SHEN DANQI

A READER OF TRANSLATIONS (WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS)

translated by Dave Haysom

He Yang had a friend named Guillaume, and Guillaume was interesting. If compelled to expand on “interesting”, she would describe him as “a maker of interesting mistakes”. Their mistake was the time they took off all their clothes and laid down in bed together, and the first thing they discussed on that creaking bed was this: how to ensure that such a mistake never occur again. Then they carried on chatting, and for some reason Guillaume told He Yang that Yukio Mishima was the writer he most revered. He Yang made a noncommittal noise in response; she had never heard of Yukio Mishima. But when she did a search online after she got home, she discovered that Yukio Mishima was, in fact, none other than 三岛记夫.

She sent Guillaume a message: Did I mention that Yukio Mishima is my favourite writer too? (She had to triple check the Anglicised spelling of “三岛记夫”.) Have you read The Golden Temple?

He replied: You must mean The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.

She called him at once, so delighted was she with his reply. “How about ‘Tidal Disturbance’?” she asked as soon as he picked up.

“Yes,” he replied without hesitation, “I do like The Sound of Waves.”

“And ‘The Five Mortal Omens of a Celestial Being’? It’s about reincarnation. My favourite Chinese author loved that book.”

He was a silent for a moment, then took a long breath. The tone of his reply was that of an examinee answering a particularly tricky test question: “That must be The Decay of the Angel.”

That unbearable silence before Guillaume answered the test question should have served as a warning to He Yang: careful now, careful. They both failed to realise that the author they revered was in fact neither Yukio Mishima nor 三岛记夫, but 三島由紀夫 (or みしまゆきお). This was another interesting mistake. It was owing to this mistake that they started dating, and it was owing to this mistake that they parted.

He Yang herself was also an interesting mistake. It was great translators who had created her, more than great authors. They didn’t even have to be great: any translator, anyone who was prepared to strive to find the truth between an original text and a translation (regardless of whether they succeeded) had played their part in nurturing the mistake that was He Yang.

“Do you only read translations?” a curious Guillaume asked her, “and never the originals?”

Ignoring her conscience, He Yang replied with a fib: half the books she read these days, having lived in America all these years, were in English, and half were in Chinese. She was quite comfortable reading in either language.

They were in an antique bookshop in the city centre, wandering between rows of titles which He Yang had mostly already read in Chinese. As she flicked through the illuminated manuscript of the Book of Kells, she felt a sudden twinge of melancholy. Living in this world of English, she told Guillaume, Chinese felt like the Latin in the Book of Kells: a language that was beautiful but never spoken, never heard, becoming a dead thing whose splendour could only be witnessed on the page. Guillaume sighed. Love sparkled bright in his eyes as he gazed at her, full of sadness and joy. It was in this moment, more likely than not, that they fell in love. But. Wait. Was it love they were tumbling into? Or was it a heap of dead, beautiful languages? She remembered that she was still holding the Book of Kells when Guillaume put his arms around her and gave her a typical French kiss.

“My dear,” he said, “we’re so alike, you and I. My French is dead, here, too.”

Dead. 死了. Mort. Mortuus. They gazed at each other, savouring the beautiful sound of the word. To He Yang, the death of a language was spring’s last wilting narcissus, a gradual decay, a hand smeared with sticky juices, a sigh from her mother as she tossed it into the trash. To Guillaume, the death of language was a hare in the crosshairs of a rifle, meat on the block, awaiting the gun’s retort, held by the ears in his father’s hand. A dead language, lying as peacefully as any narcissus or hare, upon He Yang’s lip, upon the pages of the Book of Kells, in this town of A___ where outsiders were rare and neither Chinese nor French were spoken.

They sat surrounded by antique books. By a contemporary artist’s installations of clanging Cola cans. By candles and silverware (where she noticed that he ordered a tableful of classic French cuisine without glancing at the menu). By silhouettes staring at a giant screen. In the darkness he held her hand, and said that it had truly been a Proustian day.

