, really embraced Mao’s revolution and often tried to justify violence. I remember a lot of conversations about this, about struggle sessions against landlords in the period of land reform and how they justified it. I imagine you’ve had to wrestle with this a bit too. So, back to that question, how did your writing of this book reflect or maybe affect your attitude or your beliefs about the Chinese revolution and really about the vastitudes of the Mao years?
Rebecca: Well, first, I’m so sorry for your loss. I hope you and your family are doing okay.
Kaiser: Thank you. Thank you. That’s right.
Rebecca: I imagine it’s a really hard time. I actually think more about the 1989 student protests when I think about the revolution that inspired the revolution in Babel, and this is because I have a very close relationship with my dad. And he was a student at Beijing University during the protests, and he was there, and he watched his friends dying in the streets. This has immensely affected him. It’s one of the reasons why he chose to bring our family to the U.S. He went to the U.S. for graduate school shortly after he left Beijing. I mean, I can’t overstate how difficult every Liùsì 六四 is for him. He won’t talk to anyone. He goes into his room and it’s really hard for him.
Kaiser: Wow.
Rebecca: And as I’ve grown older… Well, so even as a child, right? I think the political attitudes of this 1989 generation, this cohort of students who immigrated to the U.S., I’m really fascinated in them as a community. I’m going to work on a novel about them eventually. And I’m interested in how their political views have changed. There was a lot of chatter in 2016 about how a lot of them had come out as Trumpists. And it’s not really surprising to trace the trajectory of someone who had fought for democracy and freedom of speech in China to come, to the U.S. and become a Republican, vote for conservative values because you think that’s the most anti-communist China platform you can take. And this was my dad for a long time. I have this silly story about how he, in part, taught me to read by reading Animal Farm with me when I was very young. I didn’t understand what the book was talking about at all. We read 1984 Animal Farm; before I was 10.
So, he was indoctrinating me from a young age. But it’s actually been incredible to see his political views change, too, since Trump has come to power. He sent me and my siblings this very long essay, a few years ago, that just said, “I am now a liberal, and here are a lot of things that liberals believe in, and you guys should all consider being liberals too.” And I was like, “Well, dad, thanks for getting with the program.”
Kaiser: Way ahead of you.
Rebecca: All of that, all of those U.S. politics matters aside, he has always inculcated in me, from a very young age, the necessity of speaking up when you feel like it matters, and using your voice for things that are important and not being afraid. And I’ve always been so inspired by that. Since I was in high school, and then throughout my entire education, I’ve been obsessed with student revolutionaries across history and in other countries as well. I keep coming back to these tropes of student martyrdom and student naivete because I mean, students are really bad revolutionaries, right? They aren’t Hermes. They’re incredibly naive and idealistic about the world, and they get mowed down by tanks immediately. And the Hermes Society, the Secret Society in Babel that is composed of students, I try to reflect how naive they are. They’re really bad at being a secret society. They’re constantly making mistakes. Robin meets them because they’ve just fumbled a big heist. At the same time, I think that the student revolutionary’s greatest weaknesses are also his greatest strengths.
Kaiser: That’s right.
Rebecca: It’s right precisely because they have that naiveté that they can believe in these romantic ideals that really spread like wildfire, that draw people to their cause. And then when student revolutions are crushed that, that lasting image of martyrdom, they become symbols that echo throughout history. No one’s ever going to forget 1989. And I think about that a lot. And so it’s that kind of revolution that’s motivating Babel more so than the 1949 revolution.
Kaiser: Fascinating. Fascinating. Let’s move away from the politics right now and talk about the magic system that you created and about language. Like I said, I thought it was an absolutely brilliant invention. Maybe just for people who haven’t yet read the book, you could explain how it works, and maybe, if possible, tell us what inspired this idea that imperfectly translated pairs of words from one language to another engraved on a bar of silver could activate magic.
Rebecca: So, the magic system in Babel is called silver working. And how it works, as you said, is a silver worker, a trained translator, engraves a word or phrase in one language on one side of a silver bar, and the corresponding word or phrase in a different language on the other side. And so I call it “the semantic warp”, but whatever meaning is lost or imperfectly conveyed, whatever etymological baggage or connotations don’t make it out on the other side because there’s no perfect one-to-one translation between words or phrases in any two languages. No matter how close they are, there’s always something missing. That missing piece becomes manifested as the magical effect. And it’s pinned to the physical object of silver because silver was smelted with mercury, and mercury was the Roman name for the Greek god, Hermes, who is the god of messengers and travel. And I think translation is just the travel of messages from peoples and places to other peoples and places. And, of course, Hermes is where we get hermeneutics, which is about meaning. So, it all comes together so nicely.
