Francesca Rhydderch, author of The Rice Paper Diaries, and Yan Ying, the book’s Chinese translator, launched the novel at Shanghai International Book Fair and Literature Week. The novel is published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House, the largest comprehensive translation publishing house in China.

In a series of essays, published on our website this week, Francesca Rhydderch and Yan Ying, share their impressions:

China Day by Day
Francesca Rhydderch

It may seem at best irrelevant and at worst obscenely privileged be talking about a week-long promotional trip to Shanghai at a time when thousands of people are fleeing Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan in search of a safe haven in Europe. But if the current refugee crisis points to anything beyond the tragedy that is war, it’s the increasingly urgent need for countries not to be strangers, as the Welsh expression goes. As world citizens we can only really understand and know each other by finding ways to reach out from within our individual cultures and languages. For me, translation exchange is one way.

Simone de Beauvoir, on her first, ecstatic solo journey around the United States in 1947, hungered to discover America through her (occasionally overwhelmed) senses as well as her philosophical and political intellectual antennae: ‘I walk slowly. I want to string the lights around my neck, stroke them, eat them.’ she writes. ‘Here they are – and what can I do with them? My hands, my mouth, my eyes, have not taken in this night.’ Her memoir America Day by Day – always avid, never atavistic – conveys through a particularity of detail the real, lived experience of her travels as well as the rapidly changing face of postwar America that she witnessed, as interested – no, more interested – in the man and woman on the street as she was in the occasionally self-regarding intellectuals she mixed with. On one visit to a New York hairdresser’s she was charmed by the way in which the stylist removed the pins from her hair using a magnet. It’s a sophisticated image of the sassy, classy existentialist which is then almost immediately offset by her description of her comical attempt to take a walk along a highway without pavements, ‘glued’ to a concrete wall, terrified for her life, not realising there was a separate walkway for pedestrians.

It was this book that I took with me as some kind of charm against jet lag on a long-haul flight in the other direction, from London Heathrow thirteen hours east to Shanghai’s Pu Dong airport. I was thrilled as I turned the pages by the unbridled joy with which Simone de Beauvoir threw herself at life. Reading her adventures helped to mitigate the now familiar emotional rawness I felt at leaving my children: would my son wake up in the night and reach for me, would my daughter cry before school if she couldn’t brush the tangles out of her hair? What time was it at home anyway?

As our plane touched down and I passed through immigration control with my translator, Yan Ying, I was struck by an omission from de Beauvoir’s litany of the senses: as well as our hands, mouths and eyes, don’t we discover cultures, places and people, through our ears, and through that physical, almost tactile relationship that we necessarily have with an unknown language, finding ourselves almost completely on the outside?

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The Rice Paper Diaries by Francesca Rhydderch was selected to the Wales Literature Exchange 2013 – 2014 Bookcase, our annual selection of recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation.

Shanghai Translation Publishing House announced their intention to buy the translation rights for the novel following a symposium on literary and publishing exchange between Wales and China organised by Bangor University in partnership with Wales Literature Exchange in May 2014, to celebrate the publication of a special Wales edition of the influential Chinese magazine, Foreign Literature and Art.

Francesca Rhydderch and Dr Yan Ying’s journey to China was supported by Wales Arts International and Swansea University, with additional hosting generously provided by Shanghai Translation Publishing House.