Penguin China: interview with Jo Lusby

In 2005, when Penguin opened their first China office, there were no other foreign trade publishers in the country. Books had never been branded, good literary translators were scarce, and the government maintained a tight control on the publishing industry. This was unfamiliar territory for a Western publisher, and those seeking to get a foothold would need a careful and unconventional approach.

Jo Lusby was Penguin’s appointed scout, employed initially for a scoping mission and later to run the Penguin China office. Lusby’s first move was to publish the Chinese bestseller, Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong in English, a book that went on to win the Man Asia Literary Prize and earn Penguin China a reputation both within China and internationally.

Since then, Lusby has made Penguin China an integral part of China’s publishing industry, building the relationships and making the investments necessary to make joint-publishing with China viable. While last week’s post looked at the globalisation of Chinese literature, this week’s looks at the globalisation of its publishing industry, in an interview with a pioneer.

Christen Cornell: When did the Penguin set up the China office, and what was your mission statement at the time?

Jo Lusby: I started working in Beijing March 2005 but the office was formerly established in August. It was actually a nice situation in that they didn’t have a strategy in place when I was hired. The job was to set up something in China, a legal company that could just look at what we could be doing in the area. It was definitely the best way to do it because I think any strategy written about of London would have probably failed.

CC: And were there any other international publishers in China at the time?
JL: We were the first of the trade publishers. Harper and Random set up the year after us, and Hachette set up last year. So we were just one year ahead of them. The educational publishers were all here and established already, and very big, so the job really overall was to see in what ways could we be using and developing the Penguin brand in China. That was my overall job. And very quickly we realised we would be doing three things.

We would be buying books from China: and that was the first piece of work I did was to buy a book, was to buy Wolf Totem. We didn’t know at the time that this was actually such a closely held government priority. It’s a big concern of the Central Government now, getting stuff out of China, but that hadn’t really taken off when we started. Translating a Chinese title was much more a gestural move of courtesy on our part, to show we’re not only here to publish our own books, but also to take on new and interesting Chinese books as well. It was the same model that had been used to set up the Penguin India office.

CC: I’ve always wondered if Penguin had used the same model in India.
JL: Yes we had. In India what happened was the original head of the company signed up – I think it was something like six authors, one of whom was Vikram Seth – and essentially ended up launching Indian literature in the English language for Western markets. This was very much a model that had worked for Penguin in the past.

So my three objectives were to: buy some books that we could take out into English; look at ways of developing our English language book imports into China; and look at Chinese language publishing partnerships.

CC: Has the balance of importance between those three objectives changed over time?
JL: In terms of importance, no. They are all equally important to us I would say. I think in revenue terms we earn more money from our English language imports. In the long term we expect to earn more money from Chinese language publishing.

The third area, taking Chinese literature into English, is extremely high profile; it does take up a lot of our time and it does generate quite a lot of income for us. It’s much easier to talk about, and is much quicker in terms of getting it turned around. But in terms of the mix of what we do, the primary gain is the books we are doing in China, in Chinese and English. So that’s selling our big important books from around the world into China in the two different languages: English and Chinese. The translation work, although it is still very important to us, we definitely need time to grow.

CC: And I guess in order to do that translation work you have to invest a lot of resources. You have to build up a network of translators, which is what you’ve been doing through the Chinese English Literary Translation Course.
JL: Right, exactly. The translation workshop exists for a few reasons.
It was partly a government relations exercise, in fact its origins were with this. We were under a lot of pressure from the Chinese government to take books out of Chinese into English, and to pull our weight on that front. However they were not very nuanced in how they approached the subject, particularly in the first year or two of the project, so it was a bit of a blunt instrument for a while. They were just pushing us to take more and more books into English.

Our line was that we didn’t offer vanity publishing services for the Chinese government. We would only take books that we believed were commercially viable, for two reasons: one was that we were a business and we need to make money; and two being that there’s actually no point in taking books that don’t work commercially because in the end all it would do is damage the reputation of Chinese writing. Some of this stuff is unreadable, and it represents a very different kind of writing that’s going on.

So we were very firm, and I think almost alone among foreign publishers; but we were very firm in not taking books that we didn’t believe were commercial for the sake of government relations. What we then started doing was looking at ways that we could do our part and contribute to this for the development of Chinese fiction outside of China, while sticking to our own moral line.

In the course of this conversation with ourselves we met a woman called Kate Griffin from the Arts Council of England who was very keen to support literary translators working into English. She had a project and some funding to support publication in the UK of Chinese works into English. And so she already knew very well the British Centre for Literary Translation, and their translation course at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich. She talked to us about how that works and we realised that this is the perfect model for China.

Apart from it being a government relations exercise the other thing that we became aware of through buying Wolf Totem was that … Well, we used Howard Goldblatt to translate that book, and he is of course the preeminent translator of contemporary Chinese literature into English, but there is only one of him. And I was very conscious of my colleagues in America who were extremely nervous about using translators that didn’t have prominence, didn’t have a proven published background. So we became aware that there was an extremely small and shallow pool of translators that we were trying to recruit from. And in order to do anything, and for the sake of the long-term viability of Chinese translation, what was really needed was investment in the early stage development of translation skills. So we just became very proud to do it, and it became something we were extremely happy to support.

CC: This is straying from the traditional job of the publisher, isn’t it?
JL: It is and it isn’t. The traditional role of the publisher is ultimately to find the people to be able to do what you want to do, and China’s a non-traditional market. As I say, it was partly for PR reasons, and you can’t underestimate the amount of government good will we got out of this, because ultimately they now see us as a supportive player. It cost us a bit of time, but it didn’t cost us very much money.

Penguin actually held the same course in Abu Dhabi recently, in Arabic. We have a new Penguin office in Abu Dhabi for Arabia, and again we decided this was a good approach. It’s a good way for us to get to know people, get to work within literature, a good way to get to know authors. In a way it’s a non-traditional thing for a publisher to do but in a way it’s entirely in our skill set.

And now, partly as a result of the translation course, we are able to publish our own list of between five and eight books a year – books in English, from and about China. Most of these books are Chinese literature in translation, and small numbers are books about China written in English. Participants from the translation course have been signed up to translate two of them so far [The Civil Servant's Notebook by Wang Xiaofang, which will be translated by Eric Abrahamsen, and Blood Crimes by He Jiahong]. So this really is also putting us in the forefront of the minds of the writers and the translators. It actually gives us extremely good access to future works, and the translators of those works.

CC: Do you find you have much competition when you’re trying to buy translation rights from China or are you usually at the head of the queue?

JL: Typically I find most of the books that we end up buying are un-agented, mainly because China is not a traditionally agented market. So typically I think if the book is agented we’re not necessarily at the front of the queue. But I’d say if the author manages the rights themselves then we’re very much at the front of the queue.

CC: And are you personally still looking for the books? I know you were the one who found Wolf Totem but do you still scout for the books?
JL: Yes I do. We’re working on five or six books at the moment all of which I bought for the company. I still look very aggressively. I’ve got a whole stack of [laughs] … a pile of four books that I stupidly asked for last week that I’m interested in doing for the classics. I’ve got a nice, really cool idea that I’d quite like to do something on, but now I’ve got a whole load of big hefty old things to try to get through.

