0:00

[Courtney] Hello, everyone and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Courtney. I’m

0:04

here with my spouse, Royce. And together, we are The Ace Couple. And today is probably one

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of the most important episodes of the year so far. It is very timely. So if ever there

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was an episode to send to your friends, send to other listeners and tell them,

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“Listen to this this week, right now,” this is the episode, because this is very timely.

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A lot of things have transpired over the last couple of weeks that are directly impacting a

0:33

very talented member of our community today. So we are going to get right down to it. We

0:39

actually have them with us on the podcast, so please introduce yourself to our listeners.

0:44

[Yilin] Hello everyone. I’m Yilin Wang. She/her and they/them. I’m Chinese Canadian and a member

0:52

of the AroAce community. I’m Demiromantic and also Asexual, and I’m a queer writer, poet,

1:00

literary translator from Chinese into English, and I have a book of translations coming out next year

1:07

called The Lantern and the Night Moths that features Chinese poetry in translation along

1:12

with essays on translation. And I’ve also translated a lot of Chinese poets,

1:17

including feminist poet Qiu Jin and some queer Taiwanese poets as well.

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[Courtney] And for all of our listeners out there, I will say, we have already preordered that book.

1:27

We are very excited for it to come out. Our only wish is that it was coming out sooner.

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But once it’s here, we will get it. And for all of you out there who are interested, as usual,

1:36

all of our links will be in the show notes, so the link to the preorder will be down there.

1:42

So, Yilin, you’ve had a heck of a week, haven’t you?

1:46

[Yilin] Yeah. Yeah, the last two weeks have been kind of wild.

1:50

[Courtney] What is, for those — I’m sure, if you follow us on Twitter,

1:55

you have probably seen a little bit of talk about the British Museum lately. But for those of you

2:01

who don’t follow us on Twitter, you are in for a ride. So can you kind of tell the listeners who

2:09

aren’t familiar with the situation what exactly happened and how it came to your attention?

2:14

[Yilin] Yeah. About two weeks ago, I discovered that the British Museum had taken my translations

2:23

of Qiu Jin’s poetry and used it in one of their major current exhibitions, called China’s Hidden

2:30

Century, and used it in multiple formats as well as in a book with a print run of

2:37

30,000 copies without notifying me at all to get permission or crediting me or

2:43

offering payments — just completely, basically, stole my translations.

2:47

And I discovered this through several people who had been aware of the exhibition and knew

2:55

my work translating Qiu Jin’s poetry and came to me and kind of notified me about this exhibition,

3:01

and I started looking around online, and I was really stunned to discover this.

3:06

[Courtney] Because this is such an enormously powerful museum. This is not a small museum.

3:13

They have all kinds of funding for big exhibitions like this. It seems like such a gross oversight.

3:21

I’m trying to wrap my head around how they got their hands on your translations and thought

3:28

it was okay to use it without contacting you, without compensating you. Because,

3:33

just to be abundantly clear, you have not been paid anything for this at this point.

3:39

[Yilin] No. No. And I didn’t even know that they used it, and it had been in the exhibit for over a

3:47

month by the time I found out. And recently, I’ve seen a video that someone has now sent to me as

3:54

evidence where they used a full 23-line poem — the full translation that has been published. It’s not

4:04

possible to just accidentally take a full poem. I don’t understand, and I’m still stunned as well.

4:11

[Courtney] Well, because I understand as well that

4:16

so much more goes into translating than just knowing the two languages. You have to have a

4:24

tremendous grasp not only on the languages but the cultural references — in this case, also a

4:31

historical figure, so I imagine there’s quite a bit of historical nuance to consider as well. So

4:38

can you give us an idea about what your process is and just how much work it actually is to do this,

4:45

and why it is so tremendously unfair that you have not been paid for your work in such a big exhibit?

4:51

[Yilin] Yeah. Yeah, translation

4:54

is its own art. It takes skills in terms of writing a poem in English, because I’m recreating

5:00

a poem that I read in Chinese. So, I’m using the same skills that a creator,

5:05

writer, a poet would use. And I’m also a published poet, so that is what I bring to my translations.

