Hey guys! This is an auto-generated transcript for Episode 7, on Ding Ling’s The Diary of Miss Sophie. I haven’t taken the time to tidy it, so bewarned: it’s messy and will absolutely mangle almost every Chinese word spoken!
One day, somewhere over the rainbow, I’ll tidy it up manually.
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so far on the podcast, we haven’t encountered a single Chinese character with an English name. But more importantly, we haven’t looked at any female authors. It’s all just been men so far, but have no fear. Both of these things are about to change. I’m Angus Stewart, and you’re listening to the translated Chinese fiction podcast. So before we crack on, I just like to do my plugs just now. Get them out of the way. So if you’d like to get the latest on the show, you should go to the Instagram. It’s at TR ch fac, tr Shafiq. Of course, for translated Chinese fiction. You can also give me a follow on Twitter. I’m Angus likes words on Twitter. It’s not all about the podcast on there. But to be honest, that’s just about the only thing I seem to find the energy to tweet about these days, because I kind of hate Twitter. But I found a few cool people on there, including the guests of our next episode, you can find out who he is, if you go to the Instagram or the Twitter. If you’d like to help support the show, I’ve now got two ways you can do that. You can give a monthly recurring donation on Patreon. Or you can give a one off on by mere coffee. I’ll give links to both of those in the show notes. And the reason I’m asking well, asking, the reason I’m pointing you in these directions is because I’m paying a yearly hosting fee to SoundCloud and if people who love the show can help me pay that fee. I’ll be happy, happy bunny. So those are the plugs, everybody, let’s get on with the show. So flashback to Episode One of this show when I was talking about Lucian and his diary of a madman. The few things that we should recall, first of all, let’s just refresh our memories about the May the fourth movement and the new cultural movement. So that was long story short, that was a reaction among young Chinese left leaning left wing intellectuals to kind of modernise and build up their country and like a strong anti imperialist goal. But the kind of means for modernising was learning a lot from the west. So there is that kind of not contradiction, but there was it was strongly tied into a reaction to kind of feeling that China was backward and needed to catch up with them the powers that were dominating it. Yes, so that was that was the metaphoric movement. The new cultural movement was its kind of cultural, literary wing, Lucian was part of that. So we’ve got that flashback. The other flashback is, I believe I mentioned the writer Street in Shanghai is Hong Kong district, where Lucians It’s nearby Lucian Park, it’s nearby the house revolution spent his final years. And on that street, there’s a mural stone mural of various different Chinese writers, pretty much all from the Shanghai scene of the new cultural movement. And on there is one lone lady with a a name, that’s just two characters, quite easy to read. For Beginner Level Chinese readers like me, it’s tingling. And the book we’re doing today, or the short story, I should say, that we’re doing today by her is called shaft a new should new should the regime. So we can translate that two ways. I suppose four ways because we can say it’s her name is either Sophie or Sofia. And we can say the diary of or so and so’s diary. So
we could have the diary of Miss Sophie, the diary of Miss Sophia. Or we could have Miss Sophie’s diary, or miss Sofia’s diary. I’m really sorry, I’m beating that to death. The version I read translates the title as Miss Sofia’s diary. And the version I read is a PDF. The reason I didn’t invest in an actual book is because there’s basically been no nice publications, no decent looking English language publications of dealings work for a very long time. So I just didn’t really fancy investing in a kind of badly designed cover from decades ago. So I just popped online to see if this short story was available as a PDF. Hopefully the copyright people won’t come to strangle me. But anyway, I had a PDF of the short story taken from the selected writings of dangling entitled I myself, I’m a woman, this is probably the main big collection, you’ll be getting your hands on if you’re trying to read her in English unless you’re on university programme that’s giving the you this exact PDF. So the translations in this collection were by tiny Barlow, and Gary G. George, I think that’s pronounced and it was published by Beacon Press of Boston in 1989. And if you Google Beacon Press like I did In research for this show, you’ll find they’re still going. And they’re what you might call a radical publisher. So they’re publishing kind of lefty and liberal, Dissident Voices, underrepresented voices, I did not really take note of how American versus international their perspective is, I think that’s always worth worth considering. But certainly in 1989, it was them who managed to put