CC: Do you already do Chinese classics into English?
JL: We do. We have a lot. But since we started the guys in classics in London asked us, if there was one classic that we haven’t done from China what should we do? And I said Lu Xun. They had already been thinking about Lu Xun but didn’t really know whether or not it was an absolute ‘must do or else’ situation, and then they got Julia Lovell to do it. It’s taking quite a long while to get the translation in because it’s such a big work.
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CC: I’d like to talk a bit about reading habits in China, which I guess come from purchasing habits. What are the genres that are the bestsellers in China? Are they the same as in Western markets?
JL: They’re similar. But there’s a big difference between the Chinese language and foreign language markets here. I would say in the Chinese language market you see a lot of the typical publishing of developing nations: a lot of books that allow you to become a better person, a richer person, a more successful person. Those books tend to do extremely well. We do very very well with business books in Chinese. Chinese literature is a bigger market however than foreign literature in translation.

But the big shift recently has been in book prices and formats. People are now willing to pay more for a good book if you like, for a hardback book. Typically in the West, a book will come out in hardback and then a year later in paperback, but in China it’s the other way round. It comes out in paperback and then if it does well, it comes out in hardback in a high-end edition. And that’s a very new thing.

CC: Do you think that the growth of the middle class in China will mean a growth in the number of readers, and so a growth in the publishing market?
JL: Yes and no. Actually book reading has been a very established part of Chinese culture and tradition for a very, very long time. It’s more that books are only recently being promoted as a lifestyle choice. That ‘reading this book says this about me.’ That’s a very new thing.

Books just haven’t been branded in China. But with a lot of the branding exercises we do around the Black Classics we’re beginning to see these types of things happen now with Chinese readers. In the past, book publishing was just a state enterprise of the state department, and they look like, to be honest, books that were published by the state: with no pictures on the jacket, no strong branding of one publishing house or another publishing house, no strong author branding particularly. You would never see a bus stop ad’ for a book or an author for example. They are not branded as consumer objects. But that’s just beginning to happen now.

So I mean the way books are being published is changing, I think. Actually, the number of books being published, if anything, is falling, but the books are being sold for more money, and the actual finances of book publishing are definitely growing. So you can earn more money from publishing now than you could before, but I think the actual number of books being published is going down.

It’s partly about having nice formats, good print values, production values, being brave to price your product slightly higher than the market, not being afraid to be criticised on price. It’s easy to make the race to the bottom on price but all you end up doing is making less money.
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CC: Just lastly, do you feel that there’s more of a hunger in China for knowledge about the West than vice versa? Based on book sales and translations.
JL: I don’t think it’s as easy to summarise it as that. I just think it’s … I think the English language is a very dominant language and I think other languages tend to look to the English language, much more than the English language looks to others. French publishing sees far more books published from English into French than French into English. So I think it’s the tyranny of the English language more than anything else, more than being specifically China. /interviewed by Christen Cornell

Want to learn more about Chinese culture discussion, please go to Artspace China at The University of Syndey.

Amy Tan Q&A: China Then and Now, and How to Bridge the Gap

Novelist Amy Tan has spent most of her life examining the divide between China and America through novels that examine the emotional minefields of families and the clashes that come from cultural misunderstandings.

Now the writer — whose novels “The Joy Luck Club,” “The Kitchen God’s Wife” and “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” all tackle the conundrum of Chinese-American identity — is applying her perspective on that divide to this week’s U.S.-China Forum on the Arts and Culture.

The four-day event in Beijing, which begins Wednesday, is sponsored by the Asia Society and the Aspen Institute and will bring together cultural luminaries such as cellist Yo Yo Ma, actress Meryl Streep, chef Alice Waters and film director Joel Coen to “advance cultural understanding” between the United States and China through performances, screenings and panel discussions.

The writer sat down with China Real Time Report to reflect on what she hopes will come of the forum, and what it means to be an American with emotional connections to China. Further detail pls read WSJ's report.

The Chinese Novel Finds New Life Online

Zhang Muye is a thirty-something office worker who shows up to his Chinese investment company on time. Yet to millions of Chinese fans, he is the author of Ghost Blows Out the Light, an internet novel viewed more than 6 million times online. It has sold 600,000 copies in print.
"It's only when I am at work that I can write; when I'm at home, I can't," says Zhang. His novel, which narrates the travails of a gravedigger plagued by ghosts, has been acclaimed across China for its creativity, if not for its critical value. Zhang began writing Ghost to relax and kill time during slow mornings at his office. "I don't think of it as literature," Zhang says. "For me it's just a game."
It's a particularly lucrative game. Zhang is far from unique in China, where writing and reading novels online has become the hobby of an estimated 10 million youth. Yet unlike the music world, where MP3s are threatening to kill off CDs, online novels in China are helping physical books fly off the shelves. Print versions of popular online works sell by the millions and publishers, as well as authors, are cashing in.
"Novel," the top search term on China's biggest search engine, Baidu, yields thousands of Chinese literature websites. More than 100,000 amateurs shirk mundane duties to publish their tales of fantasy and love in installments on these platforms. A handful of anonymous web authors have seen their pageviews soar into the upper seven digits. When that happens, print publishers come knocking.
And it's not just print. Companies from almost every entertainment field, including films and video games, are joining forces, heralding the next generation of Chinese entertainment empires. The creative content of one internet novel can be sold to various national entertainment companies up to five times. A film version of Ghost Blows Out the Light is in pre-production and many popular internet novels have spawned TV series and online games.
"The multi-dimensional utilization of copyright in China has just begun," says Kong Yi, the CEO of Magic Sword, a literary website whose hit series, Killing Immortals, has sold over a million copies. Yi and a few friends first hoisted Magic Sword onto the web in 2001 as a literary hobby, using a few shaky borrowed servers. By 2002, it was ranked in the top 100 websites worldwide on Alexa.com. The borrowed servers threatened to keel over under the weight of the traffic.
In 2003, Magic Sword became a commercial endeavor. It raised $10,000 from investors, got new servers and finally became its creators' day job. Then the leading Chinese portal Tom.com bought Magic Sword, making Yi a millionaire. Magic Sword now has its own halogen-lit offices in a sprawling forest of glassed buildings just outside Beijing.
Magic Sword is now losing a few thousand dollars every year. Confident of future success, Kong Yi compensates for this loss with the money from the acquisition by Tom.com, supplemented by income from ads, fees paid by readers and a string of copyright sales. (As with other Chinese literature sites, anyone can publish stories and most of the content is free, but there is a fee to read the most popular novels.)
Yi's ambitions don't stop there. "I would like to make the company into an entertainment corporation, one that would include a publishing, movie production and video game company," with internet novels at its nucleus, Kong Yi says. By Aventurina King for Wired 08.17.07

Michael Crichton Goes to China

HarperCollins is bringing Michael Crichton to readers in China. The publisher has teamed with the Jilin Publishing Group to release a number of Chinese-language editions of Crichton's books, the first of which, Next, is being released in trade paperback there. Following Next Jilin and HC will release Chinese- language editions of The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery and Airframe.

