Literary Catharsis: Jenna Tang on Translating Lin Yi-Han’s Only Novel, Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise

In Taiwan, almost everyone knows of Lin Yi-Han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise. Long before I decided to translate the novel, people told me, This is a book I’d never dare to read. Some readers make a point of avoiding Fang Si-Chi because of its heavy themes and detailed descriptions of violence. It has made me rethink the kind of world I live in, and reconsider my own experience growing up in Taiwan, a country often described as “safe.”

Many translators say that the act of translation itself is an embodied practice–that to translate a text tests the body just as much as the mind–and that is true of my experience translating Lin Yi-Han’s works.

Translation is also an attempt to reimagine someone else’s world, but it also returned me to a world I thought I had long left behind. Fang Si-chi’s sense of isolation transported me back to my school days, when bullying on campus was rampant. I was reminded of how this violence inspired me to translate, to learn languages as a way out, and leave Taiwan for many years.

Translating a novel that bears so much pain was difficult—the book reminded me of close friends who have disappeared from my life. I remembered my cram school days where I felt perpetually stuck and agitated, boxed in by a future I had no hand in creating. I thought of the days when textbooks and exams meant everything to us, the pressure to follow what everyone else did, the stares and the looks that darted toward us, and about how we teenage girls never knew how to make sense of those eerie strangers.

I was constantly thinking about how unsafe growing up was, but we never knew enough to be scared. It was only upon translating this book that these memories resurfaced, and these thoughts began to terrify me.

Dark feelings constantly seek company. They thrive in the presence of attention. Humans experience violence and trauma in a multitude of ways and on various levels. Translating literature under the specter of violence is to experience violence itself.

When I translated Fang Si-Chi, there were days where writing made me feel like I had lost a ventricle in my heart, and yet I was forcing it to beat. I sometimes isolated myself with the book, just so I could engage with old feelings that I had never learnt to acknowledge. Being reminded of my own pain was arduous yet cathartic. Keeping these wounds open has only made translation more intimate of a process.

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As Fang Si-Chi neared its release date, the thought of staying in Taiwan in preparation became unbearable. Though Taiwan prides itself on being one of the most progressive places in East Asia, society’s understanding of gender and identity politics continues to lag behind. Our most progressive movements are more visible on TV than they are in real life, making the transformations Taiwan has made as a country feel increasingly fictional. Many family members and friends of mine would still say things like: But that’s because you expose your skin so much! But it’s because you’re not being careful enough!

I know sexual harassment and microaggressions can happen anywhere, but the amount of disappointment and triggers that I’ve accumulated across my years living in Taiwan has only made calling it “home” even more challenging. Is this what home means to me? How can I call it “home” when it no longer provides shelter, and yet my heart language is so deeply connected to this “home” that everyone thinks I should belong?

Thus, I brought myself to the other end of the world and flew to Latin America. The fact that I was a twenty-four-hour-plus flight away from a “home” that consistently hurt me was liberating. I hid myself in another language, and it brought me a whole new universe.

Walking the streets of Buenos Aires, I basked in the sunshine and let my writing flow through me. I would dig out all the books from feminist writers from Latin America and immerse myself in their words; I would come back, revisit Fang Si-Chi’s edited translation and know that it weighed a little less on me because I was in a whole other place. I could feel my body again.

In a way, I felt like I was finally able to parse my emotional threads through these passages I’ve read and re-read so many times. I finally had time to let the author’s writing sink into me. This book has brought me on as many journeys as I’ve brought it.

On a quiet street in Colombia, I encountered Pilar Quintana’s feminist bookshelf in an independent bookstore. The books gave me a new perspective on how to tackle sensitivity in literature. Personal stories come in different shapes; they can appear in abstraction, in fragments, in stream of consciousness, or in different genres.

For me, approaching sensitivity in literary translation is not only about getting permission from the author’s estate, but also about reading more extensively about the language I use when it comes to addressing to sexual violence and other potentially triggering topics. By understanding what the #MeToo movement looks like in Latin America and other countries, I was also building a bookshelf of my own to support my translation and writing practice.

Lin’s lyricism has accompanied me through a lot—my own dark days tackling the emotional aftermath of campus bullying back in Taiwan, the deep sense of isolation I felt when I watched people turn away from me, from my disappearing friends in a place I once called home.

I imagine Lin must have created her heart language while writing this novel, the authenticity that animates her narrative voice became a source of inspiration to me as I began to write my own memoir about my personal relationship to language. Her language, even to this day, brings so many people, including myself as a translator, together in ways that she probably wasn’t aware of.

As a multilingual translator speaking Mandarin, English, French, and Spanish, language and translation is my fundamental way of connecting to this world, and by establishing this bond to the world, I know that I’m never alone, and have been receiving so much love along the way.

One night in the Atacama desert, I sat by the unlit campfire watching the stars in the southern sky look down upon us. Hiking in the desert wasn’t easy; sand slid under our soles as we walked and the dry air often left us feeling out of breath.  Watching the full moon rise, I remembered summers back home in Taiwan when I would try to find a hidden water’s edge to watch fireflies, only this time, the fireflies all went up into the sky and became blinking stars.

Despite the light having left them thousands of years ago, stars continue to glitter in front of us, as if inspired by those who watch them. Much like a star, it can take years for an author’s work to be discovered by a translator, and a translator can take years to bring an author’s story to readers of another language. The long journey is evidence of both the author and the translator’s fight to keep words alive. There will always be someone watching a star–or a book–to make sure they continue to shine.

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Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise by Lin Yi-Han and translated by Jenna Tang is available via HarperVia.