Kaiser: Yeah, it really does. I mean, it’s so layered and just works perfectly. It also works so well as a device because silver itself ties so closely in real history with the whole ebb and flow of economic might, as you said earlier, passing from the Spanish empire and the Mayan to England, and then increasingly, in the 18th century, to Qing, China, which was only accepting silver for payment and for porcelain, for silk, and especially for tea, of course. And that was, of course, the impetus, this need to kind of stop the bleeding and reverse the flow of silver that was the driver of the Opium War. So, it really is perfect.
Rebecca: Well, when my editors asked me what I wanted to work on after I’d wrapped up the Poppy War trilogy, I asked them, “What do y’all think of silver capitalism?” And there is this long silence –
Kaiser: They didn’t get it or they didn’t know what you meant.
Rebecca: I think I had not expressed how this project could possibly be commercial. And I think there was a lot of… Because I think about themes first when I’m writing. And the entire time I was trying to pitch this project to them, it was just, oh, silver capitalism, Industrial Revolution, England, China. But because the characters and the stakes came last, there was so much hesitation up until the first draft was turned in whether this book was sellable.
Kaiser: Hmm. Wow. But where I was going with this was, is it silicon now, which these days is the closest thing to magic? Maybe today it’s silicon and semiconductors made from it, but tomorrow it might be like lithium ion because we’re dependent. But I feel like there is this substrate, which in your case is silver, but it feels politically relevant today, again, with the United States and China and all these efforts to sort of limit China’s access right now to advanced silicon. I wonder if that’s something that crossed your mind as you were of putting this book together.
Rebecca: In terms of modern technological parallels, I don’t think about silicon so much as I think about AI, which has really dominated the conversation of, is this tool inherently good or bad? And what could it possibly do for labor markets if we can train AI to do jobs that it takes like 10 humans of all day to do? I see, echoed again and again, the exact same language that people were using in debates during the Industrial Revolution, language which I imitate in talking about silver, about whether this is an inherently evil tool or whether it just is a neutral tool that depends on who’s using it and for what purposes. And if you have something that can replace human labor and people are talking about it in a way that seems like, “Oh, this will usher us into a utopia,” well, what do you do about the people who are now out of jobs? How do you redistribute that wealth equally? It’s really just the same debate over and over again.
Kaiser: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in your book, you actually rescued the Luddites from the kind of aspersion into which common usage has now cast that group.
Rebecca: History has really done the Luddites dirty, but they had points.
Kaiser: Yeah, no, absolutely. I’d be smashing some power looms if I were them too. One person who I just knew would read this book, and he’s the same individual who turned me onto Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, to which your novel has probably… You’re probably sick of hearing that comparison — anyway is Brendan O’Kane. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him, but he’s a translator. I wasn’t surprised that he’d read it. And we chatted about your novel at length. By the way, for you, listeners, Brendan was somebody who weighed in, in the midst of this recent kerfuffle over the ProPublica Vanity Fair piece about the lab leak theory. And that controversial piece, interestingly, relied very heavily on translation and on the claims of a State Department translator to possess kind of a special knowledge of the arcane language that’s used by the Chinese state in officialese.
That smelled very, very wrong to many of us, including Brendan, who is interviewed, by the way, in James Fallows, The Atlantic’s James Fallows wrote this great substack where he interviewed Brendan. And you’ve got to read it. It’s just fantastic about that whole episode. Anyway, Brendan, among the very many kind things that he said about your book, he said, I’m going to quote him here, “I thought she did a killer job of presenting basic issues of translation theory.” So, he also, by the way, he aired a couple of nitpicky observations, but recognize that he’d come off as very #notallwhite sinologist. I’m not going to out him on any of that. But let’s talk about some of these issues of translation theory that you did surface in the book since most of our listeners are, probably at best, glancingly familiar with the different schools of thought and the major issues that people wrestle with about translation; equivalence and sense equivalence, cultural issues and all that. Maybe you can talk about what some of these issues are because you, again, you’re a theme-first kind of writer, so I’m sure you’ve given it quite a bit of thought. How these issues found their way into your novel and, and maybe even inspired parts of it.
Rebecca: So, I don’t do linguistics, and I was actually pretty new to translation studies when I started writing Babel. I had just started working professionally as a Chinese to English translator about a year before I was drafting Babel. So, these questions were circling around in my head, but I didn’t have much training in them which turned out to be a good thing because then I could give myself that training, but also because I had the advantage that they were taking classes in the 1830s, which means that they don’t have access to a lot of the translation debates that have gone on since. There are such arguments that I wanted to weave into their dialogue because they just seemed so important to the plot, but I didn’t have to cite like Lawrence Venuti and all the big names and contemporary scholarship. I just needed to make them read the German linguistics people that had been publishing in the early 19th century. So, there are debates and the people that they’re citing, all of that is pre-1830, which really limited my reading list.