HC president worldwide, Brian Murray, who made the Crichton announcement in Beijing, also said the publisher is acquiring two titles in a series from local bestseller, Hongying Yang. (The publisher bought world rights to eight books by the author at the Beijing Book Fair in 2007.) The series, Diary of a Smiling Cat (笑猫日记) for readers 7-9, was acquired from Tomorrow Publishing House and will be published by HC simultaneously in English worldwide. According to HC, the books, which follow a talking cat that communicates with its owner and were published in China in 2006, have already sold over 3 million copies in the country.

The moves are part of the house's growing expansion into China, which began back in 2006.


Written by Rachel Deahl

Chopsticks Made in America

Many manufactured goods sold in the United States are made in China.  But one small company in the American state of Georgia is making traditional Chinese chopsticks (筷子), and sending them to China.

Chopsticks are sticks used in many Asian countries to eat food (it’s about one-third of the world’s population). They are mainly made out of wood, but can be made of bamboo or plastic. Most of the world’s chopsticks are made in China. Several hundred Chinese manufacturers produce about sixty three billion pairs of chopsticks a year. Unfortunately, they are running out of wood. One small American company, Georgia Chopsticks recognized this demand. It started producing chopsticks late last year, and makes two million pairs each day.

In central Georgia, sweetgum and poplar trees grow in large numbers. And these trees can make good chopsticks. This is because the wood is not firm and has a nice color. Unlike many Asian chopsticks, these Georgia-made chopsticks do not need to be lightened with chemicals and bleach.

Korean-American Jae Lee, the president of Georgia Chopsticks, says that the world market for chopsticks is huge. “We’ll have seven machines coming in, so it’ll increase to like four million per day. End of this year, we will produce ten million per day.” 

Every chopstick his company makes goes to Asia, where they are sold to stores in China, Korea, and Japan. Right now, Georgia Chopsticks cannot keep up with demand for its product.

It costs Jae Lee less than one cent to make a pair of chopsticks. But he says he is not making any money yet. To earn a profit, he needs to produce more than four million chopsticks a day. He says he hopes to do this in the next month or two.

Download MP3, please check the VOA page.

China Getting Fatter, But Not Like U.S.

When I turn on TV, the most popular commercials showed up are about fitness, diet, or weight loss. Overweight, obviously,  is one of serious problems in the U.S. I usually don't eat cakes, sausages, packed ham which are made there. Because they are either too sweet or too salty. Sometimes, I wonder, do American people enjoy eating those kinds of food everyday? Why the ready-to-bake cake package does contain so much sugar? I don't understand this. We can add an amount as much as we like, can we?

Today, I read a story about young Chinese generation getting overweight problem too. How it happened? I mean, they eat a lot of veges. Some researches conducted in the U.S. show that China is getting fatter, but not like U.S. There are two interesting facts that I want to point here. One is: the richer families in China are, the fatter their kids could be.  Another one is: boys are fat, girls not.

If you are interested in the story, please read at ChinaRealTimeReport 

Eat This, Not That

I don't think that Americans eat fennel until one day I went to our local farmers' market. I was walking around a veggies booth, a box with big light green bulbs caught my attention instantly. It's fennel. What's a surprise! Although there are few leaves on it, I still recognize them. And I realize that we all eat fennel but different part--we eat leaves, they eat bulbs.

Usually, we use fennel leaves to make dumpling (饺子) or Chinese pizza（馅饼）. We cut leaves into tinny pieces, mix them with ground pork, salt, sugar, ground white pepper, soy source, sesame oil, cooking wine, and a little bit finely chopped ginger as filling. The rest of job is very easy. You can make wrappers at home or (to save time ) buy them directly from a Chinese supermarket, like 99 Ranch. If you want to make Chinese pizza, you may have to make the wrappers by yourself because they are much bigger, and there is no way you can buy them.

In terms of the seeds, we both use them as a seasoning but in different ways. We use the whole seed heavily when cook pork, chicken or beef. Europeans and Americans, however, use them to make spice saucages or sauces.

I learned a brief history of fennel. It has been grown for cooking at least since the time of the ancient Romans, who introduced the plant to England. In Italy, the seed is used whole to spice sausages, ground for tomato sauces of all kinds (especially pizza sauce), and also used for pork roast. The English use fennel in almost all fish dishes, especially court bouillon for poaching fish and shellfish. Fennel has an even longer history as a medicinal. The toasted seeds are often chewed as a digestive aid. Whole fish can be baked on a bed of fennel branches for a aromatic and flavorful presentation.

Want to know how to choose good ones? Please see the Food University.

Buying Chinese Fiction: Penguin's Strategy

Penguin China division has been co-publishing Penguin Classic, Children's books and biographies with Chinese local publishing houses since 2005. And its market share is expanding. The division also helps to find Chinese fiction locally and to publish in English in the UK and the US.

Li Jihong (李继宏), English-to-Chinese translator of best sellers The Kite Runner (《追风筝的人》) and Conversations with God (《与神对话》), has just interviewed Penguin CEO John Makinson for Shanghai's Oriental Daily.

At the end of the interview, Li Jihong poses a question about how Penguin chooses the novels it sources in China and publishes in English. He points out that several of Penguin's recent purchases such as English (《英格力士》) by Wang Gang, A Civil Servant's Notes (《公务员笔记》) by Wang Xiaofang, and He Jiahong's Blood Crimes (《血之罪》) are hardly excellent works -- in the China context -- either in terms of market performance or content. This particular question is answered by Jo Lusby, Managing Director of Penguin China.

Her answer is quite interesting:

"When we choose a book, our starting point is principally the tastes of the Western reader; our standard is not the preferences of the Chinese reader. A good-selling book in China is not necessarily appropriate for the Western reader, and will not necessarily sell well in the UK or the US. Our consideration is that we want to select things that will pique the interest of the Western reader. For example, in the eyes of the Western reader, the Chinese government is quite mysterious, so we chose Wang Xiaofang's A Civil Servant's Notes. We believe it is a good book that could only have been written by a Chinese. It provides an insider's perspective, and allows the reader to understand China in depth. Even if this type of book is not well viewed and is not popular [in China], we still believe it is of interest and is worthy of translation into English."

"I don't mind if people say the books we choose aren't first class. We do not seek to [translate and] publish books that were best sellers in China. We want to publish those books capable of changing Western readers' views of China."

By Bruce Humes

See the full interview -- in Chinese, click  here

Northwest Style Cold Noddle

I had a wonderful time last year when I visited my parents, brothers and friends in China. It''s the first time within  five years my family members gathering together. Since it's hot summer, my sister-in-law made delicious northwest style cold noddle(凉面), which took  me back to my memorable childhood in my hometown. Last two days, the city I am living is very hot, it's unusual this year.  What should I make for the dinner? I asked myself. Well, let's make cold noddle this time! So, here is that day's dinner. Enjoy!