She loved Proust too, He Yang quickly told him, and she had read numerous translations of his magnum opus, each of which had a different title, a different publisher, and different characters. And no ending. The first time she read it was when she had just finished elementary school. The name of the book was Remembering Past Times, and she had very much enjoyed it. It was only several years later that she realised the book she had read was a translation, and furthermore, that it was only the first volume in a series. The thought that she had only read the beginning of the story was staggering. In high school she managed to track down a complete set, and she started reading again. But this time the title of the book she read hidden beneath her stacks of mock exams—turning a page every time she finished one of the questions on the blackboard—was Remembrance of Things Past. But after two volumes she found she had to stop; the disparity in the style was too jarring. When she went back to the preface she discovered that this was a collaborative translation: after one person told the beginning of the story, another took over and continued in a completely different manner. It was a hodgepodge of different voices. Two years ago, when she was home for Spring Festival, she finally managed to find a new edition. Now it was called In Search of Lost Time. One translator. One unadulterated voice. Meticulous annotations and ravishing illustrations. The translator had been a mathematician as a young man, but the language of Proust had lured him into translation. He had pledged to devote his life to translating all seven volumes into Chinese. Now seventy years old, having finished only the first three, he had announced that he would be unable to complete the final four with a quote borrowed from Anatole France: “Life is too short, and Proust is too long.”

When she finished her story, Guillaume let out a deep sigh. Lost time indeed. À la recherché du temps perdu. Perdu, perdu… Thus was one meaning substituted for another, subtly different meaning. When she asked him what he thought of the movie, he shrugged and said the director’s pseudo-profundity was, in fact, utterly shallow. But then, he added, when it came to films he was a bon public. And what was a bon public? He stared at the ceiling as he thought about this, before finally replying: “easily appreciative”.

How was one supposed to translate an answer as ambiguous as “easily appreciative” into Chinese? With an idiom like “soft in the ear” or “with a Buddha’s heart”?

They were an easily appreciative couple at first. No ears could have been softer than theirs, no hearts more Buddha-esque. Like all young people who had received a modern education, they saw nothing wrong in a love that straddled nations. On the contrary, it was awesome, super, the best. He offered her validation in the words of a great French poet—Baudelaire, or Verlain, or one of those guys—who once said that true poetry transcends language.

Baudelaire. Oh yes. They loved the sound of his name, curling around the tongue. Those were their happiest days. Where other couples gossiped on social media about mutual friends, they amused each other by listing the names of the dead. One of them would mention a name, and the other would nod and give a smile of recognition—“oh, you know so-and-so, fancy that”—and then that would be it, the name would not be mentioned again, so-and-so was dispatched to a secret club whose easily appreciative members were all nodding acquaintances.

“Yes, I’ve read Milan Kundera, but I don’t like the books he wrote in French.” (She offers a light kiss.) “Rainer Maria Rilke, ha! Imagine, a man named ‘Maria’.” (He starts to stroke her breast.) “Tsai Ming-liang? Well I never, you even know Tsai Ming-liang?” (He covers her collarbone with kisses.) “Yes, I too like the photography of Masahisa Fukase, his Ravens is so moving.” (Her thigh makes indistinct contact with his crotch.) “Dürrenmatt’s plays are superb—you can appreciate them from the scripts alone.” (The tips of his fingers play arpeggios upon the small of her back.) “Oh, and I almost forgot Hrabal, incomparable Hrabal.” (Such is the joy the name Hrabal brings that she goes right ahead and unfastens her bra.)

But hold on. What was it they actually thought about these names?

What did they make of Kundera?

She: “the scholar of the petty bourgeoisie.”
He: “a cynical, compromised Communist.”

Rilke?

She: “the great Romantic poet, the true inspiration behind the Silver Age of Russian verse.”
He: “honestly, reading his poems in French, I can’t say he has any real talent.”

And Tsai Ming-liang?

She: “you have to watch out for the political analogies in his love stories.”
He: “I think it’s the pressure from his European investors that makes him film the way he does.”

Now they realised how many differences there were between them. And was that really such a great surprise? That there were differences between a born-and-bred Beijinger and an inveterate Marseillais? He grew up on bouillabaisse; she ate Peking duck. When he was little he went fishing in the sea; she watched the acrobats in Tianqiao. He was one of four siblings; she was her parents’ solitary jewel. He studied English with the arrogant disdain of a Frenchman; for her, English was a life buoy that could alter her destiny. On the day he set off for the States, none of his family came with him to the airport—and it went like this, in fact: five years ago, while he was studying for his masters in Lyon, a friend passing by the door of his dorm room had shouted: “Do you want to take a trip to America with me?” And so he set off that very day, carrying only an unfinished detective novel and no backpack when he arrived at Charles De Gaulle airport. On the day she departed for the U.S., there were twenty relatives there to see her off, and she carried a hiker’s backpack, a messenger bag and two suitcases to check in (in addition to the four crates of clothes she had already had shipped.)

