Tan Enmei, a Chinese-American female writer whose work has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 40 weeks, based on 15,000 emails, has made her voice and past public to the outside world for the first time. In this work, the reader will witness her family and ancestors, the inspiration for her mysterious ghostly stories. As she herself says, it is an extremely personal work. Baidao Network interviewed Zhang Ying, director of the "Intertextual" Studio of the Comprehensive Publishing Division of the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (hereinafter referred to as the Foreign Research Agency) and the project leader of the "Tan Enmei Works Series", and Xu Xiaoyu, the editor-in-charge, through their narratives, into Tan Enmei's world.
Tan Enmei
"Which moments you can erase, the memory does not allow you to choose." The famous Chinese female writer Tan Enmei wrote in her latest autobiography, "The Beginning of the Past".
New York Times best-selling author Mary Carr said of The Beginning of the Past: "This is an excellent autobiography I have read in the past decade, and Tan Enmei walks a tightrope in memory and imagination. We knew she had the power to summon ghosts, and I was amazed by her memory and detective-like ability to trace past events. I closed the book, and after a while I opened it again, and I thought: How did she do it? ”
<h3>Fifteen thousand letters contributed to The Beginning of the Past</h3>
At first, Tan Enmei did not realize that the autobiography "The Beginning of the Past" would be born. At the time, she was working on Fantasy Valley as her usual novelist. In the process of creation, she constantly exchanged letters with editor Daniel, sometimes quarrelsome, sometimes narrated. Those English letters with private overtones galloped on the Internet, put into the editor's e-mail, and unconsciously, like a snowball, reached more than fifteen thousand letters.
Because it was a private letter and there was often an argument with the editor, Tan Enmei gushed out her ideas and positions in the letter. The text in the letter is not bound by a frame, and the letter is reined, like a messy but stylistic collage. As an editor, Daniel keenly sniffed out that the mail carried a broken but huge emotional history, with the power to shake people's hearts, like Tan Enmei's previous books: "The Daughter of the Bone Master", "Fantasy Valley", and the debut book "Hi Fu Hui", which won the New York Times bestseller list for more than forty weeks after its publication, and was adapted into a well-known film of the same name.
"Happy Blessing Society"
<b>Click on the book cover to purchase directly </b>
Publisher: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press
Author: (United States) Amy Tan; translated by Li Jun
Publication date: November 2017
The Daughter of the Bone Master
Author: (American) amy Tan; translated by Zhang Kun
The Valley of Wonderland
Author: [Beauty] Tan Enmei
Translator: Wang Huilin
Publication date: October 2017
Tan Eun Mei didn't think Daniel's idea was a good idea, but eventually accepted his offer to combine these emails and write a new book and an autobiography about herself, the Beginning of the Past.
Tan Enmei considers herself not a self-disciplined writer, such as "Fantasy Valley", which she has been writing for more than eight years. Before she began to write "The Beginning of the Past", she was a little trembling, and even set herself the amount of daily submissions to supervise herself. Unexpectedly, as soon as I moved the pen, all the constraints were left behind. Those memories hidden in the depths of her mind, wrapped in surging feelings, were summoned back one by one, constituting her most honest and loyal self-description of her past: her own growth, the story of the Tan family, her ancestors.
The gushing emotional depiction, the 15,000 emails of you and me, makes "The Beginning of the Past" seem so different and subversive compared to traditional autobiographies. It abandons the traditional chronologically advanced "chronicle" narrative and diverges in the layout of emotions, so that these emotional modules eventually synthesize a tense memoir that seems more like a collage or a scrapbook than a traditional autobiography.
<h3>Non-fiction writing presents a personal life</h3>
Tan Enmei was restless about the publication of The Beginning of the Past. She once confessed in an interview that she was used to being criticized by critics for her novels, but this time it was different because it was full of more personal things.
The two interviewees said that Tan Enmei's "The Beginning of the Past" can be said to fully reveal Tan Enmei's true flesh and blood compared with previous novels.
For the first time, the archetypes of characters in those fictional works that appear from time to time, both real and illusory, go from "behind the scenes" to "in front of the stage", like her mother and grandmother. They used to be Tan Enmei's muse and were active in various novels.
And those who have been "absent" have also been excavated for the first time from Tan Enmei's memory, that is, her father, who is rarely mentioned in her previous works.