Lisa See And Her New Book "Dreams of Joy"

After publishing three Red Princess series (Flower Net, The Interior, and Dragon Bones), and then two in-depth studies of the lives of Chinese women in the 19th and 17th centuries respectively (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love), the Chinese American writer Lisa See wrote a novel Shanghai Girls. In the book, Pearl and May escaped the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the nineteen thirties. The sisters fled to California. Lisa See's new book Dreams of Joy continues the story of the two Chinese sisters : Pearl is forced to return to Shanghai on a search for her daughter.

Dreams of Joy takes place in the nineteen fifties. Pearl’s nineteen- year-old daughter, Joy, is angry at her mother and her Aunt May. So she runs away to China to find the father she has never met. She not only finds him but becomes involved with the changes taking place in the country. Lisa See says this situation was not uncommon at the time. She says many young Chinese were sympathetic to the country’s new government.

LISA SEE: “Actually, there were a lot of Chinese going back to the People’s Republic of China at that time, ninety thousand in one year from Fukien province alone. But also a lot of other people who weren’t Chinese, who were going to China kind of inspired by what was going on there, or even hoping to start a business.”*

Lisa See has written several best-selling novels about Chinese-related subjects. She says those themes have special appeal for her.

LISA SEE: “I’m part Chinese. But I have red hair and freckles so I don’t look very Chinese, but I did grow up in a very traditional Chinese American family. I live in Los Angeles and today, in Los Angeles, I have about four hundred relatives, of which the majority of them are still full Chinese and there there’s this spectrum with me on one end – there are about a dozen that look like me – but then, sort of, this spectrum all the way up to the majority being full Chinese.”

She says she is also part Irish. Like most Americans, she celebrates her ethnicities.

LISA SEE: “I think all of us here in the United States, we all had someone in our families who was brave enough, scared enough, dumb enough, crazy enough to leave their home country to come here. But there is still a part of us that is tied to our original homeland and we all share in that feeling no matter where you came from.”

Lisa See is already at work on her next book. It deals with Chinese American culture from the first half of the twentieth century. Both Shanghai Girls and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan received honorable mentions from the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature. And one of her books has already made it to Hollywood. “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” will be released in movie theaters across America on July fifteenth.

* All quotes from VOA
Find more about the author and her works, please look at her site

Being A Master: Mountain Dew Shaolin Temple Commerical

I saw this Mountain Dew TV commercial a couple of years ago. The product is an American soft drink, but Chinese Kung Fu is used as an advertising concept. They developed the story and the scene that make people feel the spirit of Chinese Kung Fu (功夫): work hard to be a master. You cannot "do the dew" unless you become a master. The commercial is interesting and really touches people's heart in someway.

"I Am Translating, Therefore I Am" -- A Master of Chinese Literature Translator Howard Goldblatt

You might have not heard his name,but you must have read his well known translation works, such as Wolf Totem, Red Sorghum: A Novel of China,Three Sisters,The Moon Opera , The Butcher's Wife and Other Stories, The Garlic Ballads and so on. If you search at Amazon.com, you will get at least seven pages of titles he has translated. This 'behind the scene' hero is Howard Goldblatt, a master of Chinese literature translator. In order to let the English-speaking world appreciate the finest Chinese literature, he retouches the tone of stories. He actually did a creative job for each Chinese classical work. The below is an interview between Mr. Goldblatt and Andrea Lingenfelter for Journal of East-Asian Poetry,translation,and the arts. I thought that's very interest to know him and his journey of  how to get into his Chinese translation career.  Through their dialog, I learned a lesson that you never know what are waiting for you ahead, and just "connect the dots." *
  
What got you into Chinese, and how did you get your start translating fiction?
It's a long story, and it may be too personal to be interesting, but here goes. I went to a state college and was an absolutely abysmal student, a terrible, terrible student. I was a “hail fellow well met” kind of guy and had a lot of fun, but I almost flunked out. They were dying to have students, so you know I had to be an absolutely terrible student if I almost flunked out there. Ironically, the only course I ever dropped in college was a course on Asian history. The guy started writing on the board in Chinese, and I said, “Who needs this? I can barely read English!” When I graduated I realized that I had no skills, and no recognizable talents—none whatsoever. I was so stupid, so irredeemably stupid that I decided to go into the Navy. I was going to be drafted, but I could have gotten out of it. But I joined the Navy, because I was in Long Beach, California, and the Navy was there.

This is the 60s, during the Vietnam war?
This was before Vietnam. But you could see it coming. Anyone else would have looked over at Vietnam and seen how stupid I was. They would have said, “This is not the time to be joining the Navy.” But I went. And I hated it. I was no longer in college where we had fraternity parties and lots of fun and drinking, and I thought my life was going to be a wreck. Out of something like 300 people in this class who they graduated, I think that 290 or so were assigned to destroyers, but for some reason they sent me to Taipei, instead. To this day I can't even begin to imagine how that happened. I wasn't sure where Taipei was. In fact, one of them said, “We're going to send you to Taipei,” and then my orders came in, and the orders said I was going to Taiwan. I said, “Now come on, you said I was going to Taipei!” That's how stupid I was. So I wound up in Taiwan as a communications officer in some big command. The world had opened up for me, I mean 1960, '61, '62. You can imagine what Taiwan was like then for a single man . . .

I can begin to . . .

Perhaps . . . Everything was wide open, absolutely wide open. I had no cares, my duties were light. Once I got drunk and was taking a pedicab drive, and the guy had to get off for some reason and I stole his pedicab . . . . Eventually, I got orders that sent me to a destroyer like everyone else, in Japan. I was a young officer on a small ship. We went into Vietnam, and then Vietnam got hot, and they were starting to send all these John Kerrys. They wanted me to go there, but I looked around, and I said, “No way.” They said, “We'll send you anywhere you want to go, because even if you go someplace else you'll be freeing up someone else.”

So you asked them to send you back to Taiwan?
Yes, and this time I was smart. I started reading—not Chinese—but I started reading books for the first time in my entire life. Then I started studying Chinese and found that was good at it. I mean my ear was good, I could hear it. So I stayed there for another two years or so until my tour of duty was over, and then I went to the Mandarin Center in Taiwan. I got my Chinese pretty good, but then my dad was dying, so I had to come back to the US, where once again I faced the same old problem: What should I do? But one day I ran into an old teacher who talked me into going to graduate school. I applied to every Chinese program I could find and was accepted at only one, San Francisco State University. I went, and I loved it. After I graduated, I taught Chinese for a year or so. But I still didn't know what to do next. And they said, “Keep going,” and I said, “Go where?” And they said, “To a program.” So once again I applied to every one, and this time I was accepted at several places and chose Indiana Bloomington. I found something I do well—it's probably the only thing in the world that I can do, but I found it. Most people don't.

