DISCLOSURE: There is currently no pair of words in the English language that activate my couldn’t-give-a-shit gag response faster than “stretch goal”—nonetheless, I have to admit that this is a pretty damn worthwhile Kickstarter project: Clarkesworld: Chinese Science Fiction Translation Project by Neil Clarke — Kickstarter
Clarke is a good editor, and his magazine an excellent venue. I’ve got at least three readily articulable reasons that I think this isn’t just a good or lofty project, but rather a goddamned vital one. Here goes:
1) YOU ARE PROBABLY BIGOTED ABOUT CHINA If you are an American reader (and Google Analytics tells me that your probably are) who mostly interacts with other Americans, you almost certainly harbor a whole host of really fucked-up opinions about China and its citizens, which you repeat often and take as gospel and don’t even realize are fucked up and baseless. I host the very same psycho-flora in my own brain-gut–and only became aware if it because I happened to go to Costa Rica for a long visit two years running. CR has *much* friendly relations with China than the US does, and that trickles down to rank and file citizens. It was only in visiting CR that I became aware of the clanging bigotry of what were, in the US, totally garden variety “factual” observations about China. I needed the contrast to see it. This is a similar source of that much-needed contrast, but without having to pay a passport fee or ride an airplane.
2) YOU ARE GOING TO BE CHARMED BY THE SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE WORLDVIEWS PRESENTED IN THESE STORIES AND YOUR OWN This is another one that totally blindsided me, and it was only by the grace of fickle Fortune that I even got the chance to get blindsided. See, I’ve got this lil wistful steampunk robot-soldier-sexbot novella that got translated into Chinese a while back. The book is set just after the Civil War, and is largely about the uncomfortable quasi-friendship of a pair of outcasts, one a crippled Confederate veteran, the other a Japanese-American veterinarian/doctor. The clockwork soldiers are sort of a narrative foil, at best–or, at least, that’s totally how American readers take it (myself included). But then I saw a couple reviews from Chinese readers, and the scales fell from my eyes. To these Chinese readers, the story wasn’t really about the outcast crippled Confederate and doctor; it was about those those identical clockwork soldiers, who had done their duty and finally been released by their government, only to be viciously punished by their human neighbors for attempting to live free and remake themselves in some new image. Yeah, all of that was always there in the novella, but it took this new group of readers–and their own fears and fascinations and cultural baggage–to make it visible.
3) FOR THE MOST PART, WE DON’T GET MUCH IN TRANSLATION The US is a *major* worldwide culture creator and exporter; most everyone else takes *a lot* of their entertainment in translation. Meanwhile, we have the privilege of getting most of our thrills, chills, shits, and giggles in our own language and packaged in our own ubiquitous culture and its biases. It is good for your brain to have to try and breakdown strange new cultural proteins.
3.1) CHINA MAKES THIS WORLD The other side: Look around you (including the thing on which you are looking at these words): Without China, an easy 90% of the things in your house don’t exist, don’t function, or don’t matter because the things they need in order to function either don’t exist or don’t function, because they were MADE IN CHINA. It’s time we understood China much, much better, on its own terms.
Just sayin’, this is worth your support–but more than that, it is worth your *attention*.
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