Translating Violence
It was 7 p.m. I had just gotten off the phone with family. “Are you doing okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Okay, I just wanted to make sure. Sheng lu yi si zheng zai naoshi. 圣路易斯正在闹事”
My mother was referencing the recent protests that had erupted in response to the St. Louis verdict, where the court acquitted former police officer Jason Stockley for the 2011 fatal shooting of black driver Anthony Lamar Smith.
I was very surprised. Naoshi.
After our phone call, I quickly looked up the definition of naoshi.
“闹事” (naoshi) – “to create a disturbance, to make trouble.” The sentence, roughly translated, meant “people are making trouble in St. Louis”.
Over the course of the following days, while I talked to friends and professors here at Wash U about the verdict and its ramifications, past present and future, I increasingly realized that I had been using English only, to talk about police brutality and violence.
[pullquote]Over the course of the following days, while I talked to friends and professors here at Wash U about the verdict and its ramifications, past present and future, I increasingly realized that I had been using English only, to talk about police brutality and violence.[/pullquote]
I grew up in a first-generation immigrant household in Connecticut and then Virginia, where Mandarin, Chinese was my first language until the age of three. While my parents wanted me to maintain a connection to our heritage, Mandarin was also the language that they were most comfortable with. It was the language I used to communicate with my grandparents and extended relatives in mainland China.
However, when I started college in St. Louis and started to explore my identity, my vocabulary expanded to include new words that I no longer knew how to translate. Structural Violence. Model Minority Myth. Microaggressions. Privilege.
[pullquote]However, when I started college in St. Louis and started to explore my identity, my vocabulary expanded to include new words that I no longer knew how to translate. Structural Violence. Model Minority Myth. Microaggressions. Privilege. Suddenly, there was a whole part of my experience that I did not know how to explain to my family whenever I went back home.[/pullquote]
Suddenly, there was a whole part of my experience that I did not know how to explain to my family whenever I went back home. Sometimes, when I heard something that I did not agree with, I tried to challenge their thought process. However, often the end result turned out to be that we held different understandings of the connotation of our words.
The language with which we use to talk about violence can be inclusive and exclusive. Often, small nuances are lost when we try to translate them.
[pullquote]The language with which we use to talk about violence can be inclusive and exclusive. Often, small nuances are lost when we try to translate them.[/pullquote]
Take the word “violence” for example. “Violent”. “Violence”. “Violently.” Depending upon how we use the word in a sentence, it holds largely disparate connotations.
Similarly, in Mandarin Chinese, there are many words to describe public displays of organizing. Depending upon which word you use, the picture is totally different.
For instance,
1) 游行 (youxing) = “to parade”, a parade 人们 穿着古装参加游行。
People wore historical costumes to participate in the parade.
Here, the word youxing connotes something celebratory, organized, and peaceful.
2) 示威游行 (shiweiyouxing) = “to demonstrate”, a demonstration 警方派出大队人马 在示威游行的现场戒备。
The police were present at the demonstration in (full) force.
When you add shiwei (which literally means “to show power”), the original word for “parade” becomes political.
3) 骚乱 (saoluan) = “to riot”, unrest 警察大批 出动，以制止骚乱。
The police were out in full force to stop any riots.
Saoluan becomes something undesirable. It connotes a sense of chaos and disorder.
Word choice can reflect a lot about the conception or misconception of an event.
The word my mother had used, “闹事” (naoshi) – “to create a disturbance, to make trouble” values harmony and peace. However, it also seemingly holds the connotation of creating something out of nothing—which is not true. African Americans in the United States have faced decades of structural oppression and violence that did not just suddenly culminate into one verdict. By using this word, we erase history. We fail to acknowledge historical injustices.
In contrast, the word: “抗议” (kangyi) is a verb that means “to protest, to express strong opposition to the speech, actions, or measures of someone, a country, or a unit”. The verb in its function often takes a direct object. By having the ability to take a direct object, the word prompts us to find a reason. We start asking ourselves: what are people protesting? Is there a reason for their anger?
Each language in this world holds deep nuances and the translator holds a lot of power in shaping the conversation. Language can thus become an intergenerational barrier to social justice conversations, which may in return affect political participation within immigrant communities.
According to the Pew Research Center, eligible Asian American voter turnout still lags behind blacks, whites, and only surpassed the Hispanic voter turnout rate in the 2016 election. Although Asian Americans have been deemed a possible “swing vote”, many have also pointed out the lack of political action. Keep your head down and work hard. Where are the Asian Americans in protests? Where is the show of solidarity?
In the summer of 2016, Christina Xu, a Chinese American ethnographer, started a crowdsourced grassroots online letter translation campaign titled “Letters for Black Lives” to create a space for “honest conversations about racial justice, police violence, and anti-Blackness in our families and communities.” The letter is to family members and speaks about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in languages such as Korean, Urdu, Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and many others. Most importantly, each translation tailored to each “community’s historical and cultural context” because “after all, the first rule of Asian America is that there is no single Asian American experience”. This letter reflected attempts of first generation immigrant youth to speak to their parents about the BLM movement in a language that their family understood.
I recall jumping on the Google document when the first versions came out and seeing a flurry of action in the comments sections. People from across the country and beyond revising each other’s translations, holding each other accountable for the connotation of the words that they were using.
When we try our best to communicate about these events happening around us, we may not have the exact language to do so that does justice to what we are trying to say. As a result, things are lost in translation. Things that may not be “violent” suddenly become “violent”. The lack of activism may be due to other historically grounded reasons. However, the lack of activism may also be due to the ways that violence and protest can become lost due to the language we use and the generational gap we must overcome.
While language can be a barrier, it can also be a bridge. As children of immigrants, we can begin creating dialogue with past generations of our families regarding protest by starting with how we talk about these issues. We must strive to deepen our vocabularies so that we can start to build more empathy.
Helen Li ‘19 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at helen.li@wustl.edu.