When did translation enter the picture?
When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about Northeastern writers up in Manchukuo, which no one else had been doing. I really sort of discovered Xiao Hong (萧红)—for us here in the States and even for people in China. They didn't know who she was either, really. She'd been lost, but now she's probably about the second most studied and written about writer from that period. Anyway, I translated some stuff by her, plus a piece by Xiao Jun (萧军), which was published, thanks to C.T. Hsia. And I said, “I really like doing this.” It was not a very good translation.

A lot of people first saw your work in Chen Jo-hsi's (陈若曦) The Execution of Mayor Yin (尹县长). How did that project come about?
Originally, Nancy Ing, who was the founding editor of Chinese Pen (Taiwan), was commissioned to do it. She did four of the stories, and then the publisher, Indiana University Press, said they needed to have a translator who wasn't from Taiwan because of the political ramifications. They also said they wanted a native speaker of English. I was an IU graduate, so they came to me. Then I did some Xiao Hong novels and did a few more for university presses over the course of several years while I was trying to get tenure at San Francisco State.

Did they give you tenure on the basis of your translations?
I'd done a lot of writing, and I'd published a book—not a very good one, but I'd published a book. Then one day Grove Press called me up and asked me, “Would you be interested in translating a novel by Zhang Jie (張洁)?” And I said, “Yes, of course.” This was back in the early 80s. That book did reasonably well, so then I decided that this was what I wanted to do.

It sounds like you did something you liked and people responded.
I just consider myself incredibly lucky. And even though I'm an anti-militarist, an old 60s leftist and unreconstructed liberal, I bow down to Uncle Sam, because if he hadn't sent me to Taiwan, where would I be? I'd be dead, I'm sure. I would have had an unspectacular career selling shoes or something, because I had no other talents. And I would have been a racist, and now I'm not. Vietnam also turned me into a pacifist. I've gotten older and more conservative as I go along, but still I haven't lost that perspective. Vietnam did that to me, and to a lot of people—the ones it didn't kill or mess up forever. It gave us a different angle.

Who do you translate for?
I believe first of all that, like an editor, the translator's primary obligation is to the reader, not the writer. I realize that a lot of people don't agree, especially writers. I don't think that these things have to be mutually exclusive, but I do think that we need to produce something that can be readily accepted by an American readership. Ha Jin can get away with writing unidiomatic English and many people are charmed by it, but a translator's English is expected to be idiomatic and contemporary without being flashy.

What are some of the problems specific to translating from Chinese into English?
Not knowing Chinese well enough, not knowing English well enough. Actually, not knowing Chinese well enough isn't a big problem—you can always ask someone. You can ask your author, you can ask your friends. No, the thing that's really killing translation in our field is literalism. Too many translators are afraid of the text, especially when they're first starting out. And I understand that, because I was too. They're all afraid of the text. You need to overcome your fear of the text, put some distance between you and it. You have to because Chinese and English are so different. Take the use of the passive voice, for example, which just runs through the Chinese language. Five different agents for the passive voice! We only have one. And the Chinese use it all the time. It is part of the language, part of the way they express themselves. But if you use it that much in English—God!

So how do you handle linguistic problems like this?
My watchword is: did the Chinese writer write it that way for a particular purpose or did his language dictate it be that way? If it's the latter, then I put it into whatever my language dictates it should be. If I assume that it's idiosyncratic, that the author was trying to defamiliarize the text, to slow the reader down, then I try very much to capture that.

Fear of the text and literalism go hand in hand, don't they? And the translation suffers.
The Chinese novels that get translated without any care about good writing turn out to be crappy reads. They're often done by junior academics who have no feel for English, and who spent all of their time, as you and I did, learning how to speak and read Chinese. We didn't have time for anything else. I've spent all those years since then trying to catch up by reading good stuff in English. But many young academics don't have the time, and then they go to translate something, and they can't handle it—they believe in being literal. They read everything that comes out in Chinese—they read it all. And I want to say, “Stop! Don't read it all. Read something else. Get a sense of what English ought to be.”

Have you found editors here to be helpful with your own translations?
A good editor can help you out, but they're not always aware of the issues. We don't have editors who, number one, know Chinese, and number two, know what good translations are. In addition, they don't realize that a lot of Chinese fiction was hardly edited in the first place.

Why do you think so many books aren't edited well?
Editors are held in such low regard in China. They're no better than copy editors. And then there are the authors. One editor told me about the time a well-known writer brought in this great big brick of a novel. The writer handed it over and said just one thing: “Don't change a word” (一个字不改). Maybe Joyce could have said that to his editor, but I couldn't help thinking, “he's not that good.”

It sounds like you feel that writers have become too godly.
They suck so much oxygen out of the air there's nothing left for anyone else. The editors, the translators, and the publishers are just out of the picture. On the other hand, some writers who won't let anyone touch their original manuscripts can be easy going about translations. They'll say, “Go ahead, do what you want.”

Why do you suppose they're willing to relinquish control over the translated version?
Take Mo Yan (莫言), for example. I really appreciate his attitude about this. He can't read the English, and he says, “It's not my novel anymore, it's yours. It's got my name and my copyright, but it belongs to you.”

So, when it crosses over he's able to let go?
Absolutely. He knows what we're doing for him—we're making him an international figure. He's grateful for that. And he also understands that not everything that is accepted in China is going to be accepted in another country.

A lot of editors in the States these days are also very hands-off.
I don't need that. They're pros. That's what they're paid to do. That was what I really liked about doing Li Rui's (李锐) Silver City (银城故事)—the fact that my editors were so involved. At the same I think the worst feeling I ever had was when I saw their revisions to my translation of that novel. They were real literary people, and they did a lot, I mean a lot, so much so that it was embarrassing. But they told me, “You shouldn't be embarrassed. What you sent us was wonderful—it gave us something to work with. You should see some of the things we get.” And I'm thinking, “God, if people give you worse things than I did, you ought to check the suicide ledgers. I bet people are killing themselves over what you tell them.” And so the editor said to me, “How did we do?” And I said, “You did really well. Thank you very much, on behalf of the author.”

I wonder if it's only Chinese fiction that gets such a thorough overhaul.
Actually, no. A former colleague of mine, Steve Snyder, who translates a lot, did this long study on Haruki Murakami (村上春樹). Before I read that I thought that Chinese was the only literature in the world where editors, agents and publishers all sit down together and say, “Okay, this is a really nice novel. We're going to buy it, and now we're going to change it. We're going to shorten it. We're going to take this out, and we're going to take that out.” It turns out that other people do that too. I talk about this in an essay called, “Think Globally, Edit Locally,” the fact that we're editing what Chinese editors never thought of touching. You get these really cumbersome and awkward but actually brilliant books. But the problem is that some of the people who are bringing these books out in the US don't have a clue what to do—editors, publishers, agents. They'll say, “This is great—now the title has to go—we need a new title.” And I say, “Wow, it already has a title, actually.” There was one book, where I'd agreed to a new title, and the publisher asked me, “Can we make it shorter?” I actually said to my agent, “It's a 250-page novel. How short do they want it to be?” It was just a knee-jerk reaction on their part. They're so used to saying, “How can we make it shorter?”