together this translation, translated collection of things writings. So back to the new culture movement, and dingling and Lucian being in the same way gang operating in Shanghai. So before I talk about our personal life, yeah, let’s just compare this diary of Miss Sophie, with the diary of a madman because they both use diary format, it’s, you know, it’s first person, it’s a personal chronological format, and kind of in the western style of following an individual and looking through their eyes. But Lucians story is definitely intended as a very deliberate metaphor for the state of the Chinese nation. And the kind of the characters, the characters feelings aren’t really the main, like his personal dilemmas aren’t really the big issue for him, the kind of the big push and pull of the story is, is what he’s seeing real or is it imagined? How mad is he, I suppose, whereas in Miss Sophie, his diary is a totally personal, totally emotional, totally internal journey, which is part of what makes this such a special and feminist story, because it’s taking a woman’s perspective. And she’s first as far as we can tell. She’s a totally independent, liberated young lady, although of course, she has her problems based on like, where she is in society. So that’s the big difference. And that’s why this books a wee bit apart from the rest of the new cultural movement, which was a lot more political and male dominated, then thing Ling’s writings are. I haven’t phrased that very well, anyway, if you if you like this podcast, then you could certainly find other podcasts about Sophie, Miss Sophie and dingling. Unlike the other podcasts I’ve done on some books, like we’re on iTunes. Leave me alone, Wang Schwaz. Please don’t call me human. This is an episode where there are rival episodes out there. So the Chinese literature podcast, they’ve got two dangling episodes, they’ve got one on shall village one on the diary of Miss Sophie, you should check those both out. And the BBC has a very cool podcast series called Chinese characters, where they look at different individuals from throughout Chinese history and just kind of talk about them. And they have an episode of On dangling, which starts off by talking about the diary of Miss Sophie. And it’s really good. So definitely do check that out if you want if you want more. So moving on,
let’s talk a wee bit about dangling herself and her life before we talk about the story. So dangling is a pen name as Chinese writers often adopts just like moron Chesson did. She was born with the name Chang Wei, and that was in the year 1994 in Hunan. And as an adult, she adopted a course CNAME which is a Chinese tradition where you adopt these names as you reach adulthood. They’re called Julia I believe courtesy names are courtesy name was young being true. But then, of course later as a writer, she picked the pen name dangling under the old, stupid, weird jail system of Romanization. She was known in two Westerners as tingling. Why I don’t know why it’s so stupid. Anyway. Yeah, so she was from quite a wealthy family. Her dad passed away when she was three. So she was raised by her mother, who was a hero because her mom was also running a school. So it was a teacher, and they were staying in her maternal uncle’s home, so her mom’s brother, and that was probably a problem for her from a very young age, because the young gangway aka Jang Vinci, aka dangling was betrothed to her uncle’s son, her cousin from childhood, maybe gives you an idea why she might have been keen to join the May 4 movement, the anti kind of Confucian anti tradition movement. So anyway, by 18 years old, she’d successfully broken off this engagement, and how she did that ad and I find it kind of amusing. She criticised her uncle in a local newspaper. So definitely a sign of the changing times. In Hunan, this kind of western style publication a newspaper was available for her to save herself, I suppose by writing a criticism. Interesting, definitely interesting. So that same year after she escaped that kind of family bond, she enrolled at a girls school over in Shanghai. So quite a lot. length of the country away. That’s a big leaf from Hunan. And this wasn’t any old school. This was a school founded by the May the fourth intellectuals left wing intellectuals. So I went digging for information on this school and they found its location, the pharma site is marked on Google Maps with its Chinese name and pinion. So it’s Chinese name. And I’m not going to do the tones correctly here is the ping Ming, new shell just means people’s girl school. And we’re in Shanghai, that’s near what I kind of think of as the laowai help it found 158 or laowai Park. If you are a Shanghai lander, you’ll know what I’m on about. So yeah, it’s pretty central still standing. You can go check it out. So at the school at the pinging new shell, the People’s girls school, and then at university dingling became involved in the left wing literary scene. Remember, it was a bit of a sausage fest. She married a poet called who yappin, sorry about the Totems there. And her and who lived in various places. And in