The distance between them was truly fathomless.

Their initial arguments were over Kundera, Rilke, and Tsai Ming-liang; later on it was showering in the morning versus showering in the evening, or drinking cold water versus hot. It was through these fights that He Yang gradually became aware that the buffer of foreign language was more likely to misguide arrows of anger than of kindness. Feelings of forgiveness, however, were the exclusive domain of one’s mother tongue. “I do wish you could speak Chinese,” she lamented.

“But Chinese is dead in this city,” Guillaume brightly pointed out, “you said so yourself.”

It was true. She spent her days speaking English in the meetings at her office, writing documents in English, reading English reports. The company posted recordings of the meetings on the internal network so that absent colleagues could hear what they had missed. When she listened to some of these recordings she realised for the first time how domineering she sounded in English. Her boss regularly praised her for being “powerful” or “tough”. But the truth was that she subconsciously slipped into conflict mode when she was speaking English: “None of you shall bully me, foreigner with a work visa though I may be.” Her aggressive English was a layer of armour to protect her inner frailty.

And then, as she drove the five miles home from work, her face gradually relaxed, she took deeper breaths, and she allowed haggardness—or, perhaps, calmness—to reoccupy her features. She parked her car and asked her neighbours how they were doing, secretly delighting in the knowledge that this would be the last English sentence of her day. She hung her key up inside the door, and spent ten minutes talking to her hamster in Chinese. “Have you been a good little hamster today? Did you play on your slide? Did you have a go on the wheel?” Her voice became meek and steady. She spoke English everywhere in this city, but she always spoke Chinese to herself. And she spent more time talking to herself than to other people. But over the last few years she had started to have English dreams, and when she woke up, feeling drained, she was left only with the memory of a few of the ponderous, subordinate-laden sentences her dream-self had clunked together, and feelings of agitation about the fact that she could now dream in English. And in the last few months she had caught herself daydreaming in English at the office, which doubled her sense of shame. Before she went to bed she said a prayer that her dreams would be entirely in Chinese. It was only from Chinese dreams that she would wake up in the morning and announce, with a bleary feeling of contentment, that it had been a good night’s sleep.

It was true, she told Guillaume. In this city, Chinese was dead. She was its tombstone; she was the keeper of its vigil. A vigil keeper could sometimes walk over to the tombstone and converse with the dead.

Guillaume gazed at her absently. She told him she dearly missed Chinese. Especially making love in Chinese.

He laughed. “But we barely bother speaking at all when we make love. We’re too busy panting, and groaning, and yelping, and licking and slapping and grinding.”

“That’s not true. We speak. We say you, me, love, yes, good, nice. We say uhh, ahh, hmm, oooh, hooo, ohhhh. We say fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“But you know, my dear, that none of those words mean anything. And besides, they don’t amount to more than a couple of sentences.”

“That’s what makes them so precious. And intimate.” In any case, He Yang said, they ought to try making love in Chinese. It would be a swap. Next time she would attempt it in French. Making love in Chinese was easy, actually, she told Guillaume. He would only need to learn one verb, and a few simple sentences.

And so she taught Guillaume that one verb. “操. Cao.” No, it’s not an English “ts”, the tip of your tongue needs to be lower down in your mouth. She taught him how to pronounce 操 with the rounded syllables of a Beijinger, the crisp clarity of the Shanghainese, the mellifluous elegance of the Cantonese. But Guillaume wanted to know how they said it in the northeast of China, how those tall, manly Manchurians pronounced the word. When he was with her, he said, he couldn’t stop thinking about The Lover, by Marguerite Duras. In The Lover a wealthy young Chinaman from Manchuria falls in love with a French girl in Vietnam. The passion Guillaume felt for He Yang was as intense as that Manchurian’s love for his French girl.

Guillaume told He Yang that she, with her black hair and brown eyes, was the French girl, and he, the French boy with the golden hair and blue eyes, was her Manchurian lover. She was moved by his words, but also perplexed. They were interesting mistakes. He told her she was beautiful, and she was only going to get more beautiful. Many years from now, he said, strangers would come up to her in the entrances of public places and introduce themselves to her thus: Je vous connais depuis toujours. Tout le mond dit que vous étiez belle lorsque vous étiez jeune, je suis venu pour vous dire que pour moi je vous trouve plus belle maintenant que lorsque vous étiez jeune, j’aimais moins votre visage de jeune femme que celui que vous avez maintenant, dévasté. 