Have you ever wanted to alter something significantly yourself?
Sure. There's a novel I was asked to translate, Cell Phone (手机), by Liu Zhenyun (刘震云), which I still hope to see published. In the original, the author starts off 30 years ago as a child and sets the scene. Next he does the contemporary text, and then he goes back to his grandmother's period. And that's all fine. But 40 pages into the novel an American would say, y'know this is really boring, and they'll put it down and never get to the real novel. I told the author I would take the first section of the second part, which is only six or eight pages, and put it at the beginning. So first you give it a contemporary setting, and then you do the flashback. The author agreed, and I was absolutely right about it—not because it made a difference in the quality of the novel, but because it made a difference in our ability to sell the novel. Because an American is going to sit there and is going to read eight or ten pages and say, “This is kind of interesting.” And then there's a flashback. “How long is the flashback? Oh, only 30 pages or so—that's not too long.” It'll make sense to them, and they'll get into it. They already know who this guy is. Most of them are just happy as can be. I sometimes wish that writers would think of it themselves, but Chinese writers are very chronological. They're married to the chronology.

That's a good point, and it's something I've noticed as well. Do you think that Chinese readers have different expectations of a work of fiction from Western readers, and that they're willing to give an author more leeway?
Absolutely. Partly because they believe that the writer can dictate the way things are said. And I think they had to read so much crap for so long that if they get something that's interesting they just can't let themselves put it down. They have no trouble with long, long, long novels—400,000- 500,000-word novels. They pick up a book and read it. I think they just assume that that's the way it should be. There's a tolerance, an acceptance quotient that I think the younger generation doesn't have and we don't have here in the West. We're not going to be that tolerant.

When I look at the works you've translated, especially the PRC fiction, I see a lot of historical fiction, or fiction with a historical sweep. Why this preoccupation with history?
First of all, I think that's what the generation of writers that I've been working with the most do best. I'm talking about writers like Mo Yan, Li Rui, Su Tong (苏童), but also Li Yongping (李永平) from Taiwan. They tend to be anti-historians, in terms of their view of China. They want to rewrite history, because they believe they've been fed a line of baloney, but they are historically anchored. The writers that have come to me, like A Lai (阿莱), simply like historical fiction; because I think so much of their own history has been taken from them in terms of truthfulness, and because China has always been absolutely obsessed with history. It's the old idea of wenshi bufen (文史不分), that literature and history are inseparable.

Do you think this preoccupation with the past has adversely affected their ability to write about the present?

Many Chinese novelists don't deal with contemporary values very well. In a lot of cases they've made this leap into representing a new cultural milieu—and Mian Mian (棉棉) probably does it as well as anyone—and they've had to take a lot of it from what they assumed the West—not just America—is all about. They haven't plagiarized, but they've done a lot of copying. But I think they're getting better; because they're saying, “We don't have to keep looking over there. We can just look here.” They have the tools now. They know how to do it. But I don't think the youngsters read enough. I think the problem is that the older generation read a lot but didn't spend enough time on their own craft—although some of them did. And now the young kids don't read enough, because they're too busy living, having a good time.

How well do you think contemporary Chinese novelists handle the depiction of social relations and the interior life?
Historical fiction is what they like to do the most, and I think that they write least well when they're dealing with things like normal human interaction. Have you read Ian McEwan's Saturday? It's a good novel. You really understand how these people deal with each other. In Chinese writing I don't see much of that. I don't think that they get far enough below the surface. They don't get into psychological possibilities, why things happen. I think they want to narrate what happens. And most of the negative reviews I get—except for those about how the translator probably ruined it—say that there's just no sense of getting below the surface, of what makes these people tick. We see what they've done but we're not altogether sure why they do it because Chinese culture doesn't encourage people to express their feelings. I'm probably going to do someone's autobiography—I won't say who—but I can tell you that she's done all of this wonderful stuff, and yet we never get to know her. There's an image that sticks with me. When I was in Harbin around '86 or '87, I saw a post-Cultural Revolution movie . . . something with a flower in the title . . .

Furong zhen” (芙蓉镇)?
Yeah, “Hibiscus Town.” Anyway, all the students at the university came to see it, and a half-dozen of us foreigners were there, too. It's a real tear jerker, and yet there were no tears shed. They just sat there and watched it impassively. I mentioned this to a woman student who was dating one of my American colleagues, and she told me, “We all went back to our rooms and cried our eyes out. But we weren't going to do it in a theater with everyone around us.” I'm going to have to tell this person whose autobiography I may translate, “If you're going to say you did a little dating, you're going to have to tell me how you felt. You're going to have to tell me what was going on, because American readers want to know that. Otherwise, they're going to say, ‘She's flat, she's not a real person.'”

You've translated so much. The number of books on your backlist of translations is stunning. What drives you? And what are you aiming for in your translations?
I translate mainly because I really don't think I could live without it. I don't have to do it every day, but I've invested myself in that and that's my identity. While I mainly translate for myself, my objective is to select stuff that I think deserves a second life and then give it as good a life as possible. And if the author is happy, I'm really happy. And if the author is less than happy, but the reader is happy, I can live with that. I don't think I've ever done anything that absolutely betrayed what the author has given me. I hope I haven't. But we need enrichment in our lives, and fiction is one of those things that helps.

One last question, Howard and I'll let you go. Earlier you mentioned negative reviews. How do you feel when you see one?
I've got ego too—when I'm cut I bleed. I hate reviews when they say bad things about me. But the problem is that I believe them. When they say good things I don't really believe them, but when they say bad things I always believe them.
 
* Quoted from Steven Jobs's Standford Commencement Speech 2005 

Chicken Curry Jiao

Have you ever tried Chicken Curry Jiao (鸡肉咖喱角,"角" means "corner") in any Chinese bakery? If not, you should try. It's one of my favorite treats,especially with breakfast or afternoon tea.It looks like a triangle shape (or other shapes) with many buff layers, filled with chopped onion, ground chicken breast. It's crisp when you bite the outside layers, then you can eat inside the delicious filling. Because I love it so much that I really want to make it at home. And I did it!

Ingredients:
1 tbs oil
1/3 pound ground chicken breast
1/2 onion,chopped
1 tbs curry powder
one egg, blend well  
one box of buff pastry, about to make 18. (you can find at supermarket)
Direction:
Prepare the filling:
Heat a wok over high heat,add the oil and heat until very hot
Stir-fry the onion, chicken breast for 5 minutes
Turn a medium heat
Add curry powder, blend well until onions become soft
Remove the wok, wait the filling compete cool
 
Prepare the buff sheets
Take the buff sheets out of the box,cut the sheet into squares, totally about 18 squares
Place a small amount of the filling into the middle of each square sheet
Fold  one corner to the top corner 
Stick the two sides of the sheet
Brush the triangle surface with egg wash
Place the pastries on the prepared  sheet pan
Preheat the oven with 400 F,place the pan into the up layer of the oven, about 15 minutes
Ready to serve

Thanks yeqiang.com for the three pictures above

Why Home Depot Struggles and IKEA Thrives in China?