5:12

There have been earlier translations of Qiu Jin’s poetry by sinologists and academics,

5:18

and they’re very much focused on the literal words and not the poetry, and I’m kind of

5:23

the first poet to actually attempt literary translations of her work. So there’s that aspect.

5:29

[Yilin] And just to give you an idea, when I start translating a new poet’s work,

5:36

I will find every poem that they have written — like, the full body of work — and read the full

5:41

body of work to choose poems to translate. For Qiu Jin, this meant getting ahold of over 200 poems

5:48

that were almost all published after her death and in different scattered, out-of-print editions,

5:55

and reading all of those, learning about the historical period she lived in, which was very

6:01

complex politically and had a lot of things going on in terms of changing gender roles.

6:07

[Yilin] She also wrote about women from history and allusions to historical figures like Mulan,

6:13

as well as poets. There was also allusions to events at the time, as well as her contemporaries,

6:21

who were also involved in, say, activism or feminism or within the political community

6:29

and revolutionary circles that she was a part of. So I had to research all of that,

6:35

and also learn about her life, learn about her views on feminism,

6:39

her views on cross-dressing. And she wrote poems that were coded as queer and trans, and kind of

6:47

learning about her views on those issues. And all of that takes a lot of time and energy.

6:53

[Yilin] And then I sit down to translate. And I’m translating the poem maybe 10 to 15 times,

7:00

because I’m attempting literal translations. I’m attempting more creative translations. I’m finding

7:05

ways to translate the imagery, the allusions, the emotional feel, the idioms. So it’s not as

7:13

simple as just looking through a dictionary or replacing words. There’s a lot of art involved.

7:19

[Courtney] Yeah, that makes a ton of sense to me. And it seems so vital that a poet is able

7:27

to translate poetry, because so much goes into it emotionally, lyrically, the way it sounds,

7:33

the way it flows, which is going to be vastly different when you’re translating between two

7:38

very different languages. But it also strikes me as so significant that you are also a queer

7:47

poet. You are a member of the Ace and Aro communities, and you’re taking a — is it

7:55

safe to say that she is a queer historical figure? I think you used “queer-coded.”

7:59

[Yilin] I would say that. Yeah, I think we can say that.

8:02

[Courtney] So, tell us a little more about that angle and about Qiu Jin as the woman,

8:08

as the historical figure, and what you can bring to the table from your own queer experiences.

8:15

[Yilin] Yeah. So, Qiu Jin lived at a time when things were very difficult for women in terms

8:24

of their gender roles. They were expected to stay within the home. They were expected to not have an

8:33

education, and they had very little opportunities and resources. This was still when women had bound

8:41

feet, when women couldn’t get a job. Women didn’t even have access, often, to education.

8:47

[Yilin] So she wrote a lot about challenging the gender norms of the time,

8:54

and also about cross-dressing and living in the space between female and male,

9:02

and she wrote about occupying kind of multiple genders. So I think of her work as writing a lot

9:11

about gender fluidity and about that space. And so, as someone who is also genderqueer,

9:18

I really connect to that. And I tried to take a queer approach, as well,

9:24

to queering my translations, and I really paid attention to that. And I think that

9:29

is still very timely for discussions going on right now in feminism, even these days.

9:36

[Yilin] And she also wrote a lot about queerplatonic relationships as well.

9:42

Specifically, in Chinese culture, there’s a concept of zhiyin 知音, which means “the

9:48

one who understands your music,” “the one who understands your songs,” and, specifically,

9:54

is a phrase that stands for a deep kindred kind of spirit or someone who you really,

10:01

really connect with, a deep kind of platonic level. And that is something

10:06

that I think of as very much similar to the idea of queerplatonic relationships.

10:13

And because of her struggles with gender roles and also at home, she really craved for that.