It was a strange feeling for He Yang to hear this practised French recital, because in the years when she first felt the stirrings of love she had read and re-read the passage in Chinese that went like this: “I know you, and I shall never forget you. Back when you were young, everyone said you were so beautiful, but now, I must tell you, you are more beautiful then you were back then. Back then you were a young girl, but I prefer this time-ravaged face.”

They made love in the midst of an assortment of melancholies. He tied her hair into two long French plaits while she was naked, and placed a straw hat on her head. He held her, touched her, just like a Manchurian lover would. He learned to say, “I’m going to 操you. Whether you like it or not. I’m. Going. To. 操. You.” In a perfect northeastern accent. “And you can say oui, oui, oui,” he added, “just like a French girl.”

And later on he cried, sobbing just like the Chinaman in the book who was unable to remain with his French girl. He objected in English: “Yang, you can’t deny how intimate and how close we’ve become.”

Intimate? Yes. Close? No.

He Yang stared blankly out of Guillaume’s damp embrace. It felt just like those days in Beijing, she thought, like another of the mistakes she had repeated hundreds of times. Whenever she wanted to escape the soybean milk and wheat buns and dust and traffic and courtyards, she would open up a translated novel. No matter how refined the Chinese prose of the translator, they always retained a whiff of foreign shores. She had plunged into those unpronounceable names of characters and places, lost between foreign buildings, tasting unfamiliar foods at unusual times of day. They compelled her to process the world through a different kind of grammar, transforming her into a girl with an entirely different genealogy. She attended to every last footnote. She went through the motions of praying alongside the characters to God, or Allah, or some other deity. She starting thinking in inches, degrees Fahrenheit, ounces and teaspoons, adding cinnamon to imaginary cakes. How many centimetres were there in an inch? How much sugar could one fit into a teaspoon? She could always check online, of course, but she found these cryptic conversion rates impossible to remember. So she didn’t know how tall the hero of a novel was supposed to be, or how cold the night was when he walked from a Broadway theatre to the heroine’s home in east Manhattan, or how much sugar and milk she put into his tea when he got there.

All this exoticism was thrilling, at first. A translated novel put up sturdier barricades against reality than any Chinese novel. And it was the presence of these barriers that allowed her to stop worrying about the lurking threat of crushing disenchantment (a foe far too mighty for any Chinese novel to defeat). She flicked through page after page, chapter after chapter, until at some point she discovered she had begun to miss the maudlin sounds of her own city; to long for locals who never thought twice about which word to use, who made such precise use of their limited (but utterly authentic) vocabularies; to grow tired of these translators with the vast linguistic resources at their disposal, forever playing new fugues with their mother tongue. Hence, no matter how wonderful a story she might be holding between her hands, she would still feel compelled to close the book, and step outside, and beg the vendors selling wheat buns and popcorns in the street for salvation:

“Help! I need to hear the sound of real Chinese.”

So when He Yang extracted herself from Guillaume’s embrace and went to the bathroom to carefully wash the smell of him off her, it was not so different from those times when she felt the need to close the covers of a translated novel.

They sat cross-legged on the carpet, an array of candles before them. “Tell me a story by candlelight,” she said. “Tell me one last story.”

So he told her this:

“When I was little I once went to a summer camp. The camp leader told us, very earnestly, that if anyone was unlucky enough to find themselves lost in the wilderness without shelter, they could survive no more than three hours. Without water, three days. Without food, three weeks. Shelter is the most important, then water, then fire, then food. If you can find these four things, you can survive.”

“Wait,” she said, “why is fire more important than food? I could still live for a few weeks even without fire.”

“Because with fire you can heat water, and you won’t get sick if you boil water before you drink it. Fire can keep you warm, and stop you from freezing to death at night. Fire can be a signal to help rescuers find you quickly. If you do manage to find some food, then with a fire you can enjoy roast chicken. Or roast frog. If you’ve gotten to the point where you have to eat frog to survive, then you’d at least hope the frog isn’t going to be raw.”

