Sisterhood and Translation
In which I think about my relationship with my sister and the tragedy of our mother tongue.
Part 1 - Felicity
My sister and I, like many siblings, have a shared language - a way of communicating - that has been curated from years of hiding secrets from our parents. Codewords and slang allowed us to speak whilst evading the invasive ears that all parents have. To be honest, not all of it is very sophisticated, I don’t think that “toot” is a very smooth codeword for “tattoo.” Indeed, we’ve adopted broken Korean to alleviate the fear of our parents figuring out what we’re saying. For example, when I ask if Felicity wants to eat out, I’ll ask her in Korean to avoid the off-handed comment that we eat out too much.
Anyway, we speak in a way that cobbles together and intertwines the semblance of Korean we understand, our still sub-par Mandarin and Shanghainese (that my mum denies we understand) within our vernacular. It has transcended simply evading my parents’ understanding and has become, what seems to be, a more honest and authentic way of speaking. Sentences that can be frequently heard being lobbed between us include:
我们 (Chinese) 같이 (Korean) Chicken 먹으 (Korean)
We go eat chicken together?
为什么 (Chinese) you so 笨 (Chinese)
Why are you so stupid?
WOW 너무 (Korean) pretty
WOW so pretty
我不知道 (Shanghainese)
I don’t know
If we do speak in only one language though, it is obviously English. Despite both of our fluency in Mandarin, apart from small remarks, we never converse strictly in our second language. Whenever I have attempted this, Felicity recoils and refuses to respond in Mandarin. She claims that it is because she feels like she’s being reprimanded. But this doesn’t seem particularly convincing to me. I suspect that speaking exclusively in Mandarin exposes to each other and to ourselves, just how flawed our understanding of our mother tongue is. Perhaps there’s a slight shame that sinks in from the realisation that despite at least a decade each of language school, we don’t know the Chinese language as intimately as we love the Chinese culture.
The second dimension to this uncomfortability is the inescapable distance between meaning and language that is inevitable when you’re unfamiliar with the intricacies, subtleties and nuances of said language. This has been a useful tool for creating distanced and detached narrators by authors such as Haruki Murakami who wrote first in English before translating back to his native Japanese and Samuel Beckett who wrote mostly in his second language, French. This cool and blase style is remarkable at producing characters who seem disassociated from their own pain or capturing the modern milieu. However, in the context of banal conversations between my sister and me, such a distance feels disingenuous at best and alienating/confrontational at worst. I suppose it’s a microcosmic example of bumping into someone you haven’t seen in a long while and making small talk about the weather when all you really want to say is: “I missed you, I’m sorry about how things ended. You really hurt me then, but I forgive you.” So, I suppose, the core of the discomfort that Felicity and I feel is that we both know there is a more comfortable and honest way to speak to one another; every time I use Mandarin, Felicity looks at me with eyes that ask “why are we pretending to be strangers? Can we stop performing please?” As an aside for Felicity, I am uncomfortable with this uncomfortability. To me, if we knew our mother tongue well, we wouldn’t have the problem of distance and I wouldn’t have to be reminded of how disconnected I am from my Chineseness and we wouldn’t be pretending when I tell you that 对我来说, 世界上没有人比你更重要 (In this world, there is nobody more important to me than you.)
Part 2 - Language
All of this is to say that language seems to me an entirely ornamental and imprecise exercise to say nothing of the liminal spaces created by trying to bridge two wildly different languages. There’s always a risk that translations artificially create a sort of distance that isn’t in the original sentence. There are so many cultural norms, names, ways of speaking, and habits that are encompassed in a language that it almost makes me want to decry translating written work as an inevitably fruitless exercise. For example, the thing about Mandarin Chinese is that you can literally lose yourself in a sentence. The subject can be positioned at the beginning, the end, or left out altogether. Unlike English, which needs a subject to be grammatically correct, it is the verb that indicates agency. A Chinese sentence doesn’t so much ask, “Who am I?” But ‘Who cares?” It is a case of language reflecting relational Asian cultures that emphasise a “we” identity. This is incredibly difficult to account for when translating between Mandarin and English.
Of course, I’m being melodramatic. There is an incredible world that can be accessed by consuming art, literature and music in different languages. Bong Joon-Ho famously declares that if only we can get over the one-inch barrier of subtitles, a whole world of rich art is opened up to us. I read a lot of translated literature and have been watching one non-English film per week all in an attempt to become more worldly or cultured, whatever that means. I will likely write a more detailed recommendations post but some books and films that always come to mind are as follows
Books:
‘The Vegetarian’ - Han Kang (Korean)
‘Season of Migration to the North’ - Tayeb Salih (Arabic)
‘Territory of Light’ - Yuko Tsushima (Japanese)
‘A Heart So White’ - Javier Marias (Spanish)
Films:
‘Yi Yi’ - Edward Yang (Chinese)
‘Cache’ - Michael Haneke (French)
‘Taste of Cherry’ - Abbas Kiarostami (Persian)
‘Burning’ - Lee Changdong (Korean)
The success and profundity of each of these works have a lot more to do with their content than their language. Nonetheless, I sometimes get the sense that I am missing out on something crucial and that no part of this can really be helped.
To conclude, I want to outline something quite cool about the Chinese language which is the use of characters - these beautiful mini-drawings. They are self-contained - each character has a history and contains, within itself, a meaning. There is often little need for a subject, an “I” or “我,” to tell a story. This feature of Chinese is a reminder that life is not meant to be taken personally and to be lived through our actions. When I disappeared from the sentence, I discovered the freedom to define myself in whatever way I wanted, or not at all.
