Tenzin Jorden, Photography Editor

An act of translation is an act of traveling between two cultures. 

This was the central idea shared by Emily Jin GRD ’25 and Rebecca F. Kuang GRD ’27, who spoke at the Asian American Cultural Center on Feb. 7 about identity, the practice of translation and being Asian in the academic world. 

“In terms of translation, I always have to sit in the middle and act as a mediator,” Jin told the crowd. “Every single translation leaves a mark on me, every interaction with my authors, in English or Chinese, kind of changed the way I position myself against the world.”

Jin and Kuang both are doctoral candidates in the East Asian Languages & Literature department, where Jin focuses on science fiction translation and technology and Kuang on contemporary Sinophone literature.

Both speakers spoke of their upbringings that led them toward translation. Jin moved between Chinese and English-speaking areas, where she felt that she was always “reading in the wrong language at the wrong time.”

“I was always traveling between languages and cultures,” Jin said. “As a result, it kind of became an escape for me and also a big part of my identity. I think that set the foundation of me wanting to translate.”

Kuang moved at a young age from China to the U.S., and she said she did not have a large connection to her culture growing up in Dallas. For her, translation is a personal project for discovering more about herself and her family history.

At the event, the two translators talked about the politics of translating works from Chinese to English and removing them from their cultural context. Chinese literature was originally a part of a dominant culture and read by those who were in that group, but in translation, they said, these works now exist within a racial minority.

“You have to be attentive to how you’re representing them, how you’re positioning their culture against American culture,” Kuang said.

Identity, language and storytelling are “all wrapped up” when writing and translating pieces of literature, according to Kuang. Jin said that when translating, she preserves a degree of “untranslatability,” not mapping every Chinese cultural intricacy onto English culture. 

In addition to translation work, Kuang also writes books. She wrote “The Poppy War” trilogy, which is an epic fantasy retelling of mid-20th-century Chinese history, and “Babel,” a revolutionary Oxford-based story about the power of translation. 

In book publishing, translations and books reflecting marginalized groups’ experiences can be a “hard sell,” Kuang said. She reflected on a time when her publicist once told her that if she wanted to be a bestseller, then she had to write for “southern white ladies in book clubs.” 

“I love my publicist, so she was just being very frank with me,” Kuang said. “Those are the kinds of readers that they are packing books for, and that’s a life experience I’ll never have and don’t really have any interest in catering to. As I was talking about the next stage of my career, I started to worry if I was always going to be considered readable by BIPOC readers, but then I thought that’s okay.” 

They also talked about the “burden of representation” and who has the right to share Chinese stories, discussing how popular movies like “Crazy Rich Asians” can portray an identity that many Asians and Asian Americans do not identify with.

Humyra Karim ’26 said she attended the talk because she has always been a fan of Kuang and was interested to hear what she had to say. She was surprised to hear that the author whose books she has seen at bookstores was also completing her doctorate at Yale.

“The practice of translation is something I’m incredibly interested in and I really enjoyed the discussion between Rebecca and Emily,” Karim wrote to the News. “They both had such interesting perspectives about being Chinese American writers and translators in academia as well as industry and overall I’m really glad I went.”

Kuang’s newest book “Yellowface” comes out in May 2023 and focuses on a white author who steals a dead Chinese author’s manuscript and publishes it herself, all while pretending to be Asian.

The Asian American Cultural Center is located at 295 Crown St.