At a time when China’s home furnishings market surged 17 percent, the largest U.S. home improvement company Home Depot has been struggling and closed five stores since it entered the China market in 2006.

Analysts pointed to the fact that a “do it yourself” culture does not exist in China. True.  Because labor costs are relatively low, many homeowners would rather hire someone to do the work than do it themselves. Apparently, Home Depot made the same mistake as some other companies that entered China without understanding the local market, which is often dramatically different from their home market.

Unlike consumers in the West, Chinese consumers have no role model from older generations. Home ownership was non-existent about fifteen years ago. It was then very common for a family, sometimes three generations, to share a 300-square-feet room that they used for sleeping, eating and daily activities. A kitchen was not even a necessity as many people simply cooked in a common area outside their room.

In the last fifteen years, home ownership has gone from practically zero to about 70 percent. However, many people have little sense of how to furnish or decorate a home.  They are very eager to learn from the West. This is one of the reasons that IKEA is very popular in China. Their Western-style showrooms provide model bedrooms, dining rooms, and family rooms showing how to furnish them. Their stylish and functional modern furniture is particularly appealing to young couples.

I visited IKEA in Shanghai. The 360,000-square-foot store was packed with people shopping for furniture and household appliances for their new homes. The store offers more than seven thousand products and features a five-hundred-seat restaurant and a spacious and colorful children’s playground. Some people come to IKEA to experience the Western style of living, or simply for recreation, as if it were a theme park.
While Home Depot reduced its stores in China from twelve to seven, IKEA plans to double the number of its stores from its current eight to fifteen by 2015. In a country where millions of new home owners are added each year, companies cannot afford to lose this potentially huge market. Here are some important lessons that we can draw from the Home Depot case:
    * Chinese consumers need to be educated as they have no role models. They are eager to learn but they need guidance. Companies that invest in educating the market can expect to reap handsome rewards.

    * Pay attention to local customers’ preferences. For example, the kitchen is usually small and considered secondary in a Chinese home. Chinese cooking usually blackens the kitchen with soot and grease and is the domain of an ayi, or household helper, who cooks for the family.

    * Most Chinese homeowners live in condominiums rather single family homes. They do not have a garage that can store tools and ladders. A more appealing package would be pre-designed interiors with installation included.

Since the Chinese consumer market is new and still emerging, companies have an opportunity to rebrand their products and services. For example, GM China has done a better job of truly listening to customers than GM North America has. Many middle class Chinese like to drive their parents around on weekends and some can afford to hire chauffeurs. GM’s Cadillac SLS model addresses the needs of the Chinese market for a roomy, luxurious back seat for chauffeur-driven riders.

In order for companies to succeed in a new market, it’s critical that they study the market and adapt to local conditions. It is still not too late for Home Depot to turn itself around in China.

/written by Helen H. Wang, Forbes/

Real Grapes You Should Try

I always miss the grapes grown in China. They are sweet but not too sweet, with a little flower's aroma, such as roses'. The grapes, however,  I bought in the supermarkets in the United States have no taste but sweet. If you have chance to visit in China, especially during the fall season, I strongly recommend that you'd better try grapes called 巨峰葡萄，or 玫瑰香葡萄.

The Facebooks of China

China's fake Facebooks started as mere copycats but now drive innovation in advertising and gaming. They've also built something unique in their country: a place where people can find love, speak out, and be whoever they want to be.

"Know anyone who has any needs? "

"I'm not sure, I can ask around for you."
"Don't you have any needs?"
"I just want to be with someone I love."
"Really, I'm not bad. Give it some thought."

It was the worst pickup attempt that Dong Jin had ever heard. You might think that something was lost in translation, that surely this sounds better in the original Chinese, but you would be wrong. That all this was unfolding online -- Dong, 26, a Beijing teacher, was being approached by a college student who had just friended her on the Chinese social network Renren -- made it even weirder. Scenes like this (many of them, fortunately, less awkward) repeat themselves hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day on the Facebooks of China.

The real Facebook is not available behind the Great Firewall of China, except to netizens rich enough and technologically savvy enough to buy access to proxy servers, because government censors have blocked it as a foreign threat. Twitter and Google are off-limits too.

In the absence of these web titans, dozens of Chinese copycats have sprung up, but none tell a story of evolving, modern China like the fake Facebooks, some of which mimic Facebook down to page architecture and color scheme. The leading social networks on the mainland are Renren, which, like Facebook, initially targeted the college crowd, and Kaixin001 (kaixin means "happy," and the 001 was added to give a techy feel to the name), aimed at young professionals.

In some ways, social networking in China is much like that in the U.S. It has spread well beyond its original target demographic. Office workers stay logged on constantly. Artists, singers, and secretaries post status updates a dozen times a day from their laptops or their cell phones. Grandmothers grow potatoes on local versions of FarmVille.

As with Facebook, the membership rolls are astounding and growing rapidly. In a 1.3 billion-strong nation where less than a third of the populace is online, Renren claims about 165 million users. A slogan on a chalkboard in an employee lounge at its HQ claims, "Every day the number of people joining Renren.com would fill 230 Tiananmen Squares." Kaixin001 says it has 95 million users.

In significant ways, though, online life behind the Great Firewall is different. For one thing, there is no dominant site. By blocking Facebook, the government has unwittingly ignited an especially fierce and litigious competition between Renren and Kaixin001. The two networks have pushed each other strategically and technologically, devising ingenious new ways to advertise to audiences that are even more saturated by marketing than Americans. Also, according to Netpop Research in San Francisco, Chinese Internet users are twice as conversational as American users; in other words, they're twice as likely to post to online forums, chat in chat rooms, or publish blogs. And to the joy of advertisers and marketers, social media is twice as likely to influence Chinese buying decisions as American ones, which explains why brands such as BMW, Estée Lauder, and Lay's have flocked to China's social networks.

Sites like Renren and Kaixin001 are microcosms of today's changing China -- they copy from the West, but then adjust, add, and, yes, even innovate at a world-class level, ultimately creating something unquestionably modern and distinctly Chinese. It would not be too grand to say that these social networks both enable and reflect profound generational changes, especially among Chinese born in the 1980s and 1990s. In a society where the collective has long been emphasized over the individual, first thanks to Confucian values and then because of communism, these sites have created fundamentally new platforms for self-expression. They allow for nonconformity and for opportunities to speak freely that would be unusual, if not impossible, offline. In fact, these platforms might even be the basis for a new culture. "A good culture is about equality, acceptance, and affection," says Han Taiyang, 19, a psychology major at Tsinghua University who uses Renren constantly. "Traditional thinking restrains one's fundamental personality. One must escape."

Put another way, a lot of people in China have needs -- and one of them is a place to be whoever they want to be.

Do not call Wang Xing the Mark Zuckerberg of China. Mark Zuckerberg is the Mark Zuckerberg of China. In 2003, Wang dropped out of a PhD program at the University of Delaware and returned to Beijing to create a local version of Friendster. It flopped. Two years later, he heard about this new thing called Facebook and decided to copy it.

