Looking Back On It

Blindness is an excellent film, I went to see it on Tuesday. It was only showing at the Portside cinema, which meant an hour on the ferry. I got on at five in the afternoon, which must be the perfect time for riding ferries, with no glare, a slight breeze, and sky of shifting colours. I looked back out onto the river and had time to think about the workshop in Suzhou.

***

The middle of an undergraduate semester doesn't seem like an obvious time to be travelling to China, but the majority of my trips there are in fact mid-semester. I've always been nervous when going on sponsored trips, worrying about whether I'm qualified or whether I'll know anyone there. The last two trips- Grandad Wen's delegation, and Hanyu Qiao- ended up being far cooler than I had imagined would be possible, and a good number of my friends are people I met through those trips. So, though harboring self-doubt as always, this time I also had some feeling that it would be worth the worrying.

And it really was.

***

I had an early start, waking up before four am for the Brisbane to Sydney, then Sydney to Shanghai flight. I was on the same flight as Australian author Julia Leigh, who was going to have her novel The Hunter translated into Chinese. Julia was the first person I met involved with the workshop, and she was totally cool and very friendly. Our flight was delayed for an hour or so because of some torrential rain, during which time I asked lots of questions about the process of creative writing. On the plane I watched In Bruges which I really liked, and two other films which clearly didn't have much of an effect on me since I can't remember them. Oh, one was a Chinese film called Mi Guo, apparently called Lost, Indulgence in English which sounds a bit too similar to Lust, Caution in my view, Lost and Caution going together and Lust, Indulgence also quite similar.

***

As we walked out to the arrival hall in Shanghai there was a driver with a Penguin sign waiting for us, which was damn cool. To get off the plane and have a people-mover reader with driver and tea and water inside, that's the best way to arrive in Shanghai. I think it was about two hours drive to the hotel in Suzhou, the first time I've done that drive at night. There were nice rural houses along the way with candles burning in the yards. We arrived exhausted at about eleven, which is one in the morning on Australian time, which meant I think twenty one hours after I had woken up. You'd think I'd have gone straight to sleep but after I had put my bags down I felt a surge of excitement at being back in China, and the airline food hadn't sat that well, so I hit the street nearby to get a late-night meal. After a bit of walking I found a Sichuan restaurant where I sat by the window with a novel, ate Kung-Pao Chicken and Tomato-Egg Soup and rice, and the waiter came over and chatted to me about why I was in Suzhou and so on. It was nice to be there for a reason. Some North-Eastern guys were head-rollingly drunk at the table nearby, and given the naming arrangements of "Second Brother" and so on I got the feeling they might be hoodlums. I hoped so anyway. There was much swearing. I went back at one am China time and slept well.

***

I had been told that I had to register downstairs between 10 and 4, and I woke up at seven with a lot of energy. I had a good breakfast of congee and warm soymilk, and went out to see what the city was like. There was a wonderful street just nearby, a Historical Street in fact.

It was really lively when I walked down it mid-morning, in search of a phone-card. I walked the length of the historic street without finding any of the newspaper-phone-beverage-internet-sage carts so common outside the fourth ring road in Beijing. After I crossed a busy road I spoke to an approachable looking guy who had kittens in with the eggs he was selling.

He pointed me in the right direction where I spoke to a woman who had one phone-card left. I wanted another one for Julia so I went off walking in the opposite direction and found an official China Mobile store. It's actually less convenient buying the legitimate phone-cards, and I sat there as people argued about whether my drivers license was acceptable to use as identification.
I had some dumplings for an early lunch, and the place was packed. When I got back to the hotel, registration had opened. As I signed my name I saw two familiar names- Brendan and Jim, from Beijing. Then on the elevator up I met Nicky, who contributes to Paper Republic, and whose posts I've always enjoyed. The world suddenly felt much smaller and friendlier.

I spent the remaining hours before the opening ceremonies reading my excerpt of Wang Gang's The Curse of Forbes (which I would actually say as "The Forbes Curse" but that's just me). After some confusion I found the room where I had to be, meeting Duncan along the way, a very funny and friendly guy with a BBC voice. The talks kicked off with simultaneous interpreting, followed by dinner, followed by readings from the authors. All very cool, and the Chinese authors in particular were very entertaining not just in their readings but in what they said preceding. By this stage I'd met fellow Australian Paul, as well as Alice and Skye. I knew by now that it was going to be an awesome week.

***

We tried different paces in the translation sessions. For the first day we didn't get past the first two sentences. Eric had told me that there'd be a lot of discussion- argument, even- over how to express a sentence, but I didn't realise it would be to that extent. Such talks were invaluable though, to revealing the limitless ways a sentence could be understood and expressed. We later split up into groups, which was faster, though we still had to explain our choices, which is something you don't often do when you're translating by yourself. There was a great session on film subtitling- I ended up having breakfast with the director of the documentary the next morning- and my group managed to slip some Northern English phrases into the clip. Oh aye.
In the evenings we'd head down the historic street to the Bookworm cafe, which had a pretty good selection of beers. I think we drank them out of Boddingtons and Leffe.

***

And so the week- days translating fiction, interspersed with buffet lunches and dinners, and drinks in the evening by the canal- went, and I look back at it, and it has an odd temporal distortion. It doesn't quite feel like a week, but more like a montage in a film. It's rare when a period of time is composed solely of curiosity, friends, learning, relaxation, but that's what the week was.