Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale

I just happened to read the book this week. I am impressed by Yang's power of telling a story using her graphic talent. 

When Belle Yang was forced to take refuge in her parents’ home after an abusive boyfriend began stalking her, her father entertained her with stories of old China. The history she’d ignored while growing up became a source of comfort and inspiration, and narrowed the gap separating her—an independent, Chinese-American woman—from her Old World Chinese parents.

In Forget Sorrow, Yang makes her debut into the graphic form with the story of her father’s family, reunited under the House of Yang in Manchuria during the Second World War and struggling—both together and individually—to weather poverty, famine, and, later, Communist oppression. The parallels between Belle Yang’s journey of self-discovery and the lives and choices of her grandfather, his brothers, and their father (the Patriarch) speak powerfully of the conflicts between generations—and of possibilities for reconciliation.

Forget Sorrow demonstrates the power of storytelling and remembrance, as Belle—in telling this story—finds the strength to honor both her father and herself.

The People’s Republic of Chemicals

The name of China is almost obscured by a grey smudge on the title page of The People’s Republic of Chemicals, and this image proves to be apt.  This book examines the crisis caused by toxic smogs that periodically choke vast regions of China and the massive particulate clouds that drift far beyond the country’s borders.

Authors William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs joined forces once before in order to write their climate classic, Smogtown: the Lung Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, a remarkable 2008 exposé and memoir about air quality, politics and health in Southern California’s smog belt. This time, the duo of self-described “smog gumshoes from Los Angeles” go farther afield to investigate air pollution that threatens to put a chokehold on the Pacific Rim. What’s more, Mandarin editions of both books will be available through the Central Party School Publishing House.

No doubt the translators were challenged to render some of the exaggerated gonzo phrases and slang from this “murky yarn of atmospheric pain and karma” into prose that doesn’t come across as glib or simply baffling.

“Ashtray-skied towns” abound and burning coal “cruds its troposphere like cigar smoke in a closet.”  Beijing is described as “the city where your oxygen sometimes came spiced with black char.” A chapter entitled “Tweets for the Wheezy” notes that “a Twitter account had economic superpowers throwing each other the stink eye.” It goes on to describe how the U.S. Embassy in Beijing inadvertently raised a ruckus in 2009 and 2010 by posting hourly readings of particulate pollution as measured on the roof of their former compound. Intended as a service for American travellers and embassy staff, the air quality statistics appeared on @BeijingAir, an embassy-run Twitter page, and showed that the capital’s atmosphere frequently was less healthy than the official daily averages posted by China’s Environmental Protection Bureau would indicate. Chinese officials took umbrage and tried to block the public’s access to these damning numbers.  It’s obvious that Kelly and Jacobs are relentless researchers, and they don’t hide a heavy reliance on secondary sources. They readily confide: “We Googled until our fingers tingled. Then we gasped.”
...
U.S. President Bill Clinton also emerges as an eco-villain. Although Clinton championed environmentalism in the United States, Kelly and Jacobs note how the bilateral trade deals made during his administration got the American consumers hooked on inexpensive Chinese goods. Prices were kept abnormally low because of China’s cheap but dirty energy sources and sweatshop wages paid to labourers. But exporting dirty manufacturing to China could not outsource pollution indefinitely, particularly when antiquated or wasteful methods were used there without modern filters. Regrettably, no provisions prevented China from financing highly contaminating coal-based projects.

“In post-W.T.O. China, something biologically creepy was only a factory pipe away,” the authors observe. They conclude that ultimately, the world cannot escape the consequences of carbon gluttony on its climate. Kelly and Jacobs urge President Xi Jinping “to make eco-restoration as much his legacy as ridding the party of the endemic graft he so loathes.”

Read more at ChinaFile.

A Map of Betrayal, An Ambivalent Double Agent, Torn Between Two Countries

When the Chinese writer Ha Jin came to the U.S. in 1985, he was only planning to stay long enough to finish his graduate degree. After that, he thought, he'd return home and teach English.

But a series of events shocked him into staying permanently, starting with the capture and trial of a Chinese spy named Larry Chin. Chin spent decades infiltrating the CIA, but swore at his trial that he was trying to improve the relations between the two countries.