10:20

[Yilin] And as someone who is in the AroAce community, I also really resonate with that

10:27

as well. And I really appreciate her writing about relationships that are not romantic. And

10:34

I really appreciate the focus on friendship and queerplatonic relationships. And I found

10:40

that to be especially progressive in an era when ties were so much focused on patriarchal,

10:47

familial kinds of ties. And she was making her own kind of found family and

10:54

seeking out other kinds of relationships and connections with other women or queer folks.

11:00

[Courtney] That does sound incredibly ahead of its time. Because even today,

11:05

we have the AroAce community saying, like, “Why don’t people write about queerplatonic

11:10

relationships? Why is every story a romance story? Why is every romantic relationship sexual?” Like,

11:17

all these things that are so ingrained into our society — with amatonormativity,

11:22

with compulsory sexuality. We are craving the work of queer thinkers, queer artists,

11:30

queer literature that strays away from it.

11:35

[Courtney] And without the important work of translators like yourselves,

11:40

it would not be accessible to as wide of an audience. So, I want to really,

11:46

really thank you. I really appreciate the work you do. And I’m sure you have been made to feel

11:52

very underappreciated and undervalued with this whole debacle with the British Museum. Let’s

12:00

get back to that for a moment, just because I understand you are planning to take action

12:07

on this. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about what has happened? Have you talked to the

12:13

museum? What are your actions going forward? And how can we, as the community, help you?

12:19

[Yilin] Thank you. Yeah. So after I discovered that the British Museum had used my translations

12:26

without permission, I went to Twitter and posted about this publicly, because how else are you

12:33

going to seek accountability with such a big institution? And I received a series of emails

12:40

that were quite disrespectful and mishandling the situation. Because, initially they tried

12:47

to represent it as if they had just forgotten to list my name on a list of translators. And

12:54

they were just like, “Oh, we’re just adding it to the list of translators. And, you,

12:58

we had 400 people helping with this exhibition, and we’re really grateful for your help.”

13:04

Which is very misrepresenting what had happened, because I clearly didn’t give any consent at all.

13:11

[Yilin] Then, they tried to send me a permission form, which they normally do when they seek

13:17

permission to use a contributor’s work. But in that same email, they kept emphasizing that,

13:23

“Oh, like, other contributors, other academics let us use their work for free.” And then,

13:28

before I even had a chance to respond, 24 hours later, they were like,

13:32

“We have removed all your translations, and we’re not going to credit you.” And

13:37

they just offered payments of £150 for the book that they printed 30,000 copies of.

13:43

[Courtney] Oooh! [Yilin] And… yeah, you know? And it just got increasingly more and more disappointing.

13:51

[Courtney] [laughing] That’s an insultingly low amount.

13:54

[Yilin] Yeah. Yeah. And I was really, really shocked by how they mishandled it. And basically,

14:01

at this point, they’ve kind of declined to credit me at all. I’ve confirmed that both the Chinese

14:08

and the English poetry of Qiu Jin have just been completely removed from the exhibition,

14:14

almost as if they just don’t want people to know. And they’re refusing, you know,

14:18

to issue a better apology that actually explains what had gone wrong and how they’ll do better.

14:25

[Yilin] So now I’m fundraising to take legal action against the British Museum, because I’ve just

14:32

been left with no choice after multiple rounds of discussion with them. And I really want to set a

14:39

precedent in terms of holding them accountable and forcing them to do better in terms of respecting

14:45

copyright and moral rights of all creators — you know, writers, translators, artists. Because it

14:52

feels like if they are not held accountable, it’s something that could happen again.

14:56

[Courtney] Oh easily. To me — I mean, as you said, it was on display for a month before you even knew

15:03

about it. So how many others’ work has been used and just completely flown under the radar because

15:09

the original creator had never known? It seems very possible that that could have happened.

15:14

[Courtney] But I also — it’s a bit galling to me that they say, “Oh, all these other

15:19

academics just, you know, volunteered their work.” I get where that’s coming from,

15:26

because I have had museums try to pull similar things on me before. I’m an independent historian,

15:32

so I do a lot of historical research on a very, very niche subject where there are

15:38

not a lot of academics studying it. And it’s an art form that I also practice,

15:43

so I have the practical experience as well as the historical knowledge.