major Chinese cities, I think Shanghai, Nanjing and Beijing are the biggies the West that lives in the western hills of Beijing, which is an area that pops up in the diary of Miss Sophie, I’m not going to be consistent with the translations of the stories named by the way. So it’s going to be all over the place, but you’ll know what I’m talking about. So the marriage was all all rosy. But in 1931, who yappin was executed for being associated with the Communist Party. And this was he would he was killed in the Gospel. What was it called the long this was an area I used to live by long wire. Yeah, the long wire prison, which is a site you can visit in Shanghai, where lots of Chinese Communists were killed by the KMT, the Kuomintang government. It’s a big kind of martyr site within China, certainly within Shanghai. If you’re in Shanghai, do go. It’s got a park where, when I visited, I saw about five old men, all within a stone’s throw just a stone’s throw distance of each other playing saxophone. So just for that alone, and there was very cute cats there as well. So for history, little cats, and old saxophonists do go,
I think we’re getting sidetracked. Yes. So one year after who yappin was executed by the Nationalist government and the woman down party, she joined the Communist Party. And this was a really big turning point in our life, because the party expected you to follow the party line. So after dangling success in Republican 20s, China writing individualistic stories about the aspirations and disappointments of new Chinese women, just like the diary, Miss Sophie, she switched it up for something a little bit more nationalistic, patriotic, left wing, socialist, all those things. But, of course, if you know anything about the mala Dong era, you’ll know that won’t help you that will do nothing for you. If you’re a writer, you are eventually going to be screwed. Lucian perhaps being one exception, so in 1942, before the revolution was successful, MindView dangling was shot down by Mao. This was while she was in there, Ian bass, I believe, because she was complaining about the party’s shortcomings in women’s liberation. She felt that, for example, the right to divorce that had been granted to men and women was kind of being abused by the men. She felt that there was double standards about what was expected of women. They were told that they should be you know, model, soldiers model communists, but if they didn’t keep up their traditional feminine duties, they would be judged, etc, etc. And she complained and Mao said, Stop complaining. So that damaged her position. Fast forward 15 years to 1957 when there was a big anti racist, put that in quotes anti rightist purge, basically where you if you expressed any doubt about Milo schools, or you did not adhere to the most left wing position, you were shut down. That’s exactly what happened to her. Her work was banned. Then fast forward to the Cultural Revolution, which kind of lines up with the hippie revolution in the West, so like, kind of mid to late 60s through to mid 70s. During that she was sent to jail for five years and then after five years in jail, she got 12 years of farm labour until her rehabilitation in 1978. And then eight years after her rehabilitation, she passed away. And during those eight years, her work kind of resurfaced. She Got to do a trip to the United States to the some some kind of writers position the University of Iowa. So she I think she, her and her her readers and funds and rehabilitators in the government, and in the literary scene did good things for her in those eight years. So I kinda have a happy ending to the story. So let’s talk about the story itself. So my copy of the diary, Miss Sophie was a 32 page journey with Sophia or, or Sophie. And she’s a young Chinese woman living in Beijing with tuberculosis. The plot is not too heavy, I wouldn’t say it’s our journey, or the journey we go on with her. It’s mostly through her mental state and her romantic kind of dilemmas and her sexual desires. It’s certainly not shy about those, although itself, the content itself is not explicit, but it’s very open and honest about her sexuality. There’s, there’s no more polite way for me to say that. So her big dilemma comes when she meets a new man named Ling ginger, and he’s somewhat exotic, he’s Singaporean, Chinese. So he’s from across the sea, from the the warm side. And he’s he’s a handsome guy, the descriptions of him are luscious. Let’s say there’s a lot of description of his lips. It kind of reminded me of a Scottish book called Sunset song that I had to read in high school. And that was written by a man a street man, as far as we know called Lewis, grassy, given, but from the perspective of a young Scottish girl, and there’s a man she meets who’s kind of described in the same way, like, kind of, like dangerous and powerful, but also that’s No, I’m not I’m not doing it justice for reasons. But yeah, he gets a lot of description layered on him, this guy lien jinsha. But on the other hand, she realises after not too long, he’s a very shallow guy, and he’s kind of a pig as well.
