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 the last of her essays, Francesca Rhydderch shares her impressions.

China Day by Day

"I feel something like a quiet ecstasy. I look around: I open my eyes, mouth, and ears, taking in this night."

Francesca Rhydderch

It is Friday. Our events and signings over, we take the last evening for ourselves. Sitting in a traditional restaurant, I am the only Westerner. No one looks or comments. Yan and I stopped on the way here to drink a glass of fresh kiwi juice we bought on a roadside stall and drank sitting on fold-out wooden chairs, watching a group of young men talking and smoking on the pavement.

Now it’s twilight, and we are eating with Yan’s college friends at a table next to a group of women, three generations of one family, I’d guess, from the way the one in the middle, a little younger than me, asks for clean napkins for the old lady, and feeds her daughter a vegetable pastry from her own chopsticks. The little girl doesn’t fuss or shake her head. I think of my son, who when we are eating out brings a book and loses himself in it almost immediately, eating chips with his fingers, while my daughter, saucer-eyed and pitcher-eared, asks, What? Who? When? every time my husband and I try to start a grown-up conversation over her head, until we laugh and give up, and are quiet, like the family next to me.

Yan breaks off from her conversation with her friend as she watches me snapping open my chopsticks, and clumsily lifting a piece of tofu to my mouth. Do you remember that scene in the book, she says? In The Rice Paper Diaries Elsa, the main character, finds herself in a similar situation, and laughs at herself as she tries to eat in the Chinese way, even as she tries again and again, determined to do it. For a moment, the real and imagined merge in the way they do when I’m writing. It’s not unlike discovering another country: you start out as a ghostly presence in your own story, you inhabit your characters inch by inch, and you live through time and space with them until in the end they are as real as any human being you have known. It’s what (if I’ve understood her properly) Simone de Beauvoir would call a process of embodiment.

Seeing the look on my face, Yan leans over and asks quietly, Do you want some more? Are you still hungry? Yes, I say. Yan spoons more of the tofu dish onto my plate, and as I eat it awkwardly, piece by piece, relishing its chewy, juicy texture, listening to her talking in her mother tongue with her friends, I feel something like a quiet ecstasy. I look around: I open my eyes, mouth, and ears, taking in this night.

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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.