Yang Jiang: The Story of a Literary Legend

Today, we are going to tell the story of Yang Jiang, a renowned lady who is remembered by Chinese readers for her translations and witty memoirs that gave a voice to the tragedies and triumphs of modern China.

Transcript

Yang Jiang: The Story of a Literary Legend

Today, we are going to tell the story of Yang Jiang, a renowned lady who is remembered by Chinese readers for her translations and witty memoirs that gave a voice to the tragedies and triumphs of modern China.

On April 3 in Beijing, the Translators Association of China announced this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Translation, the highest accolade given by the association. The award was presented to 11 veteran translators, all above 80, who dealt with not only major foreign languages like English, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic and Japanese, but also Sanskrit and Kazakh.

The Lifetime Achievement Award in Translation was founded in 2006, and famous translators including Yang Xianyi and Xu Yuanchong are among its previous recipients. In addition, 115 winners of the Senior Translators Award and six awardees of the Outstanding Foreign Translation Expert Award were also announced at the same event.

During the association’s annual conference, it also released annual reports on Chinese and global translation and language service industries. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the reports said, the domestic translation and language service industry underwent rapid growth, with the total output value exceeding 65 billion yuan, which is about US$9.5 billion in 2022 currency, an increase of 17.2 percent year on year. As of the end of last year, China was home to over six million translators involved in the domestic market.

The global industry report shows that the market value reached US$52 billion in 2022. The output value of China’s translation and language service industry has expanded faster than the global average over the past five years.

And among China’s numerous famed translators, one lady stands out not only for her exquisite mastery of English and Spanish, but most importantly for her integrity during periods of political turmoil in the years following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The special lady is Yang Jiang, famed translator, author and playwright, who died in Beijing on May 25, 2016 at the age of 104.

Yang is best known for translating the definitive Chinese version of Don Quixote, as well as penning several novels and memoirs in her subtle, understated writing style. Her most popular novel, Baptism, illustrates the lives of Chinese scholars in the 1950s as they struggle to adapt to life in the newly born People’s Republic of China. 

It has been translated into several languages including English, French, and Italian. After being sent “down to the countryside” in Henan Province to do manual labor during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, she wrote a well-received memoir, Six Chapters from My Life ‘Downunder’, detailing the day-to-day struggles of those assigned to rural areas for “re-education.”

The prolific Yang kept writing well past the age of 90. In 2003, the 92-year-old published We Three, a collection of essays about life with her husband and daughter. Her book Reaching the Brink of Life, which she wrote at age 94, won China’s top book award in 2007.

Although Yang had already become a household name by the 1940s and had married Qian Zhongshu, another of China’s most famous authors, she tried to stay away from the spotlight and preferred to live a quiet life. She even specified in her will that she did not want a funeral or formal memorial service upon her death. She was not driven by attention from the public.

In a rare written interview that she gave shortly before turning 100, she said: “My strength comes from faith, faith in culture and trust in human nature. Sifting through the years, I tried to live in harmony with the rest of the world simply to maintain my inner freedom and tranquility.”

Yang was born into a family of open-minded academics on July 17, 1911, in Wuxi of Jiangsu Province. Both her aunt, Yang Yinyu, and her father, Yang Yinhang, studied abroad in Japan for their undergraduate degrees and earned master’s degrees at Ivy League schools in the US. Her aunt went on to become a renowned educator and one of modern China’s first female university deans. After earning a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, her father became one of the first Chinese legal scholars to promote judicial independence. Yang Jiang and her siblings all received a Western-style education.

In the 1930s, she first enrolled in Soochow University in Suzhou of Jiangsu Province, and later studied linguistics at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. It was there that Yang was introduced to her future husband, Qian Zhongshu, a famous academic and author best known for his novel Fortress Besieged. He reportedly wrote to her to request an official first meeting with him at the university’s iconic Gongziting meeting hall, where his first words to her were “I’m not engaged,” to which she replied, “I don’t have a boyfriend.” 