So her big dilemma is, what do I do about my attraction to LinkedIn Sherm, and how does that affect me as a liberated, new woman of China. So she’s also got what appears to be a boy, a more traditional sort of boyfriend called Wadey. But wait, he is just completely hopeless. He just cries all the time, he kind of pledges himself but Sophie just kind of takes cruel pleasure and humiliating him giving him absolutely not, but also kind of occasionally flickering towards pity. And she’s never crew enough to shake him off. She just kind of wishes that she could tell him or that he could see he should be her friend, or you know, her quote, unquote, brother, not, not her boyfriend, so that those are the men in her life, at least in this story. And she kind of ends up torn, I’d say, between our independent and kind of rational side that can see what she’s doing to herself, and knows that she really ought to hate jinsha. And she also like, has this instinct to just cave in, call her call him what she wanted to call him. Is it master? There’s a part of her that just wants him to totally be her boss. And she knows that that’s messed up. And yeah, like I said, the plot isn’t the main thing. The main thing is the kind of thoughts and whimsies and insights and flights of fancy that Miss Sophia has, I think I saw some, some writer describing her as delusional, which is not fair. I think she’s no more delusional than every person is that she’s just brutally honest about it. So the kind of closure of a novel turn off here if you don’t want spoilers, is that she decides she’s going to leave Beijing to live out her last days. In the south, we’re not told how far south that is. Whether that’s the Jiangnan region like Jang Jang soo Shanghai, or whether that’s going to be all the way down in the semi tropics of Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, Hong Kong. In any case, she’s just totally disillusioned with her life. And also with the diary format, she’s realised that basically all the things that she set out to solve haven’t been solvable. She’s, she thinks there’s no answers, and she’s got a terminal illness that there appears to be no cure for. So she just thinks like, fuck it, I’m going to hit the road where no one knows me live out my days as I’ve been living them, but you know, without hopefully things that frees me in my tracks like LinkedIn. Sure. So there’s, there’s a summary of what happens. Why is the story or why did the story Alia mark at the time it did because he was hugely successful. So as I talked about, in the Lucian episode, this was a time of modernization liberalisation Westernisation and all these forces were clashing with the kind of traditional Confucian values of Imperial China. And I think everywhere in the world that has modernised these two forces have collided, the kind of conservative forces where you get matched up by a family where love isn’t top priority. What you want as an individual isn’t top priority versus the new age of finding someone you love, or just doing what you like seeking pleasure before, practical or traditional concerns. So it was a pertinent story at the time. And it lives on as a pertinent story. And especially because it’s written by a woman, about a woman, and perhaps for women. I think you don’t have to be a lady to enjoy this book. But you might get more out of it. Perhaps if you’re a Chinese woman, again, that’s definitely not me. But yeah, it’s it’s a it’s a really fascinating insight into really vividly realised an interesting character because Sophie slash Sophia is definitely a very kind of quirky individual. If he was, if the book was written exactly as it was today, she might come off as like a bit of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, perhaps. But at the time, imagine this is it’s the 20s in a country that’s just ceased being an a country ruled by an emperor a few decades ago. So think how mind blowing or not mind blowing think how forward thinking it must have seen at a time, we won’t really know because we weren’t there. But it’s certainly an interesting thing to consider, are we side note here. So I had gone in thinking this would be a story of Shanghai, about the kind of,
you know, the modern cigarette smoking cheapo wearing, liberated Shanghai, Jazeera lady. But although the story was written in Shanghai, it’s actually set in Beijing. Not that this is very important, because I’m sure a lot of the for the cultural forces that were kind of modernising Shanghai were also present in Beijing. But perhaps the reason that Beijing and the Western its western Hills feature is because at the time, Ding Ling and her husband were kind of flitting between these two big cities, these two big cultural nexuses Nexus is my new favourite word, by the way. So this is going to make me sound like a bit of a moron. But one of the most useful resources I had for researching this episode was the Wikipedia page of Miss Sophie’s diary. And we had a really interesting quote from dealing by how Western authors and not just Western but foreign authors inspired her. I’m just going to read that for you now, because I think it’s really good. Okay, I stand corrected, it’s actually on dealings Wikipedia page, not the page of the story. But it’s really