Interviewing Xueting Christine Ni

Hellooo!

Last month I talked about the excellent Sinopticon - A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction translated and edited by Xueting Christine Ni a glorious collection of some of the best science fiction stories from chinese authors in the last thirty years. Wishing to know a little more Xueting kindly agreed to answer some questions which I hope you enjoy!

How would you usually booktempt Sinopticon 2021 – A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction?

Other than wave its gorgeous cover under people’s nose? I’d quote some of the reviewers who’ve said some very kind things like “It is one of the best, and most accessible collections to the vast world of Chinese Sci-fi”, and point out the long list of award winning authors, and probably continue like this till I’m dragging them to the checkout.

I really appreciated the sense of the recent developing history of Chinese SF the collection covers and in particular the growth of female authors you highlight. What was the catalyst for this change in SF popularity or was it always there?

It’s not that female SF authors have suddenly popped out of the ground. There have always been female writers of Kehuan (Chinese for science fiction), they just haven’t always been as visible, especially on the international stage. As early as the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when science fiction as we know it today, began in China, there were already female scholars propagating the genre. Zhang Jing, who wrote the award-winning “Love of Nüwa”, was born in the ‘30s, and Qian Lifang, had a best-selling novel Providence, published in 2004, and my research found a huge number of great works between them. I believe that as more female scholars, writers and translators like myself are researching, translating, writing science fiction, we’re giving more of a voice to female creators internationally, and bringing it more into the public’s attention.

There has been both a cultural and technological catalyst in accelerating the publication of sci-fi, with the technological one probably reaching further in the promotion of women’s writing. Culturally, we’ve seen a global acceptance of zhai wenhua (geek culture in in Chinese). That’s comic book movies, video games, grown ups still collecting toys. I remember sitting with an investment banker who had a pair of replica Iron Man bracelets that calls the suit. With that acceptance, sci-fi became better known, and as the money followed, it got deemed more as an acceptable career path. The second has been the rapid growth of the internet usage, and in particular, via smart phones. This has actually put a whole slew of publishing platforms literally into people’s hands, and has removed a lot of the gatekeeping, opening doors for female authors of all genre fiction, sci-fi included.

Looking at the collection common themes seem to be living with the pressure to be the best (educationally or even socially) and thoughts about future legacy. What makes this a theme many authors come back to?

China is a country with a massive population, the number of high paid, white collar jobs are increasing, but not as fast as the population, so that’s a lot of people competing for relatively fewer opportunities.  The pressures to achieve, and the desire for self-improvement has been one of the most recognisable traits of the Chinese people, but honestly, it is by no means exclusive to China. They just culturally have a head start on it. A profound reverence and love of learning is also another well-known, and age-old, preoccupation in China. So of course, these are going to be themes that pervade the arts and literature. In this collection, they are explored in different ways, the obsession for the perfect score, the perfect life, taken to extremes by the manipulation of a single piece of tech, the debate of whether human-machine interface is the next stage of intellectual evolution, and taking a look at more meaningful, effective ways of learning. As for thoughts about future legacy, the veneration of ancestry and lineage are very Confucian, so you’d think there would be a lot about the past, and there’s indeed a lot of historical genre fiction out there. That mindset also places you as a link in the middle of a chain, so you do think about how your actions will affect the generations after you.

For this collection you are both translator and editor how have you found this dual experience working with the authors?

As a translator, I consider it my responsibility to precisely convey author’s words, meaning, and tone into the secondary language, making it read well. This of course, takes skill in adaptation and localisation. As an editor, my responsibilities are more to the reader, to make sure that the final text makes sense, flows well and carries through in a way that works as a story, but also that what the author wants to say, is heard. When translating, I’m intimately acquainted with the original text. Then I step away and return to it after a while, allowing me to look at it with fresh, more critical eyes. It’s then that I may see the occasional gaps that need filling, phrases that need tweaking. Sometimes the adjustments are more than that, and that involves a lot of communications with the authors, sending them my suggestions for certain extracts, and agreeing rewrites, or workarounds. It would have been easy at that point to look at, say, a complex Chinese cultural reference, and say “That wont work in English, let’s just delete it”. But I never do that, because every single one of these heritage references make the story what they are, so I am glad I have this equal footing in both Chinese and English, that allows me to bring these stories over in a complete, and accessible fashion.

Of course, with an anthology, we’re dealing with 13 individuals here, who all work differently. Some are quite happy to leave the whole thing with me, and I’m grateful for that trust. Others like to be more involved, and have come back to me with queries and comments. Essentially, these roles are creative and collaborative ones and I would not hand something over to the publishers that the author of the original isn’t happy with. I also worked closely with my copy editor, who was also my beta reader in this case. They come from a background of very fast turn around working, so we have this quite frenetic “two pairs of eyes on” work flow, where things get bashed back and forth till they just work.

When approaching a story for the first time how does translation work and what are your key aims?