Family
Tan Enmei confessed in "The Beginning of the Past" that his father rarely appeared in previous works because he died too early. It has long been idealized in her memory, and it is difficult to see the real face. And this time, as a high-achieving student and a devout Christian father, he officially entered the reader's eyes. The "Beginning of the Past" includes hundreds of photos taken by Tan Enmei's father with a Lulai camera in his early years, and an extremely precious family portrait, allowing readers to glimpse the style of this legendary family.
In addition, Tan Enmei spent a special chapter telling the story of her decades-long misunderstanding of her father and her final understanding of his father. Intimacy, mustard, regret, reconciliation. Compared with the passionate and "love and killing" mother-daughter relationship, Tan Enmei and her father, who died young, finally developed a tacit understanding through life and death, and this process she used for nearly fifty years.
<h3>Her Chinese perspective is like a lonely beacon in the Pacific</h3> Ocean
What is most praised by readers is Tan Enmei's unique narrative perspective of moving between East and West. When it comes to the origin of this perspective, we have to return to her unique Chinese identity.
In the 1940s, Tan Enmei's parents emigrated to the United States, and soon After, Tan Enmei was born in California. Such a life has brought her a different experience from that of Americans or Chinese. She grew up in the United States, and for Chinese culture, she is the "other"; but on the other hand, in the United States, she is also a distinctive Asian girl, with black eyes and yellow skin. At home, she was constantly exposed to the "second-hand information" of Chinese culture. She stood between the two cultures, like a beacon in the Pacific Ocean, watching over the two sides of the strait. Both staring and being gazed at.
This gives her work a dual perspective of The West and the East. On the one hand, as an American, she describes the oriental stories full of strange feelings, such as the description of the dragon bone, the Beijing ape man, the ink-making family, and the bone elixir in "The Daughter of the Bone Master", or the exaggerated exposition of ancient Chinese customs. American readers gaze at Chinese culture through Tan Enmei's books.
On the other hand, as a Chinese immigrant, she searched for roots in the ancient East and searched for the common emotions of the Chinese who were also wandering. Although Tan Enmei bluntly said that she was not a writer of Chinese culture or immigrant experiences.
As she wrote in "Happy Blessing Society", the heroine Wu Jingmei comes to China in the ending to meet her lost sisters. "The moment our train left the Border of Hong Kong and entered Shenzhen, China, 'I' felt a little different," she said. 'I' could feel the skin on my forehead vibrating, the blood rushing down a new passage, and my bones aching, an old, familiar pain. I think mom was right when she said it before, 'I' was turning into a Chinese. ”
This time, "The Beginning of the Past" is no exception, it records many stories about the Tan family wandering in the United States, struggling to survive, and striving to move up. For example, Tan Enmei grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Tan family has moved more than a dozen times but has never relaxed the experience of cultivating their children, which can undoubtedly arouse the emotional resonance of many immigrant families, especially Chinese immigrant families.
<h3>Ancestors and families are never-ending themes</h3>
In addition to the Chinese perspective, "ancestors and families" is also a major theme of Tan Enmei's literary creation. This theme spontaneously emerges throughout her creative career, as a starting point and a never-ending journey.
The two interviewees believe that Tan Enmei's attention to "ancestors and families" is influenced by the women in the family. All along, Tan Enmei and her mother have a deep affection, although there are contradictions from time to time, but they have been accompanied by each other, walking through every bump in the family, until the mother passed away unexpectedly.
"Like my mom, I used to think the stories she told me were dull, sometimes scary, and tragic. It wasn't until later that I understood what she really meant: don't follow the path your mother has walked, be strong, and don't let others dictate your life. Tan Enmei wrote.
Tan Enmei's mother told Tan Enmei many stories about her mother herself: her mother's miserable childhood, witnessing her grandmother commit suicide; the unfortunate first marriage, her husband married her because of her mother's beauty, but this marriage ended in failure, and her mother did not taste happiness in the marriage, only beating her with blood and pain.
The photo of Tan's mother when she was 18 years old in "The Beginning of the Past", with her original words "I am suffering because of beauty"
Or the story of Tan Enmei's grandmother, in the turbulent times, in the intricate family relationship, her suffering is difficult to say, and finally can not bear it, silently killing herself.
