"Ways of Seeing and Being Seen" by Bonnie Chau
In the past couple of weeks, having been submerged in first the chaos of the Amanda Gorman translator controversy, and then in the terror and sorrow of the Atlanta mass murders, it became impossible for me to write whatever it is I was going to write for this month’s column without it addressing the repercussions of anti-Asian racism, without relating to the way bodies of people of color, particularly those of women, are perceived as Other, as objects, by a society and culture based on a legacy of white supremacy. I thought about how when I was eighteen, and was writing a column for my college newspaper, my first piece—the first writing I ever published—focused on the fetishization of Asian women. What does it mean that I was writing about this, that this was the world I was headed into, and carving into, before I had ever even experienced an actual romantic relationship? One thing it underscores is that the history of this racism has been going on for so long, that it has been an unavoidable weight that many of us have been navigating our whole lives. We are bodies that are mystifyingly seen as both accessible and inaccessible. Totally visible and totally invisible.
I have been thinking of the value of being visible to one’s own community, to those who have felt invisible. Several years ago, my childhood friend, who is half white and half Sri Lankan, told me about watching the actress Priyanka Chopra on the television series Quantico, and seeing for the first time a South Asian actress in a lead role in a major series—in the show, Chopra’s character is even half white and has a white-sounding name, just like my friend—and how she had this moment, this thought: that character could be me, I could be her, I could be that FBI agent, and how she understood for the first time in her life (she must have been around 35 at the time) what it must be like for every/any white person to simply watch anything on TV ever. I thought about how this must be one of the basic experiences of watching TV, that one might simply imagine oneself in any main role—namely, as protagonist, as the main character, the hero of the story. That there might be this underlying recognition of the possibility of a connection to another world or life—whether fantastic or mundane—where, that could be me. This is, of course, not to say that we haven’t ended up doing some version of this anyway—imagined ourselves in the role that a white actor is playing. Of course, watching white actors and imagining ourselves in their roles, in spite of their whiteness and our non-whiteness, is what we end up doing for most of our lives, because this is what’s been readily available in mainstream media.
I thought about how we have done this all our lives when, as the Amanda Gorman translation situation unfurled, some translators started zeroing in on the criteria of experience. I had set aside March 16 as a day for catching up on the Amanda Gorman translation chaos that had been going on the past week or so, and that Tuesday, I went to my office, and sat at the computer reading for several hours through articles, listserv emails, and hundreds of posts in a Facebook literary translation group. At some point I turned into a zombie, went home, ate a late lunch, tuned in for a bit to an online translation event, and then passed out in a strange two-hour nap, from which I awoke utterly discombobulated, feeling like I had been in some sort of fugue state brought on by the trauma of hours of reading through the shit-storm of mostly white translators transmogrifying the situation into an issue of who is allowed to translate whom, and asserting things like the best translator is the one with the most experience, and experience comes only with practice over time, and therefore, the oldest translator is the best translator. Established, trained professionals in the field were saying these things, translators in positions of authority, who are most likely holding teaching posts. Given this dubious reasoning, maybe that makes those of us who have spent our entire lives translating out of whiteness supremely experienced after all.
In the “Translation as Experiment” panel I watched that afternoon, part of the Spring Symposium at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, writer and translator Anna Moschovakis talked about the idea of translating, particularly when the original author is dead, only when one’s not doing the first/only translation, only when there’s at least one other translator/translation. Of course a translator/translation is most ostensibly inextricable from the original text/author, but I am very interested in this foregrounding of the relationship between the translator and other translator(s)/translation(s) of the same text. I pictured it as a book club meeting—if we think of translators as the closest reader of any text, closer than even the original author, then what happens when we think of the multiple translators of the same text as a club, and the lines of connectivity between or among them as the fulcrum of how we might triangulate with the text itself? I cannot help but imagine a group portrait of a translator book club meeting of Chinese literature in translation, because visuals of bodies can be helpful, and illuminating, and I think how striking this image might be, how overwhelmingly white this club is, meeting around wine and cheese in some living room, and how one-note this translator book club meeting might be. Most likely, like many book clubs, it just devolves into some sort of tepid gossip as would be expected by a cadre of white academics.
Sometimes we ask ourselves, or are asked, who are you writing for? Who is your imagined reader or audience? Toni Morrison said in a 2015 interview in the Guardian, “I’m writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio.” The same question is not frequently asked of translators—who are you translating for?—because it seems to become more complicated and fraught. There’s the question of who the original author was writing for, but what happens if the original author was writing for one audience, and the translator is translating for another? What are we to do? Can we handle it? I think we have to. It is not really possible for the original author and the translator to be creating a text for the same reader. Maybe we could theorize on the possibility of the original author and the translator creating a text for a comparable demographic, across time and space, but this seems shaky. If Tolstoy was writing for a white, educated, middle-class reader in the 19th century (say, for example, that this is the presumed target audience of Literature), does it track that a contemporary translator should then be translating Tolstoy for a white middle-class reader in the 21st century? This is also damning of what it says about readership. Doesn’t the presumed white middle-class reader have the potential to read whatever they want? Don’t we all?
