new year's update
Jan. 4th, 2024 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meikureeI've been slow on the uptake (snowed-in by work, stress, and some health issues) but a belated happy new year, everyone!
not quite in the business of making fannish resolutions just because I've enough on my plate IRL, but I felt like sharing a permissions statement I wrote in simplified chinese and recently added to my ao3 profile:
which is a translation of my statement in English:
as it stands right now, it's written in an overly formal/elevated register and more reminiscent of the kind of language you'd find in contracts or business settings -- a dead giveaway that I'm not a usual denizen of Chinese fandom spaces (my Lofter account is underused). I felt like adding this anyway after someone asked me last year for permission to translate my SNK fic into Chinese, though it's doubtful any of my recent fandoms aside from JJK and Disco Elysium will get much traffic from chinese fans.
(extra blabbering: also conversed with them afterwards about how chinese (fan)works also leave much to be desired in terms of depth or emotional realism, which tickled me since you hear the same complaints about english fandoms lol. in their words: "更重要的是你的故事里对于情感过程的合理描写，即使在许多同人文里这也是缺乏的部分，更不用说原作了。")
even more rambling about the sociolinguistic politics of the place i grew up: every year I grow more glad that I grew up in a multilingual environment. knowing chinese means I could learn Japanese with a partial leg up and kanji wasn't really a huge difficulty for me; wrapping my head around keigo and levels of formality were the main hurdle.
currently the dominant narrative back home is that chinese proficiency standards among youths are woefully declining, because it's been far more politically/culturally/socioeconomically etc etc advantageous for decades to learn english instead. english is the lingua franca anyway, but there's a lot of attendant moral/sociocultural anxiety among the old guard/older generations about """traditional""" values being lost in response to that; but my parents were chinese-educated and so I think any linguistic erosion was a little slower in my household. my mother herself still struggles to communicate in english and defaults to chinese when she can, so that led to a lot of natural osmosis and exposure at home. it sounds arrogant, but when I go about my day and listen to tiktoks/videos of people from my own country bumbling in chinese I bridge/translate omitted keywords in my own head or go "hm, that's not how my parents would have said it." and re-translate what they said. (I was baffled at first when I watched Saving Face and Will didn’t know how to say some common words in Chinese, but I know that’s par for the course.)
on another note chinese internet slang is fun. I miss 小鸡词典 (jikipedia.com), which was the chinese version of the urban dictionary. I once made my father do a mid-second double take when I passionately dropped "虐待百姓!" and "成何体统" in a conversation about politics.
when I was 10 my chinese language teacher, a lady who just moved from the mainland, sternly told me I was a disgrace to my parents (and by situational implication, my ancestors) if I couldn't write 作文 adequately. it's the kind of story I tell now to relatives and punctuate with bright absurd laughter. anecdotes like that are common here.
not quite in the business of making fannish resolutions just because I've enough on my plate IRL, but I felt like sharing a permissions statement I wrote in simplified chinese and recently added to my ao3 profile:
再创作全权声明： 本人欢迎二次性创作（包括翻译，同人画，同人视频，歌表，改编作品，有声同人，等等），不必询求授权。唯一的条件就是发帖时请显明原文作者(meikuree)和链接。若有打算把再创作上载到AO3上，请在它的作品页加上”inspired by another work”（灵感来源于其他作品）的选项。
which is a translation of my statement in English:
Permissions Statement: anyone who wants to make podfic, art, icons, fanmixes, translations, or anything else based on my work is welcome to do so, as long as you link back to my original work and credit me (meikuree). please also use ao3’s “inspired by another work” option, where possible!
as it stands right now, it's written in an overly formal/elevated register and more reminiscent of the kind of language you'd find in contracts or business settings -- a dead giveaway that I'm not a usual denizen of Chinese fandom spaces (my Lofter account is underused). I felt like adding this anyway after someone asked me last year for permission to translate my SNK fic into Chinese, though it's doubtful any of my recent fandoms aside from JJK and Disco Elysium will get much traffic from chinese fans.
(extra blabbering: also conversed with them afterwards about how chinese (fan)works also leave much to be desired in terms of depth or emotional realism, which tickled me since you hear the same complaints about english fandoms lol. in their words: "更重要的是你的故事里对于情感过程的合理描写，即使在许多同人文里这也是缺乏的部分，更不用说原作了。")
even more rambling about the sociolinguistic politics of the place i grew up: every year I grow more glad that I grew up in a multilingual environment. knowing chinese means I could learn Japanese with a partial leg up and kanji wasn't really a huge difficulty for me; wrapping my head around keigo and levels of formality were the main hurdle.
currently the dominant narrative back home is that chinese proficiency standards among youths are woefully declining, because it's been far more politically/culturally/socioeconomically etc etc advantageous for decades to learn english instead. english is the lingua franca anyway, but there's a lot of attendant moral/sociocultural anxiety among the old guard/older generations about """traditional""" values being lost in response to that; but my parents were chinese-educated and so I think any linguistic erosion was a little slower in my household. my mother herself still struggles to communicate in english and defaults to chinese when she can, so that led to a lot of natural osmosis and exposure at home. it sounds arrogant, but when I go about my day and listen to tiktoks/videos of people from my own country bumbling in chinese I bridge/translate omitted keywords in my own head or go "hm, that's not how my parents would have said it." and re-translate what they said. (I was baffled at first when I watched Saving Face and Will didn’t know how to say some common words in Chinese, but I know that’s par for the course.)