Sometimes, he told her, he would find himself stricken with anxiety in the middle of the street. If the end of the world were to arrive today, what would he do? How would he survive? But then he would tell himself: don’t worry, it’s fine, so long as I can find shelter, water, fire, and food, it’ll all be okay. Finding shelter would never be a problem in a city this size. He kept some water and a few pieces of chocolate in his bag, so he wasn’t going to die from starvation or dehydration any time soon. But then there was fire. If it really was the end of the world, what was he going to do about fire?

“That’s why I always carry this with me.” He pulled a small object resembling a key from his pocket. “It’s called a firesteel. This is what the Swedish army uses.” He scraped the flint across the key-shaped plate, and a spark appeared at once.

“This is my fire. Shelter, water, fire, food, I’ve got them all. So I feel safe. I’ll be able to survive for at least three weeks.”

“You take it with you everywhere?”

“Even on airplanes. It’s against the law, but I tell the security it’s just a key.” Guillaume paused, and stared at her for a long time. “Now it’s your turn to tell a story,” he said at last.

When He Yang graduated from high school in Beijing, she told him, and came to study in America, she went to a liberal arts college in Minnesota. It was on the side of the hill in the middle of nowhere. It was freezing at the beginning of term, and just when the snow had finally thawed and it was warm enough to think about going out without putting on a jacket, it was time to leave for the summer holidays. She didn’t have a driver’s license during that first term, and internet shopping was yet to really catch on, so every month she would set out in her snow boots and spend two hours trekking across the mountain in order to buy sanitary pads at the nearest supermarket. There were only a few hundred students in each grade, and she was the only one there from China. Mired in loneliness and misgivings, she joined in with every extracurricular activity, from booze-soaked parties to Bible study sessions. Though she did not enjoy being groped by drunken boys any more than she enjoyed scrutinising the sins of her soul the following day, she did not miss a single event. No one danced more enthusiastically than her; no one wrote more penetratingly detailed self-reflections. She suspected this frozen hinterland would drive her mad if she didn’t see other people. And so she gradually became the most sociable, popular student in the whole school. Four years later, her year group voted for her to be the student speaker at their graduation ceremony.

“That’s lovely,” said Guillaume, “a story with a happy ending.”

He Yang shot him a look. “This is just the prelude.”

She spent weeks planning her speech. On the day of the ceremony, she got up at five in the morning to get her outfit and make-up ready. She was living in an apartment that was quite far from the school, with a housemate who worked in the town. He Yang had been planning to drive to school that day as usual, but her housemate offered her a ride on her way to work, insisting that graduation was a day for getting drunk. So it was in her housemate’s car that she arrived at school. When she stepped into the auditorium in her graduation gown, she was stunned to discover her classmates exchanging chitchat in formal suits and dresses. She ducked into the toilets and checked her email inbox. There was a reception before the actual ceremony, she discovered, with a formal dress code, before they would change into their gowns in the afternoon. She called her housemate from the toilets, explained the situation as fast as she could, and begged her to go home, grab a dress, and bring it the women’s bathroom.

She spent the next several hours in a state of agitation. From outside she could hear her classmates’ laughter, accompanied by a continuous clicking of camera shutters. While she remained in the toilets, shooting off one message after another. Her housemate had to ask her boss to let her take a few hours off, which the boss was not happy about at all, but then she managed to get home, and then which dress would be appropriate, and which shoes would match, and when she finally made it out the door there was a massive traffic jam, apparently some kind of accident up ahead… Meanwhile, time continued to flow. Urgent inquiries started popping into her email inbox: first from her classmates, then from her favourite professor, and finally the principal: “Yang, where are you? Why haven’t we seen you all morning?” At last, she couldn’t put it off any longer. She sent her housemate one final message: “I can’t keep waiting. I have to go or I’m going to miss my own speech.”

She opened the door of the toilets and stepped out into the auditorium. She had steeled herself for the mockery. She was ready to be the one ugly duckling wearing a stupid gown, surrounded by her American classmates in their beautiful outfits. To her astonishment, however, she found that they had all changed into their gowns! The reception was over, and the ceremony was about to begin. Her friends rushed over and asked her where she had been all morning. She made up some excuse about not feeling well as she was led to the seat reserved for her beside the principal, who asked if she was feeling okay now. And then it was her turn to speak. Her talk was about how she had successfully integrated into American society, and it was very moving. There were tears in her eyes when she finished, and the entire audience gave her a standing ovation. Yet all the while, another version of her was thinking: “I spent the morning of my graduation hiding in a toilet.” All of this was a hallucination, she thought. She had not integrated into American society at all. She would always be the same Chinese girl wearing a different set of clothes from everyone else.

