Tilted Axis had the pleasure of partnering with the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing and Sinoist Books, for the event Women Writing China: Outside China. Featuring Li Juan and Yan Ge alongside their translators Christopher Payne and Jeremy Tiang, we had insightful discussion around their most recently published works and how their experiences as Chinese women writers have influenced and taken shape in text. Their talks covered ecofeminist ways of looking at distant lands, the concept of alienation and more.
An acclaimed essayist, Li Juan was first published in 1999, and has since written more than ten essay collections. Distant Sunflower Fields, her book translated by Christopher Payne was one of the main texts she spoke of during the event. Her work often details her personal experiences of the landscape and Kazakh nomads of Xinjiang's Altay region. Li begins her talk by bringing up the uniqueness of writing at the western fringes of Chinese culture. She lived in ‘an ancient nomadic existence’ where traditional ways were at risk due to outside cultures, though she stresses that many writers have written under similarly secluded circumstances. One of her most striking comments made to her in her career was about the fact that while many people write about loneliness, not many of us write about the ‘boundless loneliness that one feels amidst the light’. This led to her re-examining the concept of loneliness and through that she came to know herself in another way. About twenty years ago, Li wrote an essay ‘The Man Who Pulls Ramen’, one of the pieces that sparked a period of change in her writing that she still feels shifting till today, the idea that a woman writer is ‘not worth mentioning’.
Another aspect that she draws attention to is the way that the landscape of Xinjiang has a deep impact on its authors, citing the works of writers such as Zhou Tao and Dong Libo for their ‘poetic transparency’ on the earthly ordinary. A worry of hers is that the ‘inertia of tradition’ would be hard to disentangle from in such unreachable areas, due to the information blocks in places such as Xianjiang – giving rise to contradictory feelings about the future. But there is still hope.
She ends:
Maybe in the grand scheme of things, people are shaped by the world they are faced with: To live in the open, exposed for generations will create a strong people with respect for the; people who accept their ordinariness; characters who are unwilling to overindulge their egos, but instead greet life with optimism and praise. An inhospitable climate, a barren earth, will force people to cast aside useless sorrow for a passionate optimism for life. . . There is a saying in Chinese: “A plot of land nourishes its people”.
One of the beautiful moments that Christopher Payne, her translator, reads from during the event is the line, ‘all I feel at ease about is leaving, and setting out on the next journey’. It makes you think of so much that can be drawn from the prospect of change, over the reality of it. As he then speaks of Distant Sunflower Fields, he says how his priority translating her work was to identify and preserve her voice when carrying the work over into English. Li Juan’s words ring back at this moment, ‘I don’t think I’m particularly womanly, I’m just here expressing myself’.
We published Yan Ge’s Strange Beasts of China at the end of 2020, and feel so lucky to. At just seventeen she’d already published her first short story collection and is the author of thirteen books, including six novels. They join the discussion with more thoughts on translating women and writing outside society.
Jeremy Tiang, the award-winning translator and writer shares how he felt that working on Strange Beasts of China was more of a ‘time-travel challenge’, orienting us in a terrain that was Yan’s inner psychic landscape in the city of Yong’an. In his reading of Strange Beasts of China, one of the stand-out lines are: ‘the beasts are more human than the humans, and the beasts are beastlier than the beasts’.
The discussion then moves to the different ways that young women writers in China are perceived and how this can be isolating for them. Jeremy says, ‘young women writers in China are seen as belonging to their fans’ to which Yan Ge responds that women writers also seem to be viewed under the male gaze and objectfied. Her time away from China over the last eight years has allowed her the distance to view her experiences as a writer when she first started out. She reminisces about how she travelled with a group of writers on tour to America from China with Li Juan and her writing party ordered another woman, a senior writer, to make him a cup of noodles: ‘it exemplifies how we as gendered groups are considered in that society at large. . . subconsciously that’s how you’re treated, you’re just a subgroup, and this is not just happening in China, it is happening everywhere’.
Fascinatingly, she draws to mind the idea that identity as a woman engages with you and entangles with you on a linguistic and an ideological level – the ways that languages are structured within a patriarchal framework. These things, she says, ‘are related to the stigmatisation of women – words like “period” become taboo, or in Chinese the word “hysteria” is almost exclusively attributed to women’. The overall hope for her is that those stigmas are combatted by the way that we use our individualism.
In some ways, the categories that prevail in Strange Beasts of China speaks to those tendencies of over-categorisation and stigmatization amongst marginalised groups. Her advice to those experiencing this is to complicate those narratives: ‘if you are a writer of both A/B/C/D categories, it will become very hard for them to generalise you. Eventually the way out is to cancel it, to cancel this categorization and cancel this ostracization. To have a multiplied and fluid identity.’
With thanks to our partners Sinoist Books and the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. Watch the full event here to engage more with the excellent Q&A for maximum vibes. This includes some further discussion from other translators in the chat, on the statistical lack of women translators and women in translation and the challenges of balancing humour with poignancy in translation.