antipopper

There’s a sense of intimacy and immense debt when someone translates for you — especially if they do it well. Even if they’re acting as your interpreter for a discussion in a political/intellectual forum (no, perhaps especially if that’s the case), you feel like they have temporarily become your world, because they’ve shielded you from the terror of a language you’re supposed to know, but don’t.

Here in Hong Kong, we’ve met some awesome strangers who’ve spontaneously volunteered to do translate the thorny particulars of urban development politics, or critiques of the public sphere, or repressive psychiatry. For instance, we randomly met Kannie at a forum where the only word we understood was “Foucault”, and she deftly steered us through some treacherous waters, and this fortuitously opened the door to more important exchanges with her. Last night we met Steph, a Canadian Chinese activist, at a film screening by the Videopower radical media collective, and she offered to translate the post-screening discussion for us. What’s cool is that Steph has only been here a year, and wasn’t a Cantonese speaker when she arrived — and throughout discussion, she only asked others for help with obscure urban planning jargon! This might seem reasonable to some people, but it amazes me. After the discussion, we discussed the whole phenomenon of second-generation migrant linguistic cringe, which Steph still experiences. Except for her, it’s getting Cantonese tones right, while I’m trying to get the whole language to even approach being “right”.

Last week I had a similar conversation with an artist, Becky — another young Canadian Chinese woman — at a gallery opening. The show was all about utopian spaces, and she’d recreated a teenage suburban rec-room to signify the everyday, mundane spaces that can afford young people some daydreamy autonomy. As we nestled in her installation’s couch, in front of Super Nintendo controllers and a TV playing Clueless, I told her that for me, speaking Chinese terrified me so much that coming to Hong Kong was a dare. “Oh, totally,” she said. “I thought to myself, what’s the scariest thing I could do? Move to Hong Kong. So I did.” She considers her Cantonese to now be “pretty good”.

Becky is way cool. Underneath all the ’90s-era ephemera scattered around her installation, she had “randomly” hidden a layer of anarchist pamphlets.

[ tags: language, translation ]