With the kind of futile romantic gesture that tempted all mistake-making lovers, He Yang suggested they mark the end of their relationship with a lecture on the topic of translation. It was only fitting: with translation they had begun, and with translation they would end. He Yang had heard that Liu He, a professor in the East Asian Studies department of Columbia University, would be visiting A___ to deliver a lecture on her recent research. He Yang’s face came alive as she told Guillaume all about the critic Li Tuo, about scar literature, about the literary journal Today. There had been a brief period, she told him, when the youths of China had not only read foreign authors, but had their own favourite Chinese writers too. She wished she could have been born a few years earlier, so that she could have made her own small contribution to the chaos and written a handful of masterly novels, and would never have ended up here in A___, where the days she spent sitting in the office amounted to an incremental suicide. Seeing that He Yang’s eyes had reddened, Guillaume went to inspect the poster. Lydia L. Liu. The name meant nothing to him. He shrugged.

So you can imagine the kind of mood He Yang was in when, wearing a brand new dress, she followed the security guard’s directions down to a basement room in the university’s shabbiest building. You can imagine how, in that neglected room, she responded to the gloomy faces of her compatriots. How she listened to Liu He, dressed in the head-to-toe black of a businesswoman, as she introduced the topic to which she had devoted the last few years of her research: Google Translate. She explained, in a mechanical tone, how Google Translate could resolve all the problems of comparative literature, and the members of the audience stared at one another in despair. Not one of them had ever imagined that the unassuming translation function of a search engine site could somehow become a darling of literary theory. You can imagine the grim feeling of absurdity that post-modernism managed to grind out of you. You can imagine how He Yang would turn to Guillaume, confused, as they emerged from that arid lecture hall, and find she could not remember how they had ever been in love.

“We broke up,” He Yang told her best friend. “I’m never going to get married. Find me a boyfriend,” she said, only half in jest.

Her friend laughed. “You see, didn’t I tell you? It never works out with foreigners. You need to find a Chinese boy.”

Except the conversation actually went like this:

He Yang: 我分手了, broke up with my French boy. So sad.
Best Friend: I told you so! 我就说洋人不行. [hug].
He Yang: 帮我介绍男朋友吧，I’m scared 我会嫁不出去.
Best Friend: 还是中国人好。中国人就该和中国人谈恋爱嘛，otherwise how could you even overcome the language barrier?

The best friend looked down at her phone, and—seeing that her Chinese boyfriend had invited her to dinner—sent a reply that said: Gotcha. See u at seven, sweetheart.

Not a single Chinese character. It was just so much quicker to type English. This amalgam of English and Chinese was the language of love for the kids of today, a language that could not sustain repetition or introspection.

But if a man had never read the likes of Yukio Mishima in translation, if he wasn’t so passionately attached to a language that was already dead and buried, if he didn’t so earnestly tell her that she was his French girl and he was her Manchurian lover (such an absurd and beautiful line), if he didn’t make all these interesting mistakes with her, how, He Yang wondered, could she ever fall in love with him?

Right, said the best friend, precisely because of this, only a reader of translations with Chinese characteristics who can truly understand all these interesting mistakes, and hence defy disenchantment.

But He Yang did not agree, she told her friend earnestly. Nobody’s relationship with their country was entirely straightforward, no matter how passionately they loved or denounced their nation. He Yang sometimes imagined all the people in the world neatly lined up on the other side of a vast ravine, each standing on the end of a dark bridge. She would close her eyes and stretch out her arms to keep her balance (like a performer in costume stepping out into the incandescent glare) and carefully try to make her way across the bridge, any bridge, every bridge, even if she risked tumbling down into the limbo between one language and another. She would do it, she said, smiling. She would totally do it.

He Yang said she often thought about the character “读”. To read. When we read, do we read aloud, or silently, inside our heads? Reading aloud, we each use our own distinctive voice, accent, vocal cords, breath, but the sound terminates in silence in the end. Reading to ourselves, scanning lines of text with our eyes, the words instill an idea within our hearts; the discrepancies between different languages disappear, and our hearts read the same text, an original isolated from language, with the truth and emotion that lie beneath the literal. Yes, she truly believed in all of this. Truth, virtue and beauty must be as one, just like the Ancient Greeks had innocently hoped.