Larry Chin "claimed that he was basically serving both countries. He used the metaphor 'mother and father' ... really, he was torn by the two countries," Ha Jin tells NPR's Arun Rath.

In 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. Ha Jin soon decided to settle permanently in America.

In the decades years since, his novels and stories have won him international acclaim and a National Book Award.

His newest novel, A Map Of Betrayal, describes the life of a spy who is deeply ambivalent about spying on America, a country he loves as much as China. There are unmistakable echoes of Larry Chin — and, Ha Jin tells Rath, of the novelist's own experiences.

Please read/listen the interview highlights with Hajin at NPR.

Kissing Your Socks Goodbye

By her own account, Marie Kondo was an unusual child, poring over lifestyle magazines to glean organizing techniques and then stealthily practicing them at home and school, confounding her family and bemusing her teachers.

As she writes in “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing,” which comes out this month in the United States and is already a best seller in her native Japan and in Europe, she habitually sneaked into her siblings’ rooms to throw away their unused toys and clothes and ducked out of recess to organize her classroom’s bookshelves and mop closet, grumbling about poor storage methodologies and pining for an S-hook.

Now 30, Ms. Kondo is a celebrity of sorts at home, the subject of a TV movie, with a three-month waiting list for her decluttering services — until recently, that is, because she has stopped taking clients to focus on training others in her methods. Last Friday, I brought her book home to practice them.

What better moment to drill down and ponder the fretful contents of one’s sock drawer? Global and national news was careering from the merely hysterical to the nonsensical (the Ebola cruise ship incident was just peaking). Closer to home, other anxieties beckoned. But in my apartment on Second Avenue, the world was no larger than my closet, and I was talking to my T-shirts.

Let me explain. Ms. Kondo’s decluttering theories are unique, and can be reduced to two basic tenets: Discard everything that does not “spark joy,” after thanking the objects that are getting the heave-ho for their service; and do not buy organizing equipment — your home already has all the storage you need.

Obsessive, gently self-mocking and tender toward the life cycle of, say, a pair of socks, Ms. Kondo delivers her tidy manifesto like a kind of Zen nanny, both hortatory and animistic.

“Don’t just open up your closet and decide after a cursory glance that everything in it gives you a thrill,” she writes. “You must take each outfit in your hand.”

“Does it spark joy?” would seem to set the bar awfully high for a T-shirt or a pair of jeans, but it turns out to be a more efficacious sorting mechanism than the old saws: Is it out of style? Have you worn it in the last year? Does it still fit?

 ...

The contents of one of Ms. Kondo’s own drawers.

You can find YouTube videos of her technique, but it’s not so hard: Fold everything into a long rectangle, then fold that in upon itself to make a smaller rectangle, and then roll that up into a tube, like a sushi roll. Set these upright in your drawers. And pour your heart into it, Ms. Kondo urges: Thank your stuff, it’s been working hard for you.

“When we take our clothes in our hands and fold them neatly,” she writes, “we are, I believe, transmitting energy, which has a positive effect on our clothes.”

She proposes a similarly agreeable technique for hanging clothing. Hang up anything that looks happier hung up, and arrange like with like, working from left to right, with dark, heavy clothing on the left: “Clothes, like people, can relax more freely when in the company of others who are very similar in type, and therefore organizing them by category helps them feel more comfortable and secure.”

Read more at NYTS.

In a Topsy-Turvy World, China Warms to Sci-Fi

Liu Cixin

With a state-owned power plant in nearby Shanxi Province temporarily shut down to reduce air pollution, one of its engineers, Liu Cixin(刘慈欣), is using the free time to work on his hobby: reigning as China’s best-selling science-fiction author.

Along with working on a new novel and advising on screenplay adaptations of his earlier fiction, Mr. Liu, 51, has been promoting the English translation of “The Three-Body Problem,(《三体》)” the first book in his best-selling apocalyptic space opera trilogy. Translated by Ken Liu, an award-winning science-fiction writer in his own right who is based in the United States (the men are not related), it is one of the few Chinese science-fiction novels to be translated into English. It will be released in the United States on Tuesday by Tor Books.