The pair fell in love almost immediately; Qian had been known to describe Yang as “the most virtuous wife” and “the most talented woman.” They married in 1935 and moved to the UK shortly after so that Qian could study at the University of Oxford. A few years later, Yang gave birth to their only child, a daughter named Qian Yuan.

Upon returning to China after their stint abroad, Yang became a foreign language professor back at Tsinghua University. In 1958, she was tasked with translating the classic Don Quixote. Although she was already fluent in both English and French, she spent three years teaching herself Spanish so she could translate Miguel de Cervantes’ novel from the original version. 

But by the time her translation was almost complete, her manuscripts were confiscated by student militants during the Cultural Revolution. After the turmoil ended, Yang’s translation was reportedly recovered miraculously from a rubbish pile and returned to its creator. It was finally published in 1978. At that time, the public was so hungry for foreign literature and art that the work became an instant hit. When Spain’s King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia visited China a few months after the book’s publication, Deng Xiaoping gave the couple a copy of Yang’s translation as a gift.

Yang and her alma mater Tsinghua University were both “born” in the same year. Given that she had studied and worked at the elite institution, Yang was invited to the university’s 100th anniversary celebration in 2011, but as usual she declined the invitation as well as all related interview requests from the media.

In her later years, practically the only event that pulled Yang out into the public eye were the award ceremonies for the Tsinghua scholarship she had established in the name of her late husband and daughter. Yang’s daughter, an English professor at Beijing Normal University, died in 1997, and Yang’s husband followed a year later. Their scholarship has benefited more than 1,000 low-income students.

When she turned 100, a NewsChina reporter interviewed Yang at her home in an old-style, three-story apartment building in Beijing’s city center. Her apartment seemed like it hadn’t changed much since it was built in 1977, with its stark white walls, cement floors, worn sofa and overflowing bookshelves. Hers was also the only unit in the residential compound without a renovated and enclosed balcony. Yang said she kept it this way “to be able to see the vast blue sky while sitting inside.”

At this point, Yang had been living alone for more than a decade. The NewsChina reporter remembered she had a rosy complexion, fair skin and far too few wrinkles for a centenarian. The reporter said conversing with her felt like a friendly chat between grandmother and grandchild. 

Yang spent her days reading, writing and organizing her husband’s works. In 2011, she published a collection of her husband’s manuscripts and annotated pieces.  

In the introduction to the collection, Yang wrote: “[My husband] devoted his entire life to his studies, and the wisdom he diligently accumulated over the years will be his legacy for those who wish to study his writings or research Chinese and foreign culture... I have tried my best to preserve his notes and manuscripts for readers and seekers of knowledge.”

In May 2013, the 101-year-old once again made headlines. A Beijing auction house announced it had accrued 110 of her family’s letters and manuscripts and was putting them up for auction. Yang stepped into the spotlight to publicly denounce the auction, saying that these letters were private.

Yang wrote in a public statement: “These letters reflect the trust and feelings shared by friends and family members over many years; how can they be sold as commodities? I am more than 100 years old now, and I absolutely cannot accept this intellectually, and emotionally it has hurt me deeply. If personal letters can be auctioned off, who would dare to write them in the future? Mutual trust and confidence would disappear.”

Despite the media hubbub, the auction was still going to continue as planned, so Yang sued the auction house and won. She was compensated 200,000 yuan, which is about US$30,400, and donated the money to the Tsinghua University School of Law. After that, Yang rarely reappeared in the public arena.  

Chen Pingyuan, a literature professor at Peking University, mourned Yang in a May 26 article in 2016, writing that the previous generations in China had negotiated and survived more difficulties than younger generations can imagine. 

He added that: “But more than a few of them stood firm, spent their lives studying out of passion, lived according to their conscience, and avoided being trendy and commercial, despite having to make some compromises. Yang and her husband belong to this group.”

Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Wu Ziru, translator Du Guodong, and copy editor Brittney Wong. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.