How a writer gives voice to China’s ethnic minorities by translating their stories
Linguist and Chinese literary translator Bruce Humes looks back at a life lived in all corners of the Sinosphere, and reflects on his passion for literature of and about China’s minorities
Suburban brat I was born in 1955 in small-town America but was raised in two lily-white suburbs, one outside Chicago and, later, one outside Pittsburgh. This was an era of tranquil apartheid; I don’t recall anyone of colour among local adults, and only a handful at school.
Being a suburban brat in one of the nation’s richest districts, it wasn’t easy trying to be one of the gang. I accomplished this by excelling at athletics and hanging out with the jocks, despite being seriously short for my age, not to mention very effeminate. I was in trouble a lot and if my mother hadn’t enrolled me in an academically challenging private high school I might have ended up as a juvenile delinquent with a police record.
Foreign tongues I was keen on foreign languages from a very young age, certainly before I was 10. My mother, Joy Humes, held a PhD in 20th-century French literature and learned Russian and German to earn her degree, but she didn’t share them with me until she taught me German one summer when I was 13 or 14. I began much earlier on my own, without encouragement from anyone, by studying Latin with a textbook I bought.
I opted for anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. During my freshman year, I took courses in French, German and Chinese, but detested dorm life, as most students on my floor were brain-damaged business majors at Wharton, busy boozing their way into a fraternity.
So I left for a year abroad at the Sorbonne (University, in Paris), one of the happiest years of my life. I mastered French quickly – if painfully, since Parisians are famously rude if they detect an anglophone accent – and upon my return, dropped French and German in favour of Chinese culture and language. When the anthropology department refused to give me credit for some of those courses, I switched my major and graduated in oriental studies.
[Shenzhen] was frankly a rather wild border town complete with myriad sex workers, notoriously corrupt traffic police and master pickpockets from Xinjiang
China calling In the late 70s, I had an intense desire to think, live and dream in Chinese, and to experience Mao Zedong’s revolution in person. But as the United States still hadn’t recognised communist China, in 1978, I packed my bags and headed instead for Taipei, to further my Mandarin studies. Eventually, I wound up in opportunity-rich Hong Kong, where I learned Cantonese, married locally and raised our daughter.
