Cultural translation and the exorcist: a reading of Kingston's and Tan's ghost stories

Kwan, as a medium/translator, opens up a different world for Olivia. Kwan has a better command of a different culture, be it the ghost world, the previous life, or China. As Olivia acknowledges when they arrive in China, "[w]e've been in China less than eight hours, and already she's taking control of my life. We're on her terrain, we have to go by her rules, speak her language" (168). With the power of knowledge, Kwan also "talks the ghosts away" like Brave Orchid in "Shaman" or the narrator of The Woman Warrior. To some extent she manipulates the narratives and Olivia and Simon's perception of Chinese culture. But she never debases Olivia the way Olivia previously humiliated her. Against the grain of the stereotype of a shy, quiet, and timid Oriental woman, Kwan presents a vivid image of a cheerful, energetic, and active personality. I believe that Kwan is the most successful character that Tan has ever created. As a migrant figure, she teases and imitates the Western "dominant" culture and creates a new space "in a mischievous, displacing sense" (Bhabha, "Third" 210). In performing the act of translation, the original is simulated, copied, transfigured, and transformed.

For instance, Kwan goes to China to visit her aunt, Big Ma, and hopes to hear an apology from her for sending her away. Unfortunately, on the way to welcome Kwan's arrival, Big Ma dies in a car crash. After her death, Kwan sees her ghost and communicates with her. She translates Big Ma's wish that a rooster should be tied to the lid of her coffin, so her ghost body can enter the rooster and fly away. Though Kwan and Big Ma both consider it superstitious, they still want to do it because it is a tradition (218). Kwan claims, "Americans do the same thing." According to her, having the Easter eggs delivered by the Easter bunny for celebrating Christ's victory over death on Easter Sunday is transformed into a version in which "a rabbit laid eggs once a year and dead people came out of caves to look for them" (218). In (mis)translating and comparing a Chinese tradition to the Easter tradition, Kwan interprets the Western dominant culture in a mischievous, mimicking way. Barbara Johnson states:

   Translation is a bridge that creates out of itself the two fields of
   battle it separates.... The bridge of translation, which
   paradoxically releases within each text the subversive forces of its
   own foreignness, thus reinscribe those forces in the tensile
   strength of a new neighborhood of otherness. (148)

As Kwan conducts the act of cultural translation, either Chinese or American "tradition" is being ridiculed and subverted.

Olivia and Kwan translate for each other at various points, but not fluently. Lawrence Venuti suggests that "resistant" rather than "fluent" translation should be in operation in order to uncover the translator's invisibility (40). To demand a "fluent" translation is an attempt to repress or eradicate the contradictions and discrepancies between languages and cultures, which echoes the dominance of cultural hegemony over minority discourses. To keep cultural difference is to resist the assimilation of the dominant culture and disclose the process of hybridization. In bridging the dominant and the minority, a process of translation is needed. The identification with Ho Chi Kuei and the performance of exorcism resists the wholesale assimilation and constantly reinscribes cultural difference in the white-dominant American society.