| Title: For the Memory of Effacement |
| Name: Daniel Chenglish |
Reply: 0 |
Date: 2007-02-05 22:55:27 |
Email: |
Homepage: |
Since I started to translate my autobiography “Father Son & Violin” from Chinese into English I encountered quite some New China characterized terms such as “anti-right wings” “breaking the four olds” “anti-individualism and animadverting revisionism” that I would like to double check the accurate meaning and the proper English translation.
For this purpose I exploited a business excuse visiting my motherland where I devoted much of my time to the Shanghai Foreign Language Book Store, which is supposed to be one of the biggest in the vast country. However, to my astonishment and amazement, after my fingers gone through all the Chinese dictionaries that I could find in the bookstore no such terms listed above existed.
That still remains perplexed despite of much thought. Let’s flash back to the year 1957, around 2,000,000 Chinese, with the majority of intellectuals were persecuted both politically and physically during the “anti-right movement”; the same is true that at the beginning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966, numerous families were ruined by the “break four olds” movement; moreover countless Chinese suffered enormously, many even lost their lives in the most miserable and inhuman ways during the 10-year Cultural Revolution chaos under the slogan “anti-individualism and animadverting revisionism”. The tragedies that we two Chinese generations personally experienced with our soul and flesh, those words carved in our hearts with blood, yet found no room for their existence in any of our modern Chinese dictionaries.
The longer I stayed in my motherland the more awkward things seemed to emerge to me, for instance when I tried to read something on the web, many words such as the “Cultural Revolution” appear on the screen to be “*****”. As if by doing so the “Cultural Revolution” could have not taken place. The oddest thing above all, was in any bookstores I visited in China I found no Mao’s little red bible for sale, which was once the best seller in the Chinese book market history, except, at an international airport I happened to see a hand thick and a half hand sized English version “Mao Zedong’s Quotations” at the price 10 times higher than a normal Chinese book of the same volume. It became quite understandable when the sales girl told me, “It is published and printed in a foreign country, and we imported it only for the need of the market.” I knew she meant “for the need of money.”
There is something furthermore made me more terrified than surprised, or shocked. That was after I heard when the former Chinese state-chairman Liu Shaoqi passed away he was cremated under somebody else’s name. We all know Liu devoted all his life to the establishment and construction of the New China, and during Mao’s Cultural Revolution he was politically and physically persecuted for years until his last breath. What a world it would be when people couldn’t even die with one’s own name!
I tested some teenagers about the awareness of the “Cultural Revolution”, to those who know a little remarked, “The gang of four was to blame”, or “Why ask? That part of the history should be forgotten”.
Think that even the iron facts that we two generations experienced personally being so much falsely made up, distorted, or covered up, how could we not to doubt the whole education that we were crammed during our childhood, teaches such as how awful life the people in Taiwan were suffering; how dark and rotten the imperialistic countries were; how our friends were all over the world; and with the three great inventions in the history how outstanding our Chinese nation was among the others…
Suddenly the Mao’s remains in the crystal coffin at Tiananmen square stroke me hard, made me realize how wise and astute the action was chosen, for if the remains had not remained, someday someone might ask whether Mao as a living human had ever actually existed?
Regardless past’s intention of the history being distorted or falsely made up, or today’s choosing of the actualities being covered up or effaced, all tell one and single fact: to our nation, “truth” is a fearful monster.
I am scared too, scared to the result that regardless how much effort I put on my writing, and no matter how high level my humble works might reach, as long as disliked by some key persons in China, like all unpleasant occurrences in the Chinese history, would be shielded, censored, eliminated, and vanished before they given a chance to show their faces. My true stories, also like all the other Chinese true history, perhaps could only be written in a foreign language reserved in a foreign database.
I start to write in Ch-english, besides other reasons, also for the memory of effacement.
Daniel Chenglish
(A Chinese Norwegian writer living in Japan, with Chinese pen name known as Nine Brother)
Written with helpless feeling in Japan
PS: A native English writing partner wanted
http://www.danielviolins.com/jg
jiuge99999@hotmail.com
|
|