Since yesterday, there's been a lot of discussion on Twitter about one particular "idiom" (chengyu) in Xi Jinping's speech on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party--the line where he says that the enemies of China will find themselves crashing into a steel wall formed by the bodies of 1.4 billion Chinese; he uses the phrase 头破血流, which literally means "head break blood flow." The question in the tweets I've been reading, though, is whether this phrase is supposed to be taken literally (someone, whose tweet I unfortunately can't find now, compared it to idioms like "raining cats and dogs"). Frankie Huang suggests we should take it in the spirit of the famous ST:TNG episode where Picard tries to figure out the allegorical language of the Tamarian ship captain; that is, the broken and bleeding heads are not meant to be taken literally. She goes on, in fact, to suggest that taking the phrase literally is actually a purposeful act of misunderstanding driven by a bias against Xi or, more generally, China.
This has made me think again about my reaction to some of the postwar Taiwan elementary textbook passages I've been reading, and whether I'm reading too much into them. I mentioned the "urban warfare" lesson in a 1946 fourth-grade reader that struck me (and my wife) as pretty violent, and this all started with a lesson from 1956 that I translated years ago about Yan Haiwen, a Chinese pilot who kills himself rather than being taken by the enemy soldiers. But I'm starting to rethink my response what I'd consider the graphic violence of these stories. Going back to 头破血流, a thread by Chenchen Zhang arguing that the emotional valence (if I'm using that term correctly) of the language of Xi's speech and, I guess, Chinese nationalistic discourse in general, is more important to think about than one four-character chengyu.
I think with Yan Haiwen, I understood this on a certain level when I wrote about it in my dissertation (and in this paper, if I ever finish it)--I thought about this story in terms of Suzanne Keen's theory of strategic empathizing, where student readers were taught to admire and identify with the feelings and motivations of people like Yan Haiwen. In this case (and perhaps in the case of the urban warfare story), it's perhaps important to turn away from the horror I feel reading about the violence and to the feelings that the writers are trying to evoke from readers.
That all said, however, I'm resisting the idea that there's one "right" way to read these stories (or the chengyu in question in Xi's speech). Different readers will interpret these texts differently, depending on their positionality. A non-native speaker of Mandarin, for instance, might be properly accused of reading 头破血流 too literally, and it might be said that since I'm not the primary audience for this speech, I don't have the right to interpret it. On the other hand, in our globalized world of instantaneous worldwide communication and immediate translation, it seems to me a bit naïve to think that there's only one audience for any big speech like this. After all, this part of the speech is also serving as a warning to the enemy, so in that sense it's at least partly addressing that potential enemy.* And as Bessie tweeted in response to Frankie Huang's post, for a Taiwanese person, it's hard to assume "good faith" on the part of the speaker when Taiwan is under constant threat of violent annexation by that same speaker. So interpretation also has a lot to do with how you see yourself in relation to the speaker. (I'm sure I'm not saying anything new here.) Even in postwar Taiwan, stories like those of Yan Haiwen might be read differently by Taiwanese students as opposed to Mainlander students. (Unfortunately, I'm not sure how I would be able to test this at this point. One thing I'm constantly looking for is stories of people's experiences of schooling at that time.)
Anyway, this is what looking through Twitter got me thinking about today. It's useful to think about this, and it gives me another perspective on what I've been working on, but it also reminds me of my own place or position in this project I'm working on (and possibly why it's taking me so long to finish it!).
*Then again, when my son is playing dangerously on the stairs, I sometimes tell him to be careful or he'll fall down the stairs and break his neck. That's pretty graphic...
No comments:
Post a Comment