Read Haitian Ma’s 《问候》

I was in middle school when I realised I couldn’t write in a certain creative way in Chinese. Back then in our Chinese exams we were only allowed to write jixuwen, essays where we were asked to describe people, or events. Whenever I wanted to convey my emotions though, I’d rack my brains, plotting how I would use language to express them – what rhetoric to use, what collocations, what word order. If you write like that, refining things so deliberately, everything ends up either obscure and difficult to understand, or flashy and pretentious. Either way, it washes away the original meaning. Later, in high school, we started writing argumentative essays, and so I never touched jixuwen again.  

I’ve also never been able to keep up with writing a journal. Every time I’m about to put pen to paper, I always feel as though there’s a nameless reader watching me. Sooner or later I will start to write my journal for him. It will be for him to look at. This nameless, imaginary reader tells me I am unable to write a journal. Unable to write a journal that’s for myself. 

In university, I started writing in English. At first it was academic papers, then, as I more and more of them, I started to randomly jot down my thoughts as well. As I wrote, it was as though I had found a long lost mother tongue, and we were becoming closer and closer. At a certain point, it became the language I used to ask questions, to speak to myself, to write creatively. This type of intimate relationship is both cute and frightening. Was it embracing me, or colonising me?

So, for me, my enjoyment of translation carries with it some selfish motives. Regardless of whether it’s Chinese to English or English to Chinese, I get to borrow texts and reach out to a poetic Chinese, using other people’s words to dream my dreams of writing Chinese freely.

But this dream is always escaping me. When I’m translating, I need to put myself down, put my thoughts to one side, abandon my own writing habits. I clean the nooks and crannies, and open the door to let a sound into my world. Wear her heart to live through her life, and yield to her wishes in order to voice them. Let her play with the feelings left in this empty room. Leave her to rub the steaming thoughts on the stove. Become her without a thought. And, when a translation session is over, pack up her feelings, and firmly send her away. Wait for the chair on the ceiling to slowly shift back to the desk, for the pillow in the pond to return to bed, for the chopsticks in the spider plant to tip-toe back to the cupboard, for me to open my eyes in confusion, for the pen in my hand to roll onto the floor. 

As I bend down to pick up the pen, I am still longingly thinking of Chinese, clearly writing in English, and anxiously hesitating in language’s prison.

And so, when I heard these workers poems I was at once envious and yearning. Those clever metaphors! Those refined sentences! Such short lines of characters can express such complicated feelings, and I am left in the rider’s dust. 

But as is with all things that I carry with delicacy, I’m slow and I have no hope of catching up. I squint from afar. What right do I have to speak to these unreachable things.  How am I supposed to speak to them, and who am I speaking for?

I’m still unwilling. These words where we acknowledge our privilege, raise up lots of questions, but can’t give us warm answers we need. We are all hesitating in our anxiety, and privilege is chemotherapy which temporarily controls it’s spread – but it won’t be long before there’s an relapse. These workers’ poems are catalysts for it, a majestic momentum that pushes forward a frightened, fatal illness.

Besides, are these workers’ poems the poems of workers? When they were writing them, did they leave themselves too? Where did they go, what kind of dreams did they have, who did they become? And who entered their world, pulled at their heart strings, and borrowed their long unmoistened throats, to sing requiem after requiem?

No matter how hasty, unfair and loopholed this argument is, I still want to say it: the labour in these workers poems, and my speechlessness when I am faced with Chinese, are, in a certain dimension, at a certain moment, interconnected. After that moment, they part ways, and in the end, they  give each other the cold shoulder when they meet by chance, in our discussion on “privilege”.  Fortunately, there are unspeakable temperatures in language , which can bring us back to a certain dimension, to a certain time, to pass on a greeting.