interesting. So this is an introduction to our publication of Miss Sophie’s diary and other stories. I’m not sure if that’s the English translated version, or the Chinese version. But anyway, here’s what dangling as an old as an old lady sees in her introduction code starts here, I can say that if I had not been influenced by western literature, I probably I would probably not have been able to write fiction, or at any rate, not the kind of fiction in this collection. It is obvious that my earliest stories follow the path of Western realism a little later, as the Chinese Revolution developed, my fiction changed with the needs of the age, and of the Chinese people, literature, to join minds together, turning ignorance into mutual understanding time, place, an institution’s cannot separate it from the friends it wins. And in 1957, a time of spiritual suffering for me, I found consolation in reading much Latin American and African literature. So just to decode that, yeah, her early writing, which in this case will just take to mean Miss Sophie’s diary does have quite a few western influences. And there’s a few that get named checked a lot one’s Madame Bovary. I’m not sure I vowed that is I’ve never read it. But yeah, this kind of realistic depiction of an individual,
like a fully rounded 3d individual with very few political concerns. The one thing I’ve read that would match up with that in timeline and style might be the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, but certainly things of that mould were one thing when started writing, then our hobby got executed. She joined the Communist Party, her writing did become political and proletarian and then 1957, the time of suffering. That was the anti rightist purge. And I just think it’s really interesting that she was not looking to Western literature anymore, but still not just reading politically friendly or domestic literature. She was looking to the developing world, which I suppose would be kind of in touch with Mao is away, but yeah, really nice we quote there on I’m going to read one week excerpt from the diary Miss Sophie for you. Not going to read more than one just because I think it’ll be a bit cringy me trying to speak in her voice. It’s far too different as people, even though she’s not a real person. But yeah, here’s one great so quote starts here. I’ve always wanted a man who would really understand me, if he doesn’t understand me and my needs, then what good our love and empathy. Father, my sisters, and all my friends end up blindly indulging me, although I’ve never figured out what it is in me that they love is in my arrogance, my temper, or do they just pity me because I have TV TV. At times they infuriate me because of it. And then all their blind love and soothing words have the opposite effect. Those are the times that I wish I had someone who really understood even if he reviled me, I’d be proud and happy. So there’s a lot of things in that little paragraph that are characteristic of the whole story. So the kind of wild fluctuation between positive and negative thoughts and emotions you kind of unsympathetic portrayal of Sophie, she’s openly talking about our kind of on unfriendly nasty, darker thoughts, but also talking very intimately about just things she needs from life and ones from her friends family and the opposite sex. So yeah, I think that would qualify as feminist you know, to my understanding, in these episodes, where we talk about an author and their work, I also try to find some other persons analysis so I’m gonna read you a fairly hefty chunk, of inquest of the writer dangling by eater me fire verkar So, interesting, Chinese and German name there. This is from feminist studies, volume 10, number 119 84. So, this is written, I think, before dangling his rehabilitation, so really early on the ball for Western discussion of her writing. So here it goes. Although wranglings early stories one recognition for the unprecedented audacity and sensitivity with which she depicted the psychology of modern young women. More recent criticism has focused on the social context of the dilemmas of our characters. Although liberated in the sense that they have broken with traditional authority, they lack the economic means and social support needed for any genuine independence. They might be free of the institutionalised oppression of fathers and husbands, but they become all the more vulnerable to the pain of betrayal by lovers or by their own fluctuating emotions. Sophie uses the diary form for a relentless investigation of the self caught in this predicament. Her apparent liberation from the constraints of social structures leads her to feel that she has no one to blame but herself what she was doing or suffering. She is therefore all the more anxious to analyse and understand her own behaviour, yet a spectator unselfconscious actor in her own drama, she often catches herself playing apart, indeed, making it difficult for others to give her the true understanding that she craves or sabotaging at the same time her own efforts to evolve an intelligible and authentic image of the self to cope with their personal crisis. By the end of the diary, Sophie has become disillusioned with both herself and the diary as a means towards