on another note chinese internet slang is fun. I miss 小鸡词典 (jikipedia.com), which was the chinese version of the urban dictionary. I once made my father do a mid-second double take when I passionately dropped "虐待百姓!" and "成何体统" in a conversation about politics.
when I was 10 my chinese language teacher, a lady who just moved from the mainland, sternly told me I was a disgrace to my parents (and by situational implication, my ancestors) if I couldn't write 作文 adequately. it's the kind of story I tell now to relatives and punctuate with bright absurd laughter. anecdotes like that are common here.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 10:37 am (UTC)Secondly, "every year I grow more glad that I grew up in a multilingual environment": unironically I think those environments are the best!!! And obviously sometimes the reason isn't so nice (colonisation lol) but the person who said a new language opens up a new world was sooooooooooo right. :D Congrats on maintaining fluency when/where it'd be easy-ish to let go of it.
I hope u get more translations! :D
ETA: OH ALSO I've seen online articles add a sentence like "欢迎[verbs, ok admittedly mostly 转载]，请注明来源于[source]" at the top... which to my untrained ear at least seems a bit more casual? If that's what u want to go for??? Not to presume that you hadn't already thought of it -- I just came across it again just now & thought of this entry since I saw it a few hours ago :D
no subject
Date: 2024-01-11 09:39 am (UTC)and exactly! personally, knowing about other cultural/sociolinguistic milieus means I'm more aware of the boundaries and limitations of separate worldviews too.
and LMAOOOO it's so sad isn't it... wish jikipedia could make a comeback :(
no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 11:09 am (UTC)I think lack of epth and emotional realism is common in fandom (and even published works) irrespective of the language, not to say that it cannot be achieved. But I can only say for English-language fandoms since my second language is limited to spoken Cantonese; and whenever I see fanworks written in Chinese (and Chinese novels), I get the urge to pick up my very elementary Chinese lessons again.
I went to a talk recently by the writer Mok Zining, who talked about her experiences learning Chinese and English in the place she grew up; and how when she moved to the Mainland as a young teen was shocked to discover that despite the shared language, there were still cultural and linguistic differences. She did say something similar in that she was glad to have grown in a multilingual environment—a sentiment that we can only appreciate as we get older.
Saving Face <3
I very much am a disgrace to my parents and by extension my ancestors, because I cannot write 作文 at all, nor could I actually 作文 beyond my name, which is most commonly asked of me ;)
no subject
Date: 2024-01-11 09:30 am (UTC)I love what you raise about those cultural and linguistic differences. WARNING, rambling ahead: I was just reading the seminal and aptly titled Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity which talks about the importance of decentering notions of chineseness based on definitions 'authorised by a cultural mainstream' but also China, and also moving away from seeing China as the final authority on Chinese identity and inclusion/exclusion in favour of embracing a multiplicity of Chinese identities. One great example he talks about is the Peranakan/Straits Chinese community in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, who still have a cultural outlook of being Chinese despite generations of intermarriage and syncretism with local communities. I think that multiplicity is what people in the Chinese diaspora (an extremely large, common, and differentiated group!) experience in practice, as you and Mok Zining raise nicely. ❤️
and you can see those cultural and linguistic differences too just in the different terms Mandarin Chinese is referred to in different locales: 华语 ([ethnic] Chinese language) in Singapore vs. 国语 (national language) in Taiwan vs. 普通话 (common language) in China, all inflected by how Chineseness is understood differently as a purely ethnic identity vs. a nationalistic one vs. a uniter of several heterogeneous ethnic groups across these places.
haha, the Chinese language curriculum where I'm from called on us to write 报章报道读后感 which were essentially... 600-1000-word, I think? commentaries responding to news articles and op-eds, to teach us how to assess, synthesise, and then argue for our own opinions in Chinese. those alongside 作文 were a fixture of exams. but in practice most people treated them as a chore. and the way they were assessed (according to fixed rubrics) was rigid; I think you'd learn a lot more about how to argue competently and brilliantly in Chinese, in a living breathing way, from reading writings from contemporary Chinese writers and intellectual figures like Can Xue, Mo Yan, Ai Wei Wei, etc. etc.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-05 03:38 pm (UTC)I have nothing substantive to add other than that I love Saving Face. I first sought it out because I was so desperate for some kind of f/f media representation that actually featured Chinese or Chinese-American characters, and was incredibly frustrated with the whiteness (and biphobia) of my school's Gay/Straight Alliance, while the purported queer-friendliness of the Anime Club was...well, the anime club, and the queer-friendliness was mostly slash shipping.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-11 09:59 am (UTC)I think Saving Face is somehow a landmark still, 20 years later, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much Mandarin there was given it was released in the US!! I'm sorry you had to deal with so many unwelcoming spaces, and can imagine how much of a breath of fresh air SF was. on this side of the pond, Qiu Miaojin's writings had a similar formative effect on me.