The success of the “Three-Body” series, as it is called in China, has gained a following beyond the small but flourishing science-fiction world here. Since the third book was published in 2010, each entry in the series has sold about 500,000 copies in the original Chinese, making Mr. Liu the best-selling Chinese science-fiction author in decades.

In addition to the usual high school and college-age fans of science fiction, China’s aerospace and Internet industries have embraced the books. Many interpret the battle of civilizations depicted in the series as an allegory for the ruthless competition in the nation’s Internet industry.

The series has also breathed new life into a genre that, here as elsewhere, the literary establishment often marginalizes.

For decades, science fiction was subject to the whims of Communist Party rule. The genre went from being a vehicle for popularizing science for socialist purposes to drawing criticism in 1983 from party newspapers for “spreading pseudoscience and promoting decadent capitalist elements.” When the prestigious People’s Literature literary magazine published four of Mr. Liu’s short stories in 2012, it was a sign that the genre was back in official good graces.

At its core, science fiction capitalizes on uncertainty about the future to push the boundaries of the reader’s imagination. In fast-changing China, stories that lay out what coming years may hold in store have therefore found deeper resonance among readers.

“China is on the path of rapid modernization and progress, kind of like the U.S. during the golden age of science fiction in the ’30s to the ’60s,” Mr. Liu said. “The future in the people’s eyes is full of attractions, temptations and hope. But at the same time, it is also full of threats and challenges. That makes for very fertile soil.”

Chinese science fiction serves another purpose in the eyes of Xia Jia, a science-fiction writer and professor at Xian Jiaotong University. “Chinese science fiction, in a way, has borne the weight of the ‘Chinese dream’ since the genre first appeared in China in the late Qing dynasty,” she said, referring to the turn of the 20th century.

“The dream is about wanting to overtake the Western countries and become a very powerful modern China while still preserving these old elements,” she added. “This is what we who write science fiction in China have to grapple with.”

The “Three-Body” tomes chronicle a march of the human race into the universe set against the recent past, the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution. It is a classic science-fiction story in the style of the British master Arthur C. Clarke, whose work Mr. Liu says he grew up reading. “Everything that I write is a clumsy imitation of Arthur C. Clarke,” he said.

The first book in the series explores the world of the Trisolarans, an alien civilization on the brink of destruction. When a secret military project in China attempts to make contact with aliens, the Trisolarans capture the signals and decide to invade Earth. Back in China, people split into two camps: those who welcome the aliens and those who want to fight them.

The series is likely to be a change of pace for science-fiction fans in the United States, where many leading contemporary writers in the genre are rejecting classic alien-invasion plots in favor of those that take on real-world issues like climate change or shifting gender roles.

Please read more at NYT.

The Birth of Korean Cool

In 1985, a 12-year-old Euny Hong moved with her family from suburban Chicago to Seoul, South Korea. Not just any place in Seoul, South Korea, but a neighborhood known as Apgujeong — the wealthiest, most exclusive cluster of addresses in the Gangnam district. The Hongs, in short, went “Gangnam Style” 27 years before it was a thing. And when it comes to South Korean history — as with meme superstardom — three decades is a long time.

Hong’s new book, “The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture,” loosely follows South Korea’s growth from the mid-60s, when the country’s per capita G.D.P. was less than Ghana’s, to now. Today, South Korea is the 15th-largest economy in the world. From Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video to the chips that Samsung furnishes for Apple’s iPhones, the book explores the confluence of factors that make for Korea’s pop-­cultural perfect storm.

Korea’s vitality lies in hallyu — a wave of cool so pervasive that President Obama name-checked it in a speech. Hong asserts that Korea’s rise is attributable to what the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye calls “soft power”; the country wields influence not through military might but “by peddling a desirable image.” Korea’s government has earmarked a billion-dollar investment fund dedicated to fostering popular culture, and for Koreans raised abroad during the ’70s and early ’80s like Hong and myself, the notion that Seoul has become this fashionable is startling and deeply fascinating. After all, Korea was nicknamed the Hermit Kingdom by 19th-century Western explorers for its reluctance to play with others.