She felt proud of herself when she reached the end of this speech. It felt good. Sitting on the bus on her way home, she saw the following words printed on the t-shirt of the black guy sitting opposite her: Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand. —Confucius

She spent the ten-minute walk home from the bus stop wracking her brain for the original Chinese of this quote, and her self-satisfaction had turned to bitterness by the time she reached her front door. Apparently she had overestimated her ability to endure the torments of limbo.

The Amazon deliveryman had dropped off a book at her apartment door. Wang in Love and Bondage. She could barely bring herself to utter the words of the title, they sounded so vulgar, and the cover looked like the shoddy sort of pulp you might buy from a street vendor. But this was to be the first English book He Yang had read in four years. A book that had been translated from Chinese. This was, in fact, the only book by He Yang’s favourite Chinese author that was available in English. An interesting beginning, certainly. An interesting mistake? Who could say.

Thus it began:

At twenty-one, I was placed in a production team for reeducation in Yunnan. That year Chen Qingyang was twenty-six and a doctor who happened to work where I did. I was on the fourteenth production team down the mountain, and she was on the fifteenth team up the mountain. One day she came down the mountain to see me, to discuss the fact that she was not damaged goods.

Here she stopped. Was it the unfamiliarity of the translation that brought her to a halt? Or perhaps it was the obstacle that loomed up before all readers confronting a masterpiece, enormous and yet utterly insignificant. A smallish hill; a moderate challenge. With an extra spurt of energy she could get over the hill, but she could also pause here and enjoy feeling pleasantly powerless in its shade. So she paused, and looked out the window at the crowd of kids hopping off their big yellow school bus, a medley of different skin tones and accents.

She lived in the city of A___: Atlanta. In Chinese this was usually phoneticised as 亚特兰大, a meaningless collection of phonemes that produced the sound Yàtèlándà, but it had also been rendered as 饿狼陀. Èlángtuó: hill of hungry wolves. She would never be able to forget this ridiculous name, or the translated novel with which it would always be associated. “Miss Hao Sijia was not especially beautiful, but she had an exceptional charm, and the men who encountered her would often be enraptured, just like the twins of the Tang family were.” Eighty years after it was first written, critical opinion on this translation varied. Some called it breezy and clear; others called it crude. Some said it was the fountainhead of all future translations into Chinese; others said it was the source of a river that had carried readers of translations with Chinese characteristics (such as He Yang) astray. These criticisms meant nothing to He Yang. At the age of ten, she had pushed the stool over to the bookcase so that she could reach up to the top shelf, and from its disorganised muddle of old books she retrieved a four-volume edition of 飘, bound in black. Was it marked with a price of one jiao or two? This was the one true story, as far as she was concerned: Hao Sijia and her Hill of Hungry Wolves, and the black slave who spoke like an uneducated Chinese peasant—these were far more authentic than the Scarlett O’Hara of Gone With the Wind. The four volumes of 飘 were the only books she brought with her to America. Just like Guillaume and his firesteel. He Yang had lost track of how much brand new furniture she had had to dispose of during her many painful relocations, but she had always held onto those four books.

After they broke up, He Yang sent Guillaume one last message: an expert in survival skills had written on his blog that the benefits of a firesteel had been greatly exaggerated. The spark it produced was only capable of igniting fine, dry kindling, and was not much use with the kind of timber you’d actually have to hand in the wild. Whereas most cigarette lighters nowadays were fairly waterproof, and would still work okay if you just wiped them dry.

But Guillaume did not take his firesteel off his keyring. The last message he sent to her read: “I don’t just carry it round because it’s useful.” Just like He Yang would never reread her copy of 飘, out of a fear that her refined adult sensibility would find it laughably crude, and the enchantment would be broken. It would offer no more solace, the only thing literature could still offer this age of perpetual speed. He Yang had been living on Hao Sijia’s Hill of Hungry Wolves for years now. She handed over just as much money as everyone else when it was time to pay taxes, but she did not share their rights when the time came to vote. Forgetting the pressures of office life, she and her colleagues sat around the TV together to drink beer and watch the presidential debates. And whenever she felt dejected (just like now, when she still couldn’t figure out that original Confucius quote no matter how hard she racked her brain), she encouraged herself with these words in Chinese: tomorrow is a new day.