Kaiser: So, what are the big debates that are raging by the early Victorian era?
Rebecca: Well, interestingly, they’re the same debates that we’re having now. Once again, we just keep having the same argument over and over again. And it really comes down to the phrase, word for word, or sense for sense, which is a question of, oh, when do you… And this asks all these questions of what does accuracy mean? What does faithfulness mean? What does it mean to have integrity in how you approach a translation? And the question which poses a false binary is do you translate each word for word and try to adhere to that sense of accuracy? Do you try to stick to the closest equivalent of whatever Chinese character you’re translating in English? Or do you try to capture the general sense, the feel of the paragraph and imitate the affective response that the original elicits in the audience? And the answer is, well, it really depends on context, and it depends on what the translation is for and who the translation is for.
And well, also, for example, I was in a Zhuangzi this semester with Hunter, which is fantastic because I passed my pre-modern requirement. And I’ll never work with pre-modern texts again. But we did so much translation week after week, and I found… When I’m translating Chinese science fiction, I try not to make my translations read like ethnographies or to emphasize the otherness of the Chinese protagonist. I try to make it a smooth, easily accessible read. But when I’m translating the Zhuangzi, I opt for a complete opposite approach because these are academic translations, and the idea is to emphasize that you understand what grammar structures are at play and the subtle nuances between various words, various Daoist terms.
So, I would come up with these incredibly ridiculously convoluted sentences just to try to imitate the classical Chinese grammar structures that I wanted to prove to Mick I had identified and knew how to work with. And oh, that was a fun class, but I hate that kind of translation. I’m very happy to be in the literary translation where you have more artistic freedom and you don’t get docked points for subbing in a metaphor for a different metaphor.
Kaiser: Right, right, right. I’m wondering now, because I didn’t read the entire trilogy in Chinese, I started it, but people call it, of course, The Three-Body trilogy. It’s not technically called that. But in that trilogy, Ken Liu translated the first and third novels, and Joel Martinson translated the second, and there’s quite a difference in the way they sound. I’m wondering if one of them fell more into a sense for sense and another more into word for word, or is that too simple a kind of… I mean, there are a lot of people who are huge fans of the first and third and didn’t love as much the second. There are other people who really, really loved Joel’s translations of the Dark Forest. I don’t know how you feel about those or whether you even read the English translations.
Rebecca: Oh, the problem is I read them in Chinese. So, I haven’t thought very hard about the different ways to translate it into English. But I do love The Dark Forest above and beyond the other two books, which I think was fun.
Kaiser: It’s a great book, yeah.
Rebecca: But just like the sheer content of The Dark forest, it’s so crazy. The scene where the droplet is decimating the human fleet had my fiancé’s jaw on the floor on a train in Europe randomly. Well, so, but I think in the case of Liú Cíxīn刘慈欣, I mean his Chinese prose is not very beautiful to read. It’s incredibly utilitarian; it’s spare; he just wants to get ideas across. So, that’s an interesting translation case where whatever stylistic flare the translator chooses to put in is really working on quite an empty tapestry of you can really tell stylistic differences, and the translator’s voice must be incredibly present. So, I think it’d be fun to go back and compare the translations to the original and the translators to each other, but not a project I have time for right now.
Kaiser: I just remember one of the things that blew me away was the translation of the Chinese word zhīzi 知子. They translated it in English as sophon, which I thought was just brilliant because, sort of zhī 知 as in knowledge, so the Greek root, soph, and then to make it a particle, sophon. I thought they had a lot of fun with that. I think they had a really good time. Very, very creative. Back to your novel, one of the other biographical details I picked up on when I just was reading a little bit about you was that you were a debater, that you were very active in debate. A while back I taped the conversation, one of my favorite podcasts that I’ve done with a brilliant scholar named Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp about their book Six Faces of Globalization, a lot of that podcast was taken up just talking about ways of thinking.
The approach that kind of drove their work, which, for shorthand, we could just call integrative complexity. But one thing that I had asked them about was what sorts of training, whether just sort of professional training or academic training, best suits somebody to that cognitive approach, one that… They use great phrases like dragonfly eyes; that there is multifocal lens that that looks at a problem in a very kind of naturally interdisciplinary way. One of the things that jumped out at me was that she said that it was her background and debate that really was huge. I can’t help but guess that you were able to put these persuasive arguments in your novel into the mouth of your characters about how they felt about the Hermes Society and what they were doing. The conservatism of Letty, the conflicted nature of your protagonist, of Robin.