Grandma's last photograph before she died
These real sufferings, like mussel shells, honed in the careers of women in the family, finally formed a wonderful story like pearls in Tan Enmei's pen: the jing sister mother who misses the Chinese daughter day and night in "The Happy Blessing Society", the daughter Ruth who blames herself for her mother's Alzheimer's disease in "The Daughter of the Bone Master", and the half-race girl Viola in "Fantasy Valley", all of whom have the shadow of déjà vu.
And in The Beginning of the Past, the reader will once again witness the common emotional core of these novels. The prototypes of those stories, in this memoir evoked by family information, photos, diaries and letters, appear one by one, and the real past of the Tan family slowly emerges.
However, it should be emphasized that although the family and ancestors play an important role, Tan Enmei opposes readers to read her novels in a "tussoji" way, and to "sit in the seat" between fictional characters and real characters. In her view, the family story is not so much the prototype of the novel as the emotional core behind her literary creation. In an article in The Beginning of the Past, "I am the author of this novel," she specifically said:
"So allow me to put it another way: I'm the author of the novel, and the novel is narrated by the ghost that occupies my mind, and she implants her subconscious mind into my subconscious, much like someone quickly sliding her hands into my hands when I didn't realize it."
<h3>After "Happy Luck Club", it was polished again</h3>
As an American writer, Tan Enmei writes in English and tells Chinese stories. And now, these stories have crossed the ocean and returned to the ancient East. In order to let "The Beginning of the Past" reproduce the historical style of the Tan family in Chinese, the Foreign Research Agency invited two teachers, Li Jun and Zhang Li, to write and translate.
A few years ago, they co-translated The Joy And Blessing Society, and the translation was widely praised by readers and critics. Now the translation of "The Beginning of the Past" is reproduced, and the translation is in the same context and the style is harmonious and coherent.
Thanks to the translation of Tan Enmei's novel works, the two translators know Tan Enmei's creative background and family story very well, so the tone of the Tan family members is also just right. Tan's mother, who speaks pidgin English and speaks Chinese a Shanghainese accent; Tan's father, who is elegant and humorous, and is good at flexibly quoting scriptures... The Chinese translation fully presents these characters, without the slightest language barrier at the time of language conversion.
For example, the two interviewees have a lyric in the book that cleverly trades off the "literal translation" and preserves the interest of the original English text. The original text is like this: "Two can can-can. Toucan can’t. /Two lips will kiss. Tulips wilt. /Let’s be a twosome. No, that’s too soon.” These several harmonic word games associate two images with similar pronunciation, resulting in a strange effect. Such as "two can" / toucan (toucan)", "two lips (lips) / tulips", "twosome (couple)/too soon".
In these places, if translated literally, it is difficult to take into account the original meaning and harmonic sound, so the translator tries to retain the strange effect, and at the same time, taking into account the poetic meaning of the Chinese translation, the translation of these few playful lyrics:
The two can be kang danced, and the good man was helpless. The two can be kang danced, and the good man was helpless. If I can kangkang, if you can kangkang, the two Kangkang dance in pairs, let's dance a dance? Lips to kiss, frost will wither. Lips for kissing, frost will wither...
Such a translation is reminiscent of the past and has a somewhat nostalgic atmosphere. It is very much in line with the autobiography of "The Beginning of the Past", which itself is based on "the place where the past began".
In addition to the meticulous carving of the translation, in order to match the wonder and magnificence of Tan Enmei's works, the Foreign Research Agency has also invited lu Mingjing, a well-known book and paper cultural and creative designer, in the binding design, and has made a lot of efforts to make the book design attract readers in details and appearance.
For example, the cover of the book uses a darker red than red, reflecting the deep and warm emotions in Tan Enmei's text. On the cover, the jagged graphic represents the corner of the stamp; the text on the crimson color is the original appearance of the internal letter, and the two image symbols echo each other, implying the passage of time and the temperature of family affection.
In addition, "The Beginning of the Past" also carries the consistent design vein of the "Tan Enmei Works Series". From "Happy Luck Club" (paperback version), "Daughter of the Bone Master", "Fantasy Valley", to "The Beginning of the Past", the covers of the works have similar handwritten handwriting, which not only reflects the common design concept, but also highlights the common emotional core behind the works.
(Editor of this article: Xiao Ge)