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 first of two essays for Wales Literature Exchange, Yan Ying, discusses what is special about The Rice Paper Diaries to the Chinese reader.

“The Rice Paper Diaries, in its translation, has acquired a new dimension in the cultural, literary and historical context of China.”
Yan Ying, School of Modern Languages, University of Leicester

The Chinese translation of Francesca Rhydderch’s The Rice Paper Diaries was published in early August this year. Significantly, the setting of the novel in the wartime Hong Kong ties in well with the 70th anniversary of the war with Japan.

To the Western reader, the novel might remind them of the battlefield in the then Far East, which has been fading out of memory, perhaps due to geographical distance. To the Chinese reader, there is no shortage of novels and films about the Japanese occupation and Chinese resistance over eight years between 1937 and 1945. In recent years, a few blockbuster films and novels, such as Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death (2010) and Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem (2011), have featured the Nanjing Massacre. However, a distinctive feature of these films and novels is that in them, Westerners are seen as witnesses of atrocities and heroic figures protecting local Chinese from Japanese armies. What civilian Westerners suffered at the hands of the Japanese is largely lost among the general public. Very few local people know that what is now a prestigious middle school was once the Longhua internment camp where Westerners were held during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.

In literary works in Chinese set in the Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, there are only scanty references to the British being imprisoned. Perhaps that is because the life of the former colonizer at the hands of the new occupier was beyond the reach, as well as the concerns, of ordinary local people. Nevertheless, what took place, whether to the Chinese or to the Westerners, was on the same piece of land: these different war memories can be shared, overcoming linguistic differences through translation, and creating collective ownership of what is remembered.

To direct the Chinese reader to consider this possibility is the key message of my preface to the Chinese translation of and the introduction I gave at the book launch for this novel set in wartime Hong Kong and Wales. The Rice Paper Diaries, in its translation, has acquired a new dimension in the cultural, literary and historical context of China.

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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.