“Korean Cool” chronicles the author’s period of trying to fit in. She recalls toilets that don’t flush, corporal punishment and a Confucian catechism so entrenched that defying your parents results in agonizing shame. Just as Western kids feared the boogeyman, Korean children abroad lived under the constant threat of being “sent back to Korea” for delinquent behavior like smoking cigarettes or getting a C. The chapter on academic pressure rightfully dovetails into harrowing statistics of suicide, “the most common cause of death for Koreans under the age of 40.”

Hong views all of this through the slightly skewed perspective of a tween navigating a new curriculum and a disorienting national identity. Much of the awkward self-consciousness is compounded by noonchi — the Korean art of accurately gauging the infinitesimal cues of any situation in order to avoid social blunders. Missteps betray your standing as a tourist in the motherland, which results in a great deal of scorn and attendant humiliation.

Read the whole review at nytimes.

Charles Tuttle, Publishing Books to Span the East and West

Charles E. Tuttle and his wife, Reiko Tuttle.

Charles Egbert Tuttle, Jr. (April 5, 1915 – June 9, 1993) was an American publisher and book dealer who was internationally recognized for his contributions to understanding between the English- and Japanese-speaking worlds. Belonging to a family long associated with publishing, he travelled to Japan in a military role at the end of World War II, and established a publishing company there. Tuttle was the founder and eponym of the Charles E. Tuttle Company, now named Tuttle Publishing. Many of his company's books on Asian martial arts, particularly those on Japanese martial arts, were the first widely read publications on these subjects in the English language.

Tuttle was born on April 5, 1915, in Rutland, Vermont, United States of America. His family had long been involved in printing books and stationery, dating from the mid-19th century in the US, and tracing their history back to Richard Tottel in the late 16th century in London. His father, Charles E. Tuttle, Sr., published African-American literature and dealt in rare books, and also worked closely with the Vermont Historical Society.Tuttle attended local schools, the Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard University for his education. At university, he studied American history and literature. After graduating in 1937, he worked in the library of Columbia University for a year, then joined the family business.

In 1943, Tuttle's father died and, with World War II in progress, he enlisted in the
United States Army. He completed officer training and, when the war ended, was selected as part of the Allied forces occupying Japan.He arrived in Tokyo in October 1945, expecting to take charge of the library of the Diet of Japan (as he had been ordered), only to find that General Douglas MacArthur's staff had changed his assignment. He spent the next two years helping the Japanese newspaper industry. In 1947, Tuttle met Reiko Chiba, who belonged to a wealthy Japanese family from Hokkaidō; the two were married in 1951.

Tuttle founded his publishing company in Tokyo in 1948, with the mission to publish "books to span the East and West." His company was the 31st corporation approved by the occupying administration. In its first year of operation, it imported and distributed US paperback publications to the occupying forces, and the next year, it released its first publication. In 1951, the company began an intensive publishing program, producing English translations of contemporary Japanese literature, dictionaries of Japanese and other Asian languages, books on Japanese art and culture, and books on Japanese martial arts. Notably, many of its books on Asian martial arts were the first widely read publications on these subjects in the English language.

In 1971, the Association of American Publishers named Tuttle as its Publisher of the Year. In June 1978, he and his nephew, Tom Mori, founded the Tuttle-Mori Agency. In 1983, the Japanese government awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure, 3rd Class (Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon), for his contributions to the advancement of Japanese–American understanding. Through the late 1980s, Tuttle focused on the rare book business.

Following a brief illness, Tuttle died in his sleep on June 9, 1993, in his home town of Rutland, and was survived by his wife. Reiko Tuttle continued to run Tuttle Antiquarian Books until 2001, when she sold the business to two long-serving Tuttle company employees. She died on April 14, 2006, in Tokyo. Reflecting on the couple's contribution to Vermont, J. Kevin Graffagnino, Executive Director of the Vermont Historical Society, wrote: "Charles and Reiko Tuttle epitomized Vermont’s tradition of making a difference without fanfare or self-congratulation."

Read more at Wiki, and Tuttle Publishing.

The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream

Arnold Palmer realised how little the locals knew about golf when he agreed to design the first course in China for two generations.

After years of golfing purdah, the sport was gibberish to the Chinese, something that the American golfing legend soon grasped on arriving at the proposed course in the southern province of Guangdong in 1984.

“[I] gave this man a golf ball I had in my pocket. He stared at it for a few moments and then tried to take a bite out of the cover,” Palmer recalls in his memoirs.

“‘No’, I said. ‘You don’t eat it’.”

Dan Washburn relates this tale in The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream. But Washburn’s own contribution to the story of golf in China turns this sense of cultural confusion on its head, arguing that the development of the game actually offers new ways of understanding some of the social and economic changes shaping the country.

Golf’s progress hints at greater social mobility and highlights China’s expanding wealth, for instance. But the boom also points to darker truths, Washburn says, like corruption, environmental neglect, land disputes and the widening gulf between rich and poor.

The idea of the sport as a parable for modern China is an ambitious one. In golfing terms, Washburn risks swinging too hard and spraying 10 different balls in 10 different directions. But he carries it off as the central theme of his book, avoiding most of the traps by telling the stories of three protagonists: a course builder from America; a migrant worker from Guizhou who ends up joining the domestic golf tour; and a farmer from Hainan whose life changes forever when local land is leased to a golf developer.

These lives are the real focus of the book and they provide the glue for the wider account of the game’s emergence in China.

As Arnold Palmer’s story suggests, when golf first reappeared in China in the mid-1980s the game was at ground zero. Mao had denounced it as a “sport for millionaires” and the few courses that had previously existed had long been ploughed over. The game’s bourgeois origins mean that this sense of taboo lives on today. There are no photos of China’s current leaders enjoying a round, for instance.

Zhou Xunshu, the peasant who turns pro, was equally ignorant of the game when he first encountered it. “What’s that?” he asks, on being told that he will be working on a course as a construction worker. But later Zhou is promoted to course security guard and golf becomes his obsession, primarily for the life that it seems to promise. “We all knew golf as a noble sport – a game for rich men,” he explains. “We all felt that just by being in that environment, we had already raised our social standing.”

Zhou learns by watching others, fashioning his own clubs from discarded or broken equipment, and sneaking onto courses to play when everyone else is asleep.

Years later his perseverance pays off when he joins the blue-collar crew of sushi chefs, motorcycle acrobats and hotel managers that made up China’s first domestic tour.

His story – similar in spirit to the struggle of millions of migrant workers to improve their lives – is the most uplifting part of the book. Yet Washburn keeps his sense of perspective, accepting that Zhou’s experience is wholly unusual, and acknowledging that talk of “golf fever” in China is exaggerated.

Even today the game is played by “zero percent of the population” in statistical terms, simply because very few Chinese can afford it.

Learn more, please go to Week in China.

International Magazines Riding China's Ad Wave

Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times

BEIJING — Zena Hao, a 24-year-old publicist, avid follower of fashion trends and proud owner of four Prada handbags, has a new passion: fashion magazines. She carries home hefty copies of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and studies the pictures for inspiration.

“Before university, I didn’t read them that much because the photographs weren’t that good,” Ms. Hao said. “But now in the last three to four years, they’ve gotten so much better.”

Ms. Hao’s enthusiasm for fashion magazines thick with advertisements for Louis Vuitton handbags and Chanel lipsticks are a welcome source of revenue for magazine publishers based in New York. While fashion labels are spending more on magazine advertising in the United States, they’re pouring even more money into magazines across mainland China.

Publishers willing to contend with censorship, relationships with local business partners and low-level corruption common in many Chinese businesses are being rewarded so far.

Late last year, Cosmopolitan editors in China started splitting its monthly issue into two magazines because it was too thick to print. Elle now publishes twice a month because issues had grown to 700 pages. Vogue added four more issues each year to keep up with advertising demand. Hearst is even designing plastic and cloth bags for women to easily carry these heavy magazines home.

“We never take anything for granted. But so far this year, we look like we’re having a pretty good year of growth,” said Duncan Edwards, president and chief executive of Hearst Magazines International, which has agreements to have 22 magazines, including Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, published here. “There is an enormous hunger for information about luxury, and there aren’t many other places you can get that information than in fashion magazines.”

Many Chinese women will spend far more of their income than their Western counterparts on these magazines and the products featured inside them. According to a 2011 study conducted by Bain & Company, mainland China ranked sixth in the world for spending on luxury goods ranked by country. In 2010, it was a $17.7 billion market. Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Gucci remain the most desired luxury brands.

In recent years, Chinese people have been buying up luxury goods around the world.

 

For example, both Vogue and Cosmopolitan cost about $3.15, which is significant when the average monthly individual income in Beijing is about $733. Mr. Edwards added that it was fairly common to find Chinese women who earn $15,000 a year spending $2,000 on one luxury item.

“We’re going through this wonderful period where huge numbers of women are coming out of poverty into the middle class and beyond,” Mr. Edwards said. “Many of these women are choosing to spend on luxury goods.”

Lena Yang, general manager of Hearst Magazines China, who oversees nine publications including Elle and Marie Claire, says that the typical reader of Hearst Magazines in China is a 29.5-year-old woman who is more likely to be single than married. She has an average income of about $1,431 a month and spends $938 a season on luxury watches, $982 on handbags and shoes and $1,066 on clothes.

Ms. Yang says these women often live at home and turn to their parents and grandparents to pay for them. The study also showed that many readers in their 20s saved little.

Read more at The New York Times.

Visual Interpreter of Chinese Culture

Recently, I am reading a book titled "Chip Kidd", and unexpectedly found a British artist who has created fabulous book covers for Penguin China. Here are some of them.

Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:
Chickens occasionally appear in Chinese ink painting, and I think the birds themselves have a certain arrogant, disgruntled look about them so….

 Kafka’s Metamorphosis:
This is a longhorn beetle, which I found in my garden. I’ve never seen a bug like it in the UK, so for me it is a very “Chinese” beetle. The Characters on it’s wing case spell out the book title.

Orwell’s 1984:
Taking 1984 to be a hell on earth, with Big Brother as a Chinese devil….

 Melville’s Moby Dick:
I have another version of this which looks more “Chinese”, the calligraphy making up the whales tale. Unfortunately that image was too dark for the series, so we’ve got…

 If you want to learn more about Jason Pym, please go to his blog.

Four Top Tips for Businesses Expanding into China

Image credit: Stuart Miles

China is certainly a mouth-watering prospect to the SME business. The engine house of the world with a population of 1.3 billion, China seems to offer an opportunity for everyone and a market for everything.

Within publishing this is especially true, as the Chinese publishing industry is growing into one of largest in the world and certainly has the fastest growth rate. Five years ago, Publishing Technology started to set its sights on servicing the Chinese publishing industry and last year the vision finally became a reality. So as Beijing Book Fair, China’s biggest trade publishing event, gets underway out in China I will detail some of the tips and insights we have learnt along the way.


1. Do your homework
As I said, I’d considered establishing a Chinese presence for the company for a few years, but hadn’t moved beyond the developmental stages. In such an expanse of possibility, I realised, a secure, financially viable opportunity must be identified to justify the investment and guarantee success in this complex market.

During these years we attended conferences, spoke to publishers and consultants, quizzed my Chinese contacts, and probed my most trusted colleagues and advisors – all to confirm there was a marketplace and a gap in the market that we could fill. I immersed myself in the minutiae: I took nothing at face value, delving deep into the mechanics of the publishing market in detail, studying competitors, locations, logistics, revenue forecasts and potential clients in order to ensure I had a proper understanding of what our Chinese business would look like. Even so, the last year has thrown up many new aspects I had not seen and many surprises, mostly positive.

While it seemed like slow progress, it is clear now that these years of research, contact building and time invested in the Chinese market were an indispensable part of creating the right conditions for success.


2. Find the right partner
Something else I learned during this time was that on-the-ground knowledge, contacts and understanding is vital for success. While I have a very international background, I quickly realised that my knowledge did not extend to being able to master business in China. I knew we had to find the right local business partner. We were very fortunate to meet Helen Sun, a Chinese academic and publishing professional with deep knowledge of the national and international publishing community, unrivalled contacts and knowledge of publishing in China and an understanding of the technological side of publishing. She, like all successful partners, brought a combination of local contacts, knowledge and enthusiasm, which we as outsiders couldn’t bring to the table.


3. Appreciate Cultural sensitivities
China has a different business psychology to the familiar Western models. No CEO can immediately be aware of all the cultural intricacies inherent in a country’s way of doing business, but one must go in with an open mind and an understanding of one’s own vulnerability, a consciousness of difference – or a business will stumble before it has even started.

For example, in contrast to the strict contractual obligations that govern US and UK business cultures, the Chinese have a more liberal attitude. Tactical alliances and gestures of partnership are statements of goodwill, and do not necessarily become defined strategic movements until your business actually starts. It’s a different mind-set, and one that Western CEOs must orient their thinking towards, and another reason why having a local business partner who knows the lay of the land is invaluable.

Another key aspect to remember, and this is especially true in the publishing world, is that in dealing with the Chinese, you are essentially dealing by proxy with the Chinese government. Taking on-board government sensitivities is intrinsic to making any venture work and why no venture can realistically work there without a Chinese business partner to guide you through the process.

Read the whole article, please go to Publishing Technology. 

Qualcomm Gets A Fourth Mirasol Device: Taiwan's Koobe Jin Yong E-Reader

Early this year, Qualcomm broadened the audience for its mirasol display technology by announcing a new, mirasol-equipped e-reader from Taiwanese company Koobe. The Koobe device, known as the Jin Yong Reader, is the fourth mirasol e-reader to be announced in the past 10 weeks. The rapid adoption indicates increased interest in a technology Qualcomm has spent years developing.

The Jin Yong Reader joins the C18 from China’s Hanvon, the Bambook Sunflower from China’s Shanda Networking Co. and the Kyobo eReader from South Korea’s Kyobo Book Centre. The four companies have been able to bring out e-readers in quick succession because most of them utilize the same base hardware. The Hanvon C18 is an exception; with a thickness of 10 mm and weight of 300 grams it is thinner and lighter than the others, including the new Jin Yong Reader.

The Jin Yong Reader is almost identical in design to the Kyobo eReader, but stands out as the first mirasol e-reader for the Taiwanese market. Qualcomm is currently pouring a reported $1 billion into a mirasol manufacturing facility in Taiwan. Once that “fab” comes online in late 2012, Qualcomm hopes other tech companies will take up the technology for phones, tablets and other devices. Having a mirasol device on sale in Taiwan, where many computing components are made and gadgets are designed, could help popularize the technology.

San Diego-based Qualcomm has been refining mirasol since acquiring the technology from a startup in 2004. Mirasol displays eliminate the need for backlights by reflecting light between two conductive plates. Qualcomm says the setup enables bright colors in direct sunlight, weeks-long battery life and an image refresh rate fast enough to support video.

The combination is key because for years e-readers could not offer color and interactivity without negatively affecting outdoor visibility and battery life. Qualcomm generates most of its revenues from licensing mobile technology and selling mobile chips to other companies but considers mirasol a potentially valuable side business.

Like the other mirasol e-readers on the market, the Jin Yong Reader has a 5.7-inch “XGA” format touchscreen display (1024 x 728 pixels, 223 ppi resolution) and runs on a 1.0 GHz Snapdragon (S2, single-core) processor from Qualcomm. Its operating system is a custom interface on top of a Google Android (version 2.3) base. The e-reader takes its name from the popular Chinese novelist and will come pre-loaded with all 15 of Jin Yong’s books.

Koobe has not disclosed pricing or exact availability for the Jin Yong Reader, but the device is expected to be available soon in Taiwan.

Koobe introduced its first e-reader in 2010. That device was black-and-white-only. The company considers the mirasol-equipped Jin Yong Reader to be its “next-generation” e-reader. Both devices were unveiled at the Taipei International Book Exhibition, the largest book fair in Asia.

If you are interested in reading more from Elizabeth Woyke, please go to Forbes.

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.
*
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.
*
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.

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

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

"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