An impossible necessity: translation and the recreation of linguistic and cultural identities in contemporary Chinese American literature

Criticism, Fall, 1997 by Martha J. Cutter

Louie also demonstrates that translation is a matter of motivated situations, rather than linguistics per se, through the narrator's former girlfriend. Although she is American, she manages to communicate with Mrs. Pang: "[Mandy] spoke Chinese, a stunning Mandarin that she learned at Vassar, and while that wasn't my mother's dialect Mandy picked up enough Cantonese to hold an adult conversation, and what she couldn't bridge verbally she wrote in notes" (80). Beyond "bridg[ing] verbally" the barriers that appear to separate her language from Mrs. Pang's, Mandy also manages to cross the borders between their two cultures; Mandy and Mrs. Pang "conspired together to celebrate Chinese festivals and holidays, making coconut-filled sweet-potato dumplings, lotus-seed cookies, daikon and green onion soup, tiny bowls of monk's food for New Year's Day" (80). Unlike the narrator, then, Mandy is receptive to Mrs. Pang's world view, and Mandy diligently translates their cultural and linguistic differences into positive signifiers of intercultural connection. Louie's text therefore demonstrates that language can be either a bridge between cultures or a barrier; translation can either maintain or destroy cultural divisions.

Through the character of Mandy, then, the story illustrates that translation should be a writerly process of actively and imaginatively bridging gaps between languages and cultures. Yet this lesson is not transmitted to the narrator, who cannot succeed as a translator both because he refuses to share his mother's culture, and because he remains trapped by a readerly conceptualization of translation. The narrator's translations are literal and constrained, as the following "transcription" of his translation process shows: "I know what I want to say in English. My mind's stuffed full with the words. I pull one sentence at a time from the elegant little speech . . . and try to piece together a word-for-word translation into Chinese. Yielding nonsense" (95). Rather than thinking metaphorically about how he might convey his sentiments, the narrator becomes formulaic and simplistic: "I abandon this approach and opt for the shorter path, the one of reduction, simplicity, lowest common denominator" (95). The narrator sees translation as a reduction, rather than an expression, of his experience, and ultimately he conveys nothing, failing entirely as a translator.

Louie's story "Inheritance," on the other hand, depicts Chinese American characters who engage in a more positive, active, and metaphorical process of translation, for the central character, Edna, moves from a readerly attempt to translate her mother's life to a writerly one. Edna's deceased mother seems to have been lost in translation. Indeed, Edna wonders if her bitter and reclusive mother has transmitted anything positive: "Had I inherited my mother's hand, which was warm only after she hit her little girl, which for comfort reached for angry fistfuls of her child's hair?" (224). As in "Pangs of Love," language at first seems to be the source of the problem. Edna explains, "Once my sister started school and infected our home with English, I stopped learning Chinese, and after that my mother . . . who masterfully avoided linguistic accommodation of any form--spoke to me as to a little child" (207). Yet the mother's refusal to learn English also reflects her cultural identity: she lets her husband Edsel "negotiate this American life for her" (207), staying at home to perform traditional Chinese ceremonies she does not explain to Edna (202). Once again, parent and child inhabit the same physical space, but remain in separate linguistic and cultural terrains.