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

Criticism, Fall, 1997 by Martha J. Cutter

In her own life, Leila also claims to be unable, literally, to translate some of her feelings: "I have a whole different vocabulary of feeling in English than in Chinese, and not everything can be translated" (18). She also suggests that her parents have this problem; about her mother she says, "She had a world of words that were beyond me" (22). But Leila can, in fact, translate her mother's "world of words": "Main grunted, a huumph sound that came out like a curse. My translation was: Disgust, anger. There's power behind her sounds. Over the years I've listened and rendered her Chinese grunts into English words" (22). Leila has discovered how to decode the metaphorical meanings behind her mother's Chinese grunts, to translate them into a language that crosses the barriers between Chinese and English. Leila has also learned to find linguistic bridges between her mother's world and her own, as the following exchange about Leila's husband Mason demonstrates:

"What?" I was too upset to stop. "What?" I demanded again. "You don't like Mason, is that it?"

"Mason," Mah spoke his name soft, "I love."

For love, she used a Chinese word: to embrace, to hug.

I stepped around the boxes, opened my arms and hugged Mah. I held her and took a deep breath and smelled the dried honeysuckle stems, the bitter ginseng root. (23)

Leila translates her mother's Chinese term for "love" into an English word that is meaningful to herself and her listeners, and the translation is both literal (from the Chinese word to the English meaning) and metaphorical (from the world of China, ginseng, and the mother, to the world of the daughter). Leila's mother feels angered that her daughter has married without the traditional Chinese wedding banquet, and Leila feels defensive about her choice of an American marriage in a City Hall with only her sister as witness. Yet the word Leila's mother uses for "love" acts as a bridge between the two women, a translation that encourages, rather than inhibits, communication. It is a translation that allows a crossing between the daughter's modern world of America and the mother's traditional world of China, a translation that shows that mother and daughter are compromising, rather than remaining on opposed sides of a cultural divide.

Ng's main character speaks more Chinese than Louie's characters, yet this is only part of her success as a translator. Leila also maintains an understanding of and respect for her mother's cultural context, and this enables the metaphorical communication that translation, in its most symbolic and writerly sense, connotes. As Neubert and Shreve explain, translation is a constructed (or learned) competence (43), an active process of problem-solving that must be acquired (86). And knowledge of language alone is not enough for this process to be successful. Since "Chinese appears to be a more context-sensitive language than English," a context of shared experiences and knowledge is necessary for disambiguation (Aaronson and Ferres 148). Leila is a successful Chinese to English translator, then, both because she actively problem-solves in order to translate difficult words and sounds, and because she is willing to understand and share her mother's cultural context. As a child, Leila hated the responsibility of translation: "What I hated most was the talking for Mah and Leon, the whole translation number. Every English word counted and I was responsible. I went through a real resentment stage" (17). Yet Leila grows away from her resentment, although her statement on this subject is still somewhat tentative: "I'm over that now, I think" (17). As an adult, Leila does not resent translating, and she shares her parents' context in order to create a bridge between her world and theirs.