I felt like you were able to arm them with a conviction that felt quite authentic so that even the people like that, in their state of torment and ambivalence, they felt really authentic to… Was debate important to you as a writer?
Rebecca: Debate was hugely important for basically every facet of my life. I initially went to Georgetown because I thought I was going to debate for the, the college team and that I would debate for four years and quickly decided I did not want to be a debater anymore and I wanted to focus on schoolwork for once. And I think there’s the obvious arguments about how debate teaches critical thinking and research skills. For me, it certainly introduced me to many, many schools of thought that most high schoolers don’t get any exposure to. So, we were reading authors that often university students wouldn’t pick up until their junior or senior years. Now, how well we interpreted those authors is another question, but knowing how vast certain fields were and what debates were out there as a 13-year-old was very cool. But I think the thing that has helped me beyond anything else is, how do I put it, a tingling connection with the audience.
Because when you’re at that level of competitive debate that I was at, and when you are often giving speeches to rooms of dozens, possibly like hundreds of people, you get this sense of how every word you utter and every way in which you modulate your voice or move your body, it affects the audience’s energy and their connection with you. And when it’s working, it’s really working. When you make a joke and everybody laughs, then you know you have control of the room. When you are putting out your punches or arguments and there’s silence, and you can tell it’s connecting, that feels really good on the flip side, right? When you’re rambling it on and it seems like people have lost interest or have gotten bored, you can feel that connection sever. And I think that’s been immensely helpful in writing prose because if I’m getting bored with a passage, then I know my reader is getting bored. And I think in the back of my mind I’m always thinking of the debate judge listening to those words and either connecting with me or tuning out.
Kaiser: That’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. I guess I don’t really know what distinguishes this genre, but apparently there are some people who would debate as to whether Babel is a YA novel — should it be considered a YA novel? Is that a meaningful category to you? Do you think in those terms?
Rebecca: It’s actually very confusing to me why people keep calling my books YA because none of them are YA. Young adult is a marketing category first and foremost. I think the only way we can draw hard lines about what counts as YA and what doesn’t is what publishers and authors say about their books. So, you have imprints that put out explicitly YA novels that are, in the jacket copy, it says, “This is a YA novel for readers age 14 to 17.” And none of my books have ever been that. They’ve always only ever been put out from adult imprints and meant for adult fantasy readers. But I think there is this annoying tendency for people to automatically assume if the author is young, often if the author is a woman, then she can only be writing frivolous books for children, which is annoying on two fronts.
The first, the idea that it doesn’t take skill to write books for children, right? I mean, it’s really hard to write about difficult issues in a way that is digestible for a 14 to 17-year-olds, and in a way that can teach them, but comfort them. It takes really careful craft and it’s not something that you can just say, “Oh well, this writer’s frivolous, her stories are important. They’re only for kids.” That doesn’t make any sense. But also, I’ve never written for children and I don’t think any of my books are YA, and it irritates me when people say they are.
Kaiser: I can see why. I can totally see why. Yeah. So, I’m not going to spoil for those who haven’t read this, but given the fate of the four young scholars at the heart of the novel, Robin Rami, and Victoire, and Letty, it seems like there’s room for a sequel. Is that something that you were contemplating centered Victoire?
Rebecca: It was never a part of the original proposal. And I don’t think it’s something I have time for right now. I have at least three other books in the pipeline that are taking up all of my attention. But since the books come out, I’ve thought about it more and more, and I think it would be really fun to do a kind of godfather two type sequel that has a prequel storyline and a sequel storyline running together. And so, one half would focus on Griffin and the other half would focus on Victoire. And the problem is I would first have to learn French and also become an expert in civil war history because I think the next obvious playing fields for this world is the American Civil War, but…
Kaiser: That’s right.
Rebecca: I’m not there yet, so give me a decade.
Kaiser: Okay. Well, you’ve got plenty of decades ahead of you, but first in the pipeline is a new novel. I know that people already have some advanced copies of it — and set me up with one. Let’s talk about your forthcoming novel, Yellow Face. What can you tell us about it?