I was still thinking through ideas about the visuals of representation the next day when I was talking on the phone with a friend who mentioned an upcoming job he had in New York City that had something to do with the paintings of Matthew Wong, a Canadian artist who had committed suicide. My friend was trying to recall if he was Chinese. I remembered Wong immediately. I had only learned of him from reading the New York Times obituary when he died in late 2019, but had been intensely drawn to his landscapes, with their geometric expanses and little textures, sometimes with a lone house or, a lone little person. I had been drawn, too, to his birthday being one day before mine, and the fact that he lived for much of his life in Hong Kong. I didn’t feel something for Wong and his work solely because of his Hong Kong roots, but it was not separate from the fact that he was a Hong Kong artist. It is impossible to subtract that. When I was a kid, I remember being very annoyed that my parents were so into Michael Chang, the banana-eating tennis player. He seemed super not cool. Same with Michelle Kwan. And Yo-Yo Ma. How annoying that these were the Chinese people who were famous, and they were all so not cool. How annoying to only like someone because they were Chinese. But, as with my childhood friend and Priyanka Chopra, it is a powerful thing to see someone and to think: that could be me. It is consequential, especially when one is in a position of less power (e.g., someone who is an immigrant, and/or not white, and/or a child), to be presented with the visual of someone aspirational, someone with more power perhaps, and to think, however fantastically, that could be me. In that experience, the world wonderfully expands (you can be anyone!), and wonderfully contracts (you are less alone!); it is a practice and process of elasticity.
I have been asked, many times, about how much my writing has to do with being Asian or Asian American, by acquaintances, by interviewers, by friends, and by other writers. This is both very complex and very simple. It has to do with the fact of my humanness, as it has to do with my recognition of it, or claiming of it, and it has to do with it regardless of my recognition or claiming of it. (There is the publishing side of things—the product, the commodity, the object, its reach, the marketing—all of which is inseparable from it. But how much does that have to do with my writing? Little.) The question essentially becomes: how much does my life have to do with being Asian or Asian American?
While thinking about Matthew Wong’s paintings, and loneliness, aloneness, loneness, I was also in a state of distress, because this was the day after the Atlanta killings, and I found myself wandering around the small town in central Pennsylvania where I’m currently living, thinking about being alone. I’ve been here since January, and have since seen a few non-white people, but for the first couple of weeks, I don’t think I saw a single other non-white person, aside from the Chinese owner of a seemingly anomalous, unexpected godsend of a little Asian mart on the one main street in town. To be fair, I didn’t, and don’t, see that many people around, period, as this is a very small university town, during a pandemic, and in the middle of winter. During my first week, while at the one big supermarket in town—which is not really in the town, as it lies on the other side of the highway—I wondered if anyone else might find it an amusing reinforcement of a stereotype, that the one Asian person in the store, practically in the whole town, was asking where the tofu was.
(In some spaces, I know, tofu=Asian. Once, I went to a friend’s wedding in northwestern Minnesota, i.e., a place where it felt as if my four friends and I were the only non-white people in a hundred-mile radius, and I was wearing a shirt that said TOFU KILLS PEOPLE on it, a weird inside-joke shirt by the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. Multiple times that weekend, white passersby would kind of cheer at the shirt—I suppose in the upper midwest, cattle is king, and people were enthusiastic about seeing what seemed like a negative statement about tofu. But when it registered that I was an Asian person, they got confused and faltered, like a cognitive dissonance was happening and the optics did not compute.)
In thinking about the motivations of representation, I find myself returning to something I have thought of often in the last few years, of writer, critic, curator, and activist Ryan Lee Wong’s words in Teen Vogue in 2017:
When people say representation and visibility, I wonder who are we representing ourselves to, and why. I suspect that a lot of times, because it is the default definition of a person in American society, ‘representation’ means representation to a white, middle-class spectator. I'm not interested in fighting for a share of that limited market, or jockeying for a visibility slot.
A few weeks ago, I went back to a small café I used to frequent when I was living in Brooklyn—I would go there for the mapo and the lu rou fan, but really it was because it’s owned by the Taiwanese conceptual artist Tehching Hsieh. I first encountered Hsieh’s work in 2009, when I took a spontaneous trip to New York while living in L.A. It just so happened that both the MoMA and Guggenheim were holding breakthrough exhibitions of Hsieh’s durational performance pieces. MoMA had documentation of Hsieh’s “Cage Piece” performance, in which he spent a year from 1978–9 living inside a cage, and the Guggenheim had photographs from “Time Clock Piece,” where from 1980–1981 he punched a time clock every hour on the hour, and the projects really kind of blew my mind.
It is possible to say there was a moment, where I was like, this is mind-blowing work, and because of his ethnicity, on some subconscious level, I was like, that could be me. On the occasions that I did actually see Hsieh in his Brooklyn café, I think this sentiment was still present: I sat there, watching the artist, about forty years after those seminal pieces were created, thinking, wow, and now he runs this rad little spot where I can hang out and have a lu rou fan and a beer, so fucking cool, yeah, sure, I would do that, I could do that, that could be me.
Bonnie Chau is a writer and translator from Southern California. She earned her MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University; and has received fellowship and residency support from Kundiman, Art Farm Nebraska, the American Literary Translators Association, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and the Black Mountain Institute. She is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood (2018), and is currently an editor at Public Books and the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell’s Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts.
