In March 2010, I commenced an arts degree—much to my mother’s dismay. I’d attended the top high school in the country and she expected me to do law or medicine. But neither law nor medicine appealed to me. I enjoyed reading and I was a good writer, so I started with general English subjects, obtaining a full ride (that is, a four-year scholarship).
During my undergraduate studies, I switched majors each semester. My teachers were frustrated by my lack of commitment to any one subject. I went from international relations to art history, Greek to cinema studies. I grew vague and inattentive. I didn’t make many friends. I walked around campus with a sluggish step, my feet dragging the cobbled pathways, the straps of my bag clinging onto the bones of my shoulders, always threatening to fall off. I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to do. I knew only that I enjoyed reading books, and that when I was immersed in a story, I forgot about everything, especially the pressures my mother put on me to find a stable job.
One day in my third year, our Chinese studies professor was sick and a replacement showed up. She was a small, slender woman not yet middle-aged but possessing the air of someone who knew she no longer required the affirmation of men. Her hair was cut short to her scalp, her wrists small enough to slip through the box beside the door to pull out the key to the hall.
‘I am Professor Samantha Egan-Smith,’ the woman announced, though we all knew who she was. ‘I’m teaching this class for the next two weeks while Professor Tsai is recovering.’
She looked delicate yet strong, printing her name on the whiteboard at the front of the room as if to expand her aura of gentle authority.
‘I am not Chinese like Professor Tsai but I lived in China for over a decade.’
She began speaking fluent Mandarin and the atmosphere in the room changed, as though she had transformed into a child prodigy swooping a Rachmaninov number on stage. I noticed pairs of eyes turning to glance at each other, as though they needed to see their shock in another’s eyes to acknowledge the miracle they were witnessing.
They needed to see their shock in another’s eyes to acknowledge the miracle they were witnessing.
To me, it was unremarkable. I could speak fluent English and nobody paid me any attention. Yet when a white person spoke a language from the East, it was as though they had performed a miracle; people responded as if they had seen a dog fly.
Still, I found myself stunned, not by the Professor’s flawless speech or lack of accent, which seems impossible for white people to execute, but by her easy grace, her delicate manner and the way she moved her body, as if it were an extension of the grand lecture hall we were in.
A few weeks later, I settled on translation, specifically English to Chinese. I believed it would motivate me to improve my mother tongue, which I had only studied formally up until high school. Perhaps I believed it would bring my mother and me closer. Or maybe it was just that I was in awe of my new Professor.
At that point, I was still under the impression that a more expansive vocabulary might lead my mother and me to communicate on a deeper level.
I followed this up with an honours thesis (Modern Taiwanese Literature and Translation Trends), then a PhD in literary translation.
I had the temperament for translating, which consists of patience, attentiveness and an abiding obsession about the words on the page. As a translator, I abandoned ego and assumed the voice of the author. I was able to sit at a desk and stare at a screen for five, six, seven hours. I was able to mimic someone else’s voice and love their story more than I loved myself.
I was able to mimic someone else’s voice and love their story more than I loved myself.
The Professor, or Sam as she prefers to be called, was loyal, reliable and stern. She took time to check in on me. She wrote birthday cards and asked after my mother.
She championed my work. I was going to translate excellent new books from abroad, and people in Australia would come to see that Taiwanese authors had brilliant and creative stories. She said I would take Australian writers to East Asia. I would be one of those rare specialists who translated to and from both my working languages.
We co-translated works together. She encouraged me to edit her manuscripts before she sent them to her editors at the university publishing press. Later, she’d give me a small shout-out at the book launch and a mention in the acknowledgements pages, which also included her gratitude for dead Italian writers such as Dante (For opening my imagination to the world of real men, and showing me that they can be funny in a non-perverted way) and Homer, who made her realise that ancient Greek proved difficult, true, but not as difficult as Chinese, which has become her main language.
In another book’s acknowledgements pages, she’d thanked the American translator, Dr Emily Watson, the Chair of Classical Studies at the University of Kentucky, despite engaging in an eighteen-hour Twitter feud with her. On this occasion, the pair could not agree on what a ‘contemporary feminist translation’ of Homer’s works was. (The verdict is still out.)