Rebecca: I’m so excited for Yellowface. So, it comes out of May, 2023. Babel was a big stylistic experiment for me. I had just written these three high-octane, fast-paced, epic fantasy novels, and I wanted to do something that was the complete opposite of that. So, I turned to slow ponderous Victorian fiction in the style of Dickens. I really enjoy playing around with different literary voices and genres like that because I get bored very easily and I couldn’t write the same kind of book my entire life. So, Yellowface is another extreme gear change in terms of genre and style. It’s meant to imitate the feeling of reading a Twitter meltdown or watching a train crash in slow motion. It’s incredibly absurdist and ridiculous. It’s a satire about the publishing industry. And, well, you can probably guess from the name Yellowface; it involves a white author who takes the manuscript of a recently deceased Asian-American author and publishes it under her own name.
And she selectively modifies facts about her own biography to mislead readers into thinking that she also is Asian American. And yeah, it’s just this completely ridiculous story about the weirdest aspects of the publishing industry. And the sad thing is, as ridiculous as it gets, it never matches the horror of actual scandals that have happened in publishing over the last few years. And I’m sure it will continue to happen.
Kaiser: I feel like I read somewhere about somebody who did publish under a Chinese name, a white person publishing under a recognizably Asian surname and being outed for that. And that was around the time that Rachel Dolezal and her whole claim to be black thing was happening. Anyway, yeah, it seems ripped from the headlines. It’ll be great. I can’t wait to read it. And I trust that you will accommodate. I can’t wait.
Rebecca: We’ll set you up.
Kaiser: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Well, I can’t tell you how much of an honor it’s been to talk to you. Thank you so much for making the time to talk. On now to recommendations, but first, a quick reminder that the Sinica Podcast is powered by The China project, and you know the drill. If you like the work that we’re doing, the best thing that you can do is to subscribe to our newsletter. That’s the way to support the work, not only for Sinica, but all the other shows in the Sinica Network. By the way, next week, be on lookout for the first episode of Season 3 of Strangers in China, which is something I’m very immensely proud of. It’s a great magazine format, kind of radio magazine format show by Clay Baldo. And he’s done a spectacular job. I’ll drop two shows next week. One will be a good long interview with Clay about the episode and then the episode itself on the same channel. But make sure to subscribe to Strangers in China as well for the rest of the season.
Anyway, on to recommendations. What do you have for us, Rebecca?
Rebecca: I’m weirdly in the middle of this big Irish kick right now.
Kaiser: Oh, good.
Rebecca: And I saw the movie Banshees of Inisherin a few weeks ago. I’m obsessed with it. It just led in Golden Globes nominations, I think, and it’s just one of the darkest, funniest movies I’ve seen in the past year. I’m a big fan of the director, Martin McDonagh. I liked In Bruges a lot. Well, not as well-known are his plays, which are also brilliant and fantastic. The collection, The Beauty Queen of Leenane and other plays is a good place to start, but there’s just a brand of dark, dark humor that tackles the hardest stuff with such a light touch that I am in awe of, and it’s part of my project to read styles that are as different as possible from my own, and I feel like I’m learning a lot from dear old Martin.
Kaiser: That’s a great recommendation. I will absolutely check that out. Thanks a lot. I have just started for mine. I’ve just only a few chapters into The Passenger, which is the latest novel by Cormac McCarthy. I confess that I actually… I usually don’t do this, but I read a review of it, first, by James Wood in The New Yorker. Despite some issues that he pointed out with it, it was not nearly enough to dissuade me from rushing out and buying and tucking in. It’s really good. It’s quite a departure, actually, from what you’re used to, from Cormac McCarthy. Like you, he’s changed styles. But the review also, James Wood review is really great. He seems to understand him well. He talks about his two types, his two dominant modes. One is afflatus when he’s like declaiming some Old Testament or Homeric kind of poet, and using just bizarre language that doesn’t always make sense. And then his other kind of Hemingway dry defflatus style, but a great review and a great book. So, I recommend them both.
Rebecca: I love The Passenger.
Kaiser: Oh, you read it? You finished it?
Rebecca: Yeah, I loved it. I’m always really excited when writers can do something completely different with their next project, no matter how old they are. So, I have the very cheesy, pretentious experience of finishing the passenger at a whiskey bar by myself. And yeah, I felt so cool reading it, and I am really excited for Stella Maris. I need to go out and get that.
Kaiser: Yeah, so it’s a pair of novels that he’s put out together. Stella Maris is written about the sister who is a main character in The Passenger. So, it’s about a pair of genius physicist brother and sister. Anyway, great, great recommendation. And I’m really looking forward to having some time over the holiday to finish and to read all sorts of other stuff that I need to read. But Rebecca, thank you so much for taking the time.
Rebecca: Thanks for having me. I had so much fun.
Kaiser: Oh, me too, me too.
The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com to tell us how we’re doing or just give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter, if Twitter is still alive by that point, or on Facebook at @thechinaproj. And be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