As a multilingual individual, I’m immersed in both Chinese and English, which feel like they occupy the same space in my head, but not necessarily at the same time. Rather than a mechanical process where you can see word substitution and reformatting, It’s almost like delving into a Chan -like state (Zen gets used more commonly, but it’s a Chinese concept that came first) where the thing exists, and there is a Chinese way of describing it, and an English way of describing it. And I just write down the one that isn’t in front of me. This sort of parallel processing does mean that sometimes find it tricky code switching on the hop, because they are such different languages, and all the culture and paradigms that come with a language do not necessarily have a perfect opposite.

As someone who was born in one culture and transplanted midway during my upbringing to another, translation, in one sense or another, has always felt pretty natural to me. When it comes to literary translation, to be quite honest, most of it is quite intuitive for me, and that comes from all the localisation that is built in to my perception and use of both languages. Often it’s not until the fine-tuning stages, of the idioms, and proverbs, certain phrases that it becomes a more conscious thinking process. In these situations, I try to maintain as much of the original content as possible, even if it means creating new metaphors, that read as if they are common places, and use English in a way that encourages the reader to let their perception follow the language.  In some instances, I may come across a phrase I struggle to translate as effectively and precisely as I’d like, and I may put a placeholder in there. But I’d leave it highlighted in red, and I’d mull over it for ages, even when working through other stories, but I know that eventually I would find the perfect blend, and go back to drop them in.

The overall aim is always to convey the author’s intentions accurately, in a way that works in English, and make it as beautiful as possible, or as hard-boiled, or whimsical, or philosophical… whatever the tone of the piece is. As one translator working on all these different pieces, I ran the risk of making them all sound like me. It’s a problem I’ve seen a lot of other translators fall in to. I developed an approach of trying to read works by anglophone writers whose tone I thought would be analogous with the voice of each story. We call this process ‘marinating’ (Cooling is very important to me). My eclectic reading habits really helped me select the right sources (sauces?), and I think the effect has been noticeable, the readers are certainly seeing the very different voices of the authors coming through.

For those keen to find more Chinese SF after reading this are there other collections or sources you can recommend? Can we have future Sinopticons please!

There really aren’t that many anthologies out there of Chinese science fiction, as I pointed out in my introduction. The best-known ones are the Liu books, and if you like dark SF, Reincarnated Giant, edited by Mingwei Song and Theodore Hunter is very good, It collects China’s ‘subversive dark wave’, and has the stories translated by different translators. The diaspora Chinese SF anthology “The Dragon and the Stars” edited by Derwin Mak also features some amazing stories. Clarkesworld have a collaboration with the Chinese agency Storycom, and publish Kehuan regularly. If you liked the stories by Hao Jingfang and Bao Shu in Sinopticon, why not go on to read their novels Vagabonds and Redemption of Time which are now available in English. There’s a trilogy of Han Song’s to come.

I haven’t expected the resounding call for a second volume of Sinopticon. I have a roadmap of non fiction and fiction books I would like to have published over the coming years, diving into other literary genres and elements of Chinese culture, both historic and modern.  I really loved putting Sinopticon together though, and If Sinopticon 2021 has started something special, I hope that can be continued. I’d have no problem filling the next volume with different authors, all writing amazing Kehuan. So if you enjoyed Sinopticon, please do shout about it so my publishers know how much you liked it, and encourage others to get it too, or just buy it for them as gifts. Sales figures are really the best way to tell the industry that you want more!

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more?

There’ll be articles on culture as always, either published on my website or on other platforms, though lately I’ve not had a chance to publish as many, what with interviews, podcasts and promotion, but it’s one of my resolutions to get back to those short pieces next year. There’s quite a big catalogue of my writings on snowpavilion.co.uk, as well as my social media links.

I’m currently talking to publishers about the next books, again, trying to follow that pattern of alternating between fiction translation and non-fiction, so the next book will be non-fiction. I do have an essay on women’s internet literature in The Way Spring Arrives, the Tor collection of Chinese spec fic that’s coming out in March. There may also be a few more exciting projects in other formats, so watch this space.

If there was one book (not your own) that you could get everyone in the world to read what would it be and why?

I’m really not the right person to ask this question to. My outlook is exactly the opposite. I was brought up on the anglophone literary cannon, I ended up picking the ones that spoke to me, and when I got into genre fiction, I’ve never really looked back much. I believe there is good literature in all genres, and you should read whatever you fancy, and put the book down if it hasn’t made a connection with you after a number of pages. Recommendations and reviews are always interesting, helpful and broaden one’s choices, but you should always read what piques your interest, what you enjoy, and what inspires you. No book is so ‘worthy’ or ‘important’ that it should supersede your enjoyment of reading. I’m hoping that Sinopticon will engender further interest in the readers to find translated literature from other cultures, more Chinese SFF, more from those featured authors. The act of reading is an active process of learning and thinking, and that’s important, as the last story in Sinopticon shows.