Miss Chopsticks
Authors: Xinran
XINRAN
Translated from Chinese
by Esther Tyldesley
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781407065748
Published by Vintage 2008
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Copyright © The Good Women of China Ltd. 2007
Translation copyright © Esther Tyldesley 2007
Xinran has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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6 The Three Sisters Explore Nanjing
7 Six and the Teahouse Customers
11 Uncle Two Visits the Gates of Hell
Afterword: The Story After the Story
Editor's Note: A List of Chinese Festivals
For PanPan
My son, my best friend, the powerhouse behind my
motherhood
MISS CHOPSTICKS
Xinran was born in Beijing in 1958 and was a successful journalist and radio presenter in China. In 1997 she moved to London, where she began work on her seminal book about Chinese women's lives,
The Good Women of China
. Since then she has written a regular column for the
Guardian
, appeared frequently on radio and TV, and published the acclaimed
Sky Burial
and a book of her
Guardian
columns called
What the Chinese Don't Eat
. She lives in London but travels regularly to China.
ALSO BY XINRAN
The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices
Sky Burial
What the Chinese Don't Eat
In Chinese, the surname comes before the given name, e.g. âLi Zhongguo', who, in this book, is the eldest son in the Li family. âZhongguo' is the Pinyin way of writing the Chinese character that represents Mr Li's name
. Pinyin is a language system that uses the roman alphabet to represent the sounds of Standard Mandarin. However, in Chinese, different characters can have the same sound.
(pronounced
zhong
), which means âloyalty', sounds exactly the same as
(also pronounced
zhong
), which means âmiddle' or âcentral'. For this reason, the Chinese often hasten to give the meaning of their name when introducing themselves, to avoid confusion. For example, in chapter eleven of
Miss Chopsticks
, âLi Zhongjia', the second brother in the Li family, is asked by the policeman how to write his name: âLi as in the fruit tree? Zhong as in loyalty? Jia as in family?'
Names are further complicated by the fact that a lot of Chinese are called one thing at home, and another on their official registration documents. This is why, in chapter four, the managers at the Dragon Water-Culture Centre are so surprised to find that Five doesn't have any other name but âFive', which sounds like a family nickname.
Translating anything from Chinese into English is never an easy task. The two languages are so different, both structurally and grammatically; individual words often do not have an exact match; what seems pithy and concise in one language can seem clumsy and tedious in the other. I have heard translating between the two compared to capturing a cloud and putting it in a box: you will never quite get it all in â and by the time you are through, the result, though not without its own merits, will no longer be exactly the same shape.
This was particularly true when trying to convey a sense of Xinran's Nanjing, a city with a distinctive regional culture, centuries of history and its own very special cuisine. As a native of Nanjing, Xinran has brought her home city vividly to life in this book. However, her passing references to the things that make Nanjing unique often assume a certain knowledge in the reader, and take a lot of explaining in English. Fortunately for me, Xinran was always happy to help answer my queries. What are
Yangchun
noodles? What was it the Red Guards did with the fine paper from the houses of the courtesans? Surely that thing Nanjing girls love to eat couldn't really be a boiled egg with a feather-covered embryo inside ⦠or could it? But finding answers to my questions was only the beginning of my work: how could I incorporate what
Xinran had told me into the text, while at the same time keeping her lightness of touch and not drowing the reader in information?
Another problem was the shape of the Chinese language. There are not many different sounds in Mandarin, providing endless opportunities for puns, and allowing the Chinese to express a great deal of sly humour in very few syllables. Preserving these flashes of brief, offhand wit is always one of the hardest challenges for a translator, and was particularly so in this book, which is full of such humour. A related challenge was Chinese's great wealth of proverbs, folk sayings and four-character set phrases handed down from the classical language. Xinran's text is richly studded with these idioms, which are highly condensed and contain more information in four or five characters than a long English sentence. Include every detail and you end up with a ponderous, inelegant English style; leave them out and the language becomes sparse, dull, and quite unlike the lively original. How, too, could I convey to the reader the ideas behind the political slogans with which the characters jokingly pepper their conversation without embarking on digressions to explain Chinese politics?
A further issue for this book was its use of register and dialect. In a country bigger than continental Europe, dialects vary hugely from region to region, to the point where some dialects could arguably be classed as different languages altogether (the incident in the dormitory where girls from different provinces of China cannot understand each other is no exaggeration). On top of this, north China is as different from the south as the east is from the west, or Germany from Spain. All of this is reflected in the way people talk. Because the heroines of
Miss Chopsticks
come from a poor, country village, their way of expressing themselves, and the logic behind their thinking, is completely different from that of their city employers.
What's more, the fact that, unlike her sisters, Six has been to school for several years means that she speaks and thinks in yet another register. Trying to give all the characters in this book individual voices, retaining their liveliness and local colour without slipping into parody, was far from simple!
No translation can ever live up to the variety and beauty of the original. Still, I hope that when you open the box that is this book, you will find enough of Xinran's beautiful cloud â the sense of place; her empathy with the resourcefulness and courage of three young women so far from home they seem to have entered another time; the moments of poignancy, and the flashes of subtle sarcasm â to give you a sense of what I found when I first took up
Miss Chopsticks
and began to read.
Esther Tyldesley, Edinburgh, February 2007
Before I came to England in 1997, I worked as a radio presenter in Nanjing. My programme
Words on the Night Breeze
was a talk show that discussed women's issues and, in order to research items for the programme, I frequently travelled to many corners of China. Once, in a small village in the northern province of Shanxi, I heard about a woman who had committed suicide by drinking pesticide because she couldn't give birth to a boy â or, as the Chinese put it, she couldn't âlay eggs'. Virtually no one in the village would attend her funeral, and I asked her husband what he felt about this. âYou can't blame them,' he said, without a trace of rancour. âThey don't want her bad luck to rub off on them. Besides, it's her fault that she only managed to give birth to a handful of chopsticks and no roof-beam.' I was struck by this way of referring to girls and boys. I had never heard it before, but it seemed to epitomise the manner in which the Chinese view the differences between men and women. While men are believed to be the strong providers, who hold up the roof of the household, women are merely fragile, workaday tools, to be used and then discarded. The thought made me feel melancholy, but, as I was standing there pondering the man's words, I heard one of his daughters pipe up from nearby, âI'll show the people in this village who's a chopstick and who's a roof-beam.'