If you want to read more, please click on Fast Company magazine at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/152/the-socialist-networks.html?page=0%2C1

Dreaming in Chinese

I just remember the first time I heard the book Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life,Love, And Language was in the New York Time Book Review section. Since I had the similar experience when I learned English - dreaming in English. And I am curious about how an America woman learned Chinese. So I borrowed the book from the local library and read it. It turns out a very interesting reading experience.

The author Deborah Fallows came to China with her husband and has lived there for three years. She learned Chinese language and characters based on their daily life and the culture context. She mentioned Chinese Pinyin system. There are four tones in the Pinyin system. I believe that it's very confusing to foreigners. For example, 狮，十，使，是, four Chinese characters have the same basic Pinyin letters"shi". But the tones are different. 狮（lion）is with the first tone, shī, a high tone；十（ten）is with the second tone, shí, rising tone；使 （to make）is with the third tone, shǐ, falling then rising；and 是（to be）is with the fourth tone, shì, falling tone.

I think it's also confusing if you heard the word in Chinese, like xīn. It could be the word  新，which means "new", or the word 心，which means "heart". It depends on which context the word is.

When I learned the differences between English and Chinese, I figured out that there is no space between two Chinese characters, but English words do(like "新年" in Chinese, "New Year" in English. ). Ms. Fallow also pointed it out.

The most confusing thing to speak English to me is when I say he/she/it/. In Chinese, they are three different characters 他/她/它 with the same Pinyin -- tā. As a born Chinese speaker, I don't have any problem to say them and never make a mistake on the gender when I heard the word. But once I speak in English, something happened unconsciously.If I say "she", while usually have "he" in my mind. Ms. Fallows talked about this linguistic phenomenon in her book.

Besides the above, the author explained how Chinese people say the directions, how Chinese characters are composed. Anyway, there are lots of knowledge and language learning experience we can read from the book. You also will deeply understand the culture context of China. I am sure that Ms. Fallows has already fallen in love with 按摩 and 拔火罐 of China.  

The daily Chinese:
打包 (dá bāo)：Do you do takeout?
很好 (hěn hǎo): Really good!
不可以 (bù kě yǐ ) : Not allowed
你好(nǐ hǎo) Hello
再见(zài jiàn) Bye Bye
厕所在哪里？(cè suǒ zài nǎ lǐ) Where is the bathroom?
谢谢！(xiè xie) Thanks

Good place look up Chinese Characters at this online dictionary 
You can find the book at amazon.com 

Meet Joe Wong

A molecular biologist walks into a comedy club and goes onstage...

Sounds like the perfect set-up for a joke, right? But in the case of Joe Wong, it actually happened. Joe holds a Ph D in molecular biology, still works for a pharmaceutical company on cancer research and is the comedian du jour in the US, making appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and Ellen. This March, he's headlining the Radio and TV Correspondents’ Association dinner with President Barack Obama* in the audience.

How does a scientist – they don't exactly have a reputation for comedy – decide to make people laugh? For Joe, the realization came quite late.

“I was in college in China when I wrote two sketches. I thought one of them was quite funny. I never really thought about becoming a comedian until I came to the US.”

Joe went to the US in 1994 to attend university. After the company he was working for in Texas closed its doors, Joe moved to Boston, the mecca for stand-up comedy.

“I didn't even know there was an art form called stand-up comedy until I moved to Boston in 2001. I found out that there were comedy clubs here where people could go onstage and tell jokes. I went to a couple of shows and I was addicted,” Joe said. A few months later, he was performing onstage himself.

Joe grew up in Jilin province in northeast China and discovered comedy at a young age. “I grew up in the 70s and 80s and there was very little entertainment. We didn't have a TV, so I listened to the radio a lot. The programs that I enjoyed the most are xiangsheng or crosstalk.”

Crosstalk is about as close to stand-up comedy as you can get in China. It is performed by two people, one to set up the jokes and another to deliver the punchline.

What works in America may not necessarily work in China

Joe describes his comedy as intelligent and observational. “I know a lot of ethnic comedians in America make fun of their ethnic roots – Asians make fun of Asians and Italians make fun of Italians. My comedy is slightly different. It's more about observing American culture from an immigrant's point of view.”

His ethnicity, of course, is part of the routine. “People here are not so used to seeing Asian comedians onstage. I have to say something about my heritage, otherwise, people will keep thinking about it. It's good to say something up front to make people feel comfortable. That's why when I got on Letterman, the first thing I said was 'So, I'm Irish' and basically joked about my ethnic background a little bit. People could laugh and forget about it, then I can move on with my jokes.”

As Joe found out firsthand, though, the jokes that American audience lap up won't necessarily be appreciated by the Chinese.

“I went to Beijing in 2008, which is where all the stand-up comedy happens. I performed at one of the theaters on a Sunday afternoon. I basically translated all my jokes from English to Chinese. Maybe only about two jokes got a strong response. They were play-on-logic jokes, those that don't rely on cultural context.”

In China, a joke from a hundred years ago will still be appreciated by the audience. In the US, jokes have to be new, current and very up-to-date.
One reason could be that there are differences between the American and Chinese brands of humor. Joe points out that in China, humor has more tradition. A joke from a hundred years ago will still be appreciated by the audience. In the US, jokes have to be new, current and very up-to-date. There's also more sarcasm in American humor. Plus, the audience have different expectations.

“In America, they expect stand-up comedy to be very fast-paced; they want to laugh every 10 seconds. In China, you can spend more time setting up the joke, taking your time before delivering the punchline. The audience is not in a huge hurry. They're basically drink tea and eat some peanuts while listening to the jokes.”

A constant struggle

Joe has also made his mark in China. He was on CCTV and has been featured on radio, newspapers and magazines there. His parents, who still live in China and have never been to the US, didn't see the behind-the-scene struggles that Joe faced.

“It's been eight years and a lot of hard work, especially because stand-up comedy is not as popular as it was back in the 80s. It's a labor of love; I didn't make money for years and years. A lot of times, to perform onstage at a comedy club, you have to bring your own audience. As an immigrant, I didn't know anyone in this country, so I ended up talking to people on the streets in winter, trying to convince them to watch the show. The beginning was really tough.”

Joe is currently trying to develop with other comedians a TV series that reflects Asian-American life. “If you watch all the TV shows in America, there's not a single one that's mainly about Asians in the US. In the mid-90s, there was a TV sitcom by Margaret Cho, but it was very short-lived. It's a long shot. It's very hard to get a TV deal and people tend to watch reality shows more than scripted TV shows nowadays.”

Whether he pulls it off or not, Joe will probably continue on trying to make people laugh. “I just love humor. That's kind of the way I see life. You know, in this world, we had Hitler who killed millions of people and the great humanitarian Mother Teresa. But in the end, they both died. That, to me, is the biggest joke. I'm here to harvest jokes from everyday life. That's how I see the world.”

  / Written by Geni Raitisoja /

*President Obama canceled his appearance at the event. US Vice-President Joe Biden was the guest of honor in his stead.