In-Person Panel PS6.1

From Words to Worlds: Cultural Exchange and Representation in Asian Narratives

"The Girl I Will Love" by Zaw Gyi - The Short Story That Made Mohinga Myanmar’s National Food 

Yuri Takahashi 

Mohinga is a ubiquitous Myanmar snack consisting of rice noodles in a fish based soup, and is often introduced to foreigners as the country’s traditional cuisine, through tourism and Burmese language classes.  However the origins of Mohinga have not yet been fully investigated and the creation of this national food has not been fully examined either. 

Through my investigations I found mohinga became popular during the early decades of the twentieth century, following a short story which played an important role in impressing this cuisine on Myanmar readers.  The story was entitled “The girl I will love” written by Zaw Gyi in the mid-1930s and featured a young woman running a tiny mohinga shop in a village situated in the  Ayeyarwady delta.  This story was widely read and still currently in print, and appears to have made a large contribution to the popularization of mohinga nationwide.  

Zaw Gyi was one of the leading authors of a new wave of Burmese literature in the 1930s, 'Khit San' (testing the contemporary readers’ taste) and “The girl I will love” remains a valuable work reflecting the sadness of Myanmar society after the 1929 world depression.

Brilliant Mountains and Rustling Leaves: Shifting Images of Asia in Three Translations of Kawabata Yasunari’s Izu no Odoriko (1926) 

Laura Marshall 

Untranslatability refers to the idea that certain elements of a language can prove particularly difficult to carry over into another. My research identifies these so-called ‘untranslatables’ by comparing Japanese literary works to multiple English translations. This paper intends to demonstrate how untranslatability research can offer insights into translation’s effect on our understandings of the East Asian area. To do this, it will share my analysis of onomatopoeic adverbs in three English versions of Kawabata Yasunari’s Izu no Odoriko (1926) ‘The Dancing Girl of Izu’ produced by two translators (Seidensticker 1955/1997, Holman 1997). 

Analysis of each version’s translation of onomatopoeic adverbs reveals two very different images of the titular dancing girl: a dainty, lithe ‘beauty’ (who moves with ‘quick little steps’ and ‘falls to one knee’ Seidensticker 23) vs an awkward, embarrassed teenager (who ‘trudges’ along and ‘thuds’ to the ground Holman 24). These differences, I will argue, align with broader shifts in America’s positioning of Japan as ‘unusual’ and ‘exotic’ in the cold-war years to ‘friends’ and ‘safe trading partners’ during Clinton’s 1990s. This paper will thus ultimately demonstrate how considering ‘untranslatability’ can enrich area studies’ foci by giving insight into translation’s role in shaping evolving representations of East Asia.

Poetic Conversations with my Grandmother’s Autograph Album: (Re)Imagining Representations of Asian Women 

Miriam Wei Wei Lo 

This creative-critical paper will present new translations (from Chinese into English) of entries from my grandmother’s autograph album, along with poetic responses to these translations, to consider how conversations between the past and the present can help us (re)imagine the future. The (re)imagined future envisioned by this paper is one of interconnection through dialogue: as I respond from the standpoint of a descendent located in Australia, to this World War Two era Chinese diaspora autograph album that captures a flowering of Chinese-language creative expression. Both my translations and my poetic responses are embedded within a research framework that combines insights from area studies, feminism, and genre studies: taking in socio-cultural analyses of Chinese diasporas in South East Asia, the Australian tradition of feminist redress via poetic address, and the rich field of scholarly commentary on autograph albums. This paper explores the way poetry can be used to build bridges across the hyphen between ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’. This paper also contends that poetic attentiveness offers new possibilities for the way Asian women’s lives are represented in cultural heritage spaces in both South East Asia and Australia.

A Gift from Quong Tart: An English Phrasebook for Cantonese Speakers 

Josh Stenberg 

Ashfield & District Historical Society in Sydney’s Inner West holds a book titled Huaying tongyu jiquan (Complete Compendium of Common Phrases in Chinese and English), printed in the Jiashen year of the Guangxu reign (1884) in Hong Kong. Belonging to a family of phrasebooks for the Cantonese user to navigate Anglophone conversations or societies, this copy is noteworthy for the inscribed cover, inscribed “Alf Hughes/From his employer/Quong Tart/City.” Quong Tart (or Moy Quong Tart) was the Anglicised name of a prominent Ashfield citizen.  

This copy, not previously well-known outside the Society, belongs to a family of phrasebooks of which, for Chinese-Australian history, the most noteworthy are the first Chinese-English phrasebooks known to be printed in Australia, two editions of the Self Educator by Sun Johnson in Sydney in 1891 and 1892. This presentation compares phrasebooks collected in Australia such as the Ashfield Compendium with diasporic phrasebooks, positing close connections between the industries in Hong Kong, Australia, and the United States.