Abstract
This chapter is an attempt to discuss the cultural identities of diasporic Chinese writers in the context of their translation of Chinese cultures and the way the texts are received when they are translated back into Chinese language. The author examines the in-between situation of Chinese American writers in their postmodern literary representation of cultures and discusses the controversies involved around Chinese translations of the works of diasporic Chinese writers while avoiding the cultural presuppositions in both translation and criticism of diasporic Chinese literary works and trying to give the readers a mutually inclusive conception of these writers. The author maintains that the critics should pay attention to both centrifugal and centripetal forces that are inherent in the diasporic writers and adopt a mutually inclusive approach toward their cultural identities.
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Notes
- 1.
Both Birds of Passage and After China are names from two novels by Australian novelist Brian Castro. Birds of Passage is a parody of the comment made by the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, whose comment is cited before the body of the novel:
If there had been no Chinese here, Australians might have almost invented them. Every society at times needs its scapegoat, its target; and it was almost as if the Chinese were the yardstick by which the British in Australia judged themselves, and they judged themselves to be pretty good. They complained that the Chinese were insanitary and that on the diggings they polluted water. They complained that the Chinese were birds of passages who were eager to leave Australia, taking away the gold at the earliest possible moment. They complained that the Chinese were heathen. They were addicted to drugs—opium rather than alcohol—and were the supreme gamblers. Curiously, a version of all these complaints could have been directed against many of the British diggers on the goldfields. The Chinese were specially vulnerable because they were different, and were easily identified.
- 2.
Brian Castro, a diasporic Australian novelist, e-mailed me that he does not like the word hybrid, because it reminds him of the horse. But he does acknowledge that hybrid is a useful one.
- 3.
Henry Yiheng Zhao, for example, has gone to great lengths in identifying the Chinese name of British writer Timothy Mo as Mao Xiangqing (毛翔青)See Zhao Yiheng. “The Limitation of Subject Concerns in Chinese Diaspora Fiction.” Journal of Jinan University 115.2 (2005): 45–50. On the other hand, diasporic Chinese writers themselves also cherish their Chinese name. Brian Castro, an Australian writer with one-fourth Chinese heritage, e-mailed me that he does have a Chinese name, “Go Bok Mun” (高博文), named by his mother, when I mentioned this phenomenon accidentally. This may indicate that the diasporic writers do want to keep a name that maintains the connection with their ancestor culture. The other interesting aspect is that many Sinologists are also described with their Chinese names, like Stephen Owen (宇文所安), John Fairbanks (费正清), and Vogel (傅高义), and their naming system might fall into the broad category of what professor Tu Wei-ming terms “Cultural China.”
- 4.
Translated by Zhang Shi and published by Crown Culture Corporation in Taiwan 1980.
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Wang, G. (2019). Translator Translated: Concentric Routes (Roots) of Cultural Identities of Diasporic Chinese Writers. In: Translation in Diasporic Literatures. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6609-3_1
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