It appears that John Updike has been officially nominated to tackle Chinese literature for The New Yorker. First there was a dual review of Su Tong's My Life as Emperor and Mo Yan's Big Breasts and Wide Hips in 2005, now an examination of Ha Jin's latest novel, A Free Life. We couldn't ask for a better reviewer (though I suppose we could ask for someone more familiar with Chinese literature).
Apart from Updike's general judgment of the book (neither as focused nor compelling as his other works) a good portion of the review is dedicated to language. Ha Jin is compared to Nabokov and Conrad as a writer who came late to English and achieved, if not mastery of it, at least fluency, and although a charitable reader might prefer to overlook language in favor of the story, Updike doesn't. There's a good reason for that – the book is about immigrants, and in particular the immigrant's struggle to learn the language, but judging from Updike's examples, Ha Jin's own English is slipping as well. Nan Wu, the protagonist, is tripped up by verb modifiers and prepositions (how many Chinese students of English have I heard bitterly cursing prepositions!), while Ha Jin himself is tripped up by awkward usages, inflated metaphors, and turns of phrase that sound to Updike as though they were translations from the Mandarin. I was curious about this last – the example given is "If his wife had been of two hearts with him, this family would have fallen apart long ago", but I can't tell whether this might really have been born as a Chinese phrase in Ha Jin's head.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, December 8, 1:39a.m.
- Paste Magazine carries a review of Ha Jin’s newest novel, A Free Life. It seems he’s turned from writing about China from an expat’s vantage point, to writing about America as an immigrant. But 672 pages…?
- Here’s an interesting twist on the journalist’s obligatory China Book: Beijing Confidential is an account written by the Globe and Mail’s former China correspondent, Jan Wong. Wong is Chinese, an alumnus of Peking University, and during the worst of the Cultural Revolution denounced a fellow student, thereby more or less ruining her life. The book is the account of her visit to China in 2003 to find that student, and make some sort of amends.
- Recently I discovered that Chinese ATMs’ habit of asking you, after you’ve finished your business, if you’d like to ‘Print Advice?’ is not the humorous solecism of someone’s electronic dictionary, but rather something we can blame on the British. It seems that there really are ATMs somewhere in England which presume to pronounce upon your personal life, when all you wanted was a record of your transaction. It doesn’t make any sense to them, either.
- A series of recent articles have gotten me all excited about the future of Chinese literature in Western markets. First was this IHT piece, which begins with Xu Xi and goes on to mention a few of the signposts of growing interest in Chinese writing: HarperCollins’ presence here, Penguin’s acquisition of Wolf Totem, and some quotes from Marysia Juszczakiewicz of Creative Work. Then there was this in the Guardian, berating the British for not reading enough translated fiction. Good! Lastly was Nury Vittachi cheerleading for the Man Asian Literary Prize, though since he’s partially responsible for the establishment of the prize, maybe that’s less a sign of the times.
So everything indicates a literary scene that’s trying hard to go global. The publishers are here, and while they’re mostly still huffing and puffing at the water’s edge, they’ll all eventually work up the courage to jump in. But what about readers? The Guardian article is not, when it comes down to it, terribly optimistic about the odds of foreign literature in the UK, and the US is no better. Publishers getting up the gumption to drop cash on a book doesn’t guarantee a readership, especially when no equivalent sum is spent on marketing. Most tellingly, I saw very little discussion of the Man Asian Literary Prize in mainstream western media, or in the literary websites that link together readers, publishers and the media. Sure, it’s a chicken and the egg problem; sure, it’s an evolutionary process, but I’m wondering if that process won’t be a little slower than I’ve been blithely assuming.
- Can someone confirm that, when typing Mongolian or Tibetan into a computer, you first type in Chinese-looking text like so, and then run it through some processor so that it actually comes out in a Mongolian or Tibetan font? This is most curious.
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 20, 6a.m.