self understanding. Thus the story and theme and form is provocative inquiry into the limits of subjectivism and modern literature, which and foreshadows things readiness to move into a broader arena arena for her fictional explorations. So very well put there by Miss surname again, by Miss eat some a fire varchar I think that was a pretty spot on analysis. And yeah, from what I could gather, and other protagonists that dangling was writing about at the time, were all kind of in the same mould as Sophie, she was writing. I think she was writing for her readers, her readers were seeing themselves in the character she was writing for the young new women of Shanghai and of China. And, yeah, honestly, good for her because it’s an interesting little window in history, because in this kind of free or a period in the 20s and 30s. That turned into the Japanese invasion, the Civil War, World War Two Civil War, part two, the revolution and then the communist era. So this we window that tingling was writing in of kind of individualistic, individualistic feminism or not Mao Zedong, branded,
you know, you must do feminism, this way feminism. It’s an interestingly window, and I’ll stop blabbering. Okay, my last week piece of analysis here is an interesting thing I noticed that I have not seen other people mentioned is the in the story, Sophia, or Sophie refers to herself in third person quite a few times. There’s a line near the end where she says in a bittersweet minor, oh, Sophia has a lover. But earlier on, there’s more kind of playful uses versus Oh, you know, Sophia thinks this. People don’t know that Sophia likes this blah, blah, blah. And based on some things I saw when I was living in China, where some Chinese people did the same thing with their English name. I wonder if having this kind of ducted alternative name, a foreign name gives the character Sophia the distance to reflect upon herself as she does through most of the diary. And perhaps that inadvertently furthers her own isolation from herself and the characters around her because she’s the only character in the story who has an English name. And although in the story is published in Chinese, and her name will be written Shafi. It’s clearly a Chinese rendering of Sophie or Sophia. It’s not, it’s not a Chinese name. It’s an adopted name on top of whatever Chinese name her parents would have given her. So perhaps I’m reading too much into that, but I think it’s a big, especially since the Singaporean character. So the guy who’s coming over from a British colony has not himself got a British name, he’s got a Mandarin Chinese. So yes, that’s my little last nugget of thought for what I haven’t prepared for this episode is to talk about the two translators of this collection of things writing, I might look into them and see if they pop up in any future stories we do. But if you know anything about these two guys, their names being Tony Barlow, and Gary do yard and I’m assuming townies, a man, I don’t know if that’s a male or female name. So if you want to educate your show host about these two translators, please do get in touch through Twitter, through Instagram. Any means you can desert me a message, please do. And of course, if I’ve badly mispronounced anything, if I’ve made any totally bogus factual claims, then please do also sent me a message. If you’ve got anything that you’d like to see about tingling, you can send me a message that and I can read it out on the show. If you can send me a voice message, I can play that on the show, you know, join in participate. I’d love to talk with you. Really, I’m not just saying that to be weird. It’s exciting. When someone who enjoys the soul reaches out. Don’t be shy. I’m not an expert. I’m learning as I go. So anything you say is just as valid as anything I have to say, Oh, I’d also like to say if anyone from a publishing house is listening, what a huge niche in the market you have right here because like I said, there’s been no nice versions of dealings writings. So perhaps the struggle might be getting a hold of the rates. I don’t know how one would do that. But what I think readers in the English world certainly need, whether or not they want it is a nice, new, clean, tidy, cheap, maybe penguin classic. And penguin if you’re listening, that’s my two cents. We need some new editions of her work in English. It will still sell. Guaranteed especially diary, Miss Sophie. That’s about all we’ve got time for on the show. I just like to advertise our next episode, we’re going to have a translator on to talk about Sophie’s diary, and also the things he’s been involved in to, and I’m not going to tell you his name, you need to go to Instagram or Twitter to find that. So remember, Instagram is Treacher Fick TR, CH FSC. and my Twitter is Angus likes words. Remember, you can support the show on Patreon or you can buy me a coffee on coffee and all those links will be in the show notes. All support is appreciated. And thank you so much for listening. Please keep listening. Tell your friends, tell your teachers. Tell everybody tell your dog if it’s you know if it speaks English or Chinese. On that, zai jian!
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The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast 