Tse Hao Guang — Pathlight Magazine

Tse Hao Guang on Translating Zhou Jianing

Read Tse Hao Guang's translation of Zhou Jianing's "Graduation Trip" in the "Sense of Place" issue of Pathlight.

I began and finished translating Jianing’s story in the unlikeliest of places. Iowa City was obviously a misnomer, a town compared to my home Singapore, compared to the Shanghai of Jianing’s story. She and I and dozens of other writers had been sucked from across the world into the orbit of the 2016 International Writing Program, which meant hardly anyone belonged, which meant everyone belonged. Jianing approached me shyly and almost worriedly after the first briefing, admitting that she felt her English wasn’t good enough. I could have said the same about my Mandarin, but it wasn’t long before I ended up agreeing to translate her story, this act of bringing Shanghai to Iowa serving as a way to make sense of my own displacement.

Only a small subset of the IWP cohort wrote in English, and I was reminded again of my own love/hate relationship to this language, as well as my relationship to Mandarin Chinese, which I used to describe as obsession/fear. English and Cantonese were the sounds of home, but Mandarin was for the longest time the language of tests and tuition classes. Nobody told me that it could be more than just useful for business, that it could be beautiful. I hated the way I was taught to memorise and regurgitate vocabulary, and the way I felt lost half the time in a language that, teachers often reminded me, was essential to my culture. I think many other Singaporeans might find this a familiar story, including those whose “mother tongue” is Malay or Tamil or something else altogether. I believe I was the only Asian writing exclusively in English at the IWP that year.

It was later in 2018 that I visited Shanghai for the first time. It is a disorienting city, skyscrapers giving way to the French Concession, banners exhorting residents to be cultured draped all over the place. Just across the street from the NYU Shanghai campus, where students are free to jump across the Great Firewall, the restaurant on the ground floor of our hotel, rumoured to be operated by North Korea, is staffed by dour women in hanbok. I’ve wondered several times over the years what might happen if one of them were to dash out of the lobby and into the American university, perhaps screaming help me in a language I do not need to know to understand. My translator friend Shelly Bryant, American-born, Singapore-steeped and Shanghai-based, took us to a wonderful Hunanese restaurant for dinner one night.

It was at another dinner two years prior, hosted by the singular Nieh Hualing for all Chinese writers of the IWP, where I began to understand that Iowa City was not after all an unlikely place to think about the Bund. In an otherwise unremarkable suburban house, over a home-cooked meal, I had the privilege of seeing my friends from the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong poring over black-and-white photographs, recognising the famous faces of fellow-travelers to this small American town. They sat here against this wall, she got into an argument with him. All this mattered because Chinese literary cultures mattered. Instead of writing poetry, which was the original plan, I spent a good part of my Iowa residency making friends and translating.

I was surprised to learn about the Ohel Rachel synagogue in Shanghai at first. It seemed random, out of place. But it also tells a story of the city, one of dispossession and resilience against all odds. Sephardic immigrants arriving in the 1870s built the synagogue, and later Shanghai's open port led to two waves of Jewish refugees seeking shelter here, first fleeing Russian pogroms, then the Nazis. That state of not being quite at home but trying to make a home is precisely what the characters in Jianing’s story find themselves in. Stepping into the empty prayer hall, I was reminded of that same desire to find a place to call my own. Language like sand might shift under my feet, but surely there was a way to carry myself across it, to make legible, to come to rest?

Tse Hao Guang (谢皓光) is the author of The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association (Tinfish Press, 2022) and Deeds of Light (Math Paper Press, 2015), the latter shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. He is a 2016 fellow of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, and the 2018 National Writer-in-Residence at Nanyang Technological University. His poems have been featured in Poem-a-Day, Tammy, New Delta Review, Pain, Minarets, Big Other, Hotel, Asian American Writers' Workshop, Entropy and elsewhere. He was born and raised in Singapore, where he continues to live and work.