O bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ profile bc ][ bc ][ bc ][ 23 miere. At the end of the performance, Su Wei stood up in the balcony, beaming and waving both his arms in the air: a gesture of pride and thanks. Later, he asked me if I was touched by the music and lyrics. “Many audience members told me after the show that they cried,” he said. “You were sitting down there, weren’t you? Did you see people cry?” But there were also audience members who complained that the piece was too upbeat, that it didn’t represent all the suffering that youth went through during the decade they spent in manual labor, far away from their homes. Su Wei understands these objections to the lyrics. After all, in Austin’s English translations, the lyrics express positive sentiments: “Oh, the mountain knows its noble truth, / The ocean knows its drunken ecstasy. / Do not ask me, do not ask me, / whether I regret my youth.” Even in its lowest dips, the poem is wistful and nostalgic, but there is never bitterness. “This is because that was a time of hope, too,” said Su Wei. “In my life, I have never completely lost hope, because even in the darkness, there have always been good people, good memories, sources of light.” Witching Vale, Su Wei’s novel that also draws from his experience during the Cultural Revolution, is currently being translated by Austin. In meeting Austin, I encountered for
the first time one of the human beings behind Su Wei’s characters. When he was at Yale, Austin was on the 2007 Chinese Debate team with three other non-heritage students handselected by Su Wei to represent Yale at an international Chinese debate tournament that was broadcast on Chinese Central Television. Su Wei was happy to share this episode of his life, boasting about his four students, now his “buddies” and “American sons,” who had mastered Chinese idioms and could recite lines of ancient Chinese poetry. The team persisted through ten grueling days of researching, competing, and as Austin put it, “performing like monkeys” for the audience and cameras. In between debate rounds, television hosts pushed microphones in their faces and told them to recite poems, attempt tongue twisters, and talk about themselves and why they loved China. Austin and his friends were rushed from one activity to the next, spending all of their free time holed up in the hotel preparing evidence or at the TV station recording. At many points, it became difficult for the team members to grasp why they were in the competition at all. At the start of one of the rounds, Austin remembers feeling relieved rather than anxious when he and his teammates thought that
justine yan / contributing photographer
Yale Daily News Magazine yaledailynews.com/mag