Thankfully, none of this distracted me from my own work. I juggled freelance jobs, translating short stories from Chinese to English, English to Chinese, teaching undergrads, applying for grants to further my research on Modern Taiwanese to English literary translations. At the beginning of 2015, I became an assistant to the Professor.
I would arrive at her office in the morning, bringing her coffee (oat flat white, no foam) and then ask her to read through my proposals, only to be dismissed and handed a folder with her latest chapter.
‘I need this by noon,’ she’d say, taking the coffee.
At times, I felt like an appendage to her work. She saw me, encouraged me and I loved the light she bestowed on me. This light wasn’t always accurate or flattering though. Once, I signed up to a one-day POC academics symposium at the university run by the Migrant and Refugee Students Club.
She saw me, encouraged me and I loved the light she bestowed on me.
For years, the Professor had encouraged me to participate in early career academic events, but when I told her about the symposium, she said, ‘But you are not P-O-C, Fay, not really.’
‘I’m not white, if you haven’t noticed.’
‘You’re very funny. I meant that your English is perfect. Aren’t those sessions for refugee women? Migrant women?’
‘I am a person of colour,’ I replied. ‘I wasn’t born here.’
Sometimes, her blind spots were staggering. Yet I forgave her quickly.
Throughout my twenties, the university was a strange place I circled, a nebulous collection of arched hallways and ochre corridors and bleached footpaths. The university was one of the country’s oldest—and the sandstone buildings gave the space an air of aristocratic elitism. I admit, this rarely felt good.
Some days, I thought I was going somewhere, that my research had direction, that I would make a mark in the English-to-Chinese translation space. Other days, I felt insignificant, as though what I called ‘work’ was just another way to avoid contact with the real world, with industry.
Inside the classroom, flanked by students and bookshelves, I felt safe. But I began to realise my expanding vocabulary would not close the gulf between my mother and me. I made myself articulate in the English language to compensate for the linguistic void I felt with her. The more I pursued translation, the further I would grow from her.
Inside the classroom, flanked by students and bookshelves, I felt safe.
Sometimes, I wonder if I’d chosen a desk job just to spite her, my mother, who’d only ever known economic stability through manual labour.
These were feelings the Professor would not understand. Though understanding her was required of me.
She often ended her sentences with ‘Understood?’ choosing the past tense to indicate she’d made up her mind about a fact. I’d nod and parrot what she said—whatever it was she was trying to get me to understand. And she’d move on to the next thing, glad that I agreed with her. Sometimes I dissented. Though I learned that rarely ended well.
Once, while the Professor and I were working on a translation of poems by a contemporary Chinese poet, we spent two and a half hours debating a single line: 我跑了. The poet was a woman who’d been imprisoned for running an underground press in Beijing about political dissidents.
The Professor insisted the phrase translated as ‘I escaped’. I said that it read more like ‘I ran away’ and that to assume a motivation would be to hijack the source text. The Professor became visibly agitated.
‘She’s talking about being house-bound, tortured in her own home. Of course she is writing about wanting to escape!’
She kept pointing to the middle word, 跑, as if I needed help to identify exactly the location of our disagreement.
‘Yes, but it should be ran, the direct translation is the action of running, not escaping,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think you might be putting your Anglo-centric views onto her voice?’
‘This is what you don’t understand, Fay,’ she announced, and I felt a vein in my temple throb at the insistence again for me to surrender my opinions.
‘When you are translating, it’s all about the context. You need to negotiate what’s around the sentence and each word contributes to the whole. You need to see the bigger picture. Understood?’
She closed the notebook we were both reading from, as if to say, enough.
I looked down at my hand and noticed I was gripping my pen.
Nobody grows up wanting to be a translator. The profession is too invisible. You are the bridge between two cultures. What I didn’t know was that I’d always remain on the bridge—never settling on either side of the bank.
This is an edited extract from The Honeyeater by Jessie Tu (Allen & Unwin), available now at your local independent bookseller.