15:47

[Courtney] And I have had museums ask, like, “Can you write all of the placards for this

15:53

upcoming exhibit we’re having, just for free, for volunteer?” And I’ve been to museums that have had

16:00

horrible information about some of their exhibits. And I’ve spoken to them, and they’re like, “Oh,

16:04

well, we’d be happy to correct it. Just send us those corrections and we’ll do that.” And

16:08

it’s like, the thing is, [laughing] since I’m not affiliated with an academic institution, I don’t

16:14

have anyone paying me a salary for what I do. And I imagine it’s probably the same thing with you.

16:21

[Yilin] That’s right. Yeah, you know, I’m a full-time freelancer, so I write, I teach,

16:27

I translate. I’m not an academic. And these academics — who they’re, quote,

16:33

you know, considering as kind of “volunteering” or kind of contributing for free — are paid by

16:39

their institutions, you know? They have jobs, often as tenured or tenure-track professors.

16:44

[Yilin] And it’s an exhibition on China, and it’s a lot of white academics who have built

16:50

their careers off of studying Chinese culture. So that is extra disrespectful — to say that, “Oh,

16:59

they’re just contributing for free,” when it’s actually they’re benefiting in so many ways from,

17:05

you know, other cultures and making a whole career out of that.

17:09

[Yilin] And one of the folks who received the grants behind the exhibition is a

17:18

white sinologist. And she sent me an email where she said she didn’t

17:23

receive a single penny in association to this project. But she also wrote that the

17:30

grant allowed her to take a full year of leave away from her university job —

17:37

[Courtney] Ooh. [Yilin] — at the same salary, to do research on this exhibition.

17:41

So it’s very frustrating to receive this kind of messaging.

17:46

[Courtney] Yeah. That is not in any way an apples-to-apples comparison,

17:50

because this is your work, and this is… it should be a source of income for you,

17:57

if people weren’t stealing it. But the… [sighs] because not every museum has British Museum money.

18:05

There are genuinely some small museums that are constantly hard up for funding. They don’t have

18:12

enough money to even pay their staff and curators well. So, there are small, struggling museums. And

18:18

then there is the British Museum, who gets much more funding than the average museum,

18:22

And I think I saw on one of your posts about this that they received, like, something over

18:30

£700,000 in funding for this exhibit. Is that right?

18:33

[Yilin] That’s right. So behind the exhibition is a research grant that two academics received over

18:44

four years that was over £700,000 from the Arts and Humanities Council in the UK. So that is,

18:52

you know, funding the exhibition, from what I understand. And, yeah, they’re also

18:58

selling tickets to the special exhibit at £18 per ticket. They’re selling the books that they have

19:06

printed — 30,000 copies — and they’ve also been selling an app with a audio tour. So, you know,

19:14

they’re benefiting financially from it in multiple ways. And I’ve heard from multiple people that

19:20

the exhibition is always packed and that it’s even hard to get tickets and it’s always very busy when

19:26

people go. So, yeah, I wouldn’t kind of agree that the British Museum is a poorly funded institution.

19:36

[Courtney] Yeah. And it’s a bit ironic, isn’t it, that the exhibit itself is

19:42

called China’s Hidden Century. So their whole angle is, “This is the part of history that

19:50

you haven’t seen yet. We’re bringing light to this hidden era.” And yet they’ve hidden

19:57

your name from the credits. They’ve hidden the translator, the Chinese translator. And now,

20:04

after being sort of exposed for infringing upon your moral rights, your copyrights, now, they’ve

20:13

just taken down not only your words but also Qiu Jin’s words. And so that just seems like —

20:22

[Yilin] That’s right. [Courtney] — you were trying to bring light to this “hidden century,” and

20:27

now you’re just hiding it more, and you’re hiding the modern poet

20:33

and translator who is giving us this gift of bringing all of your unique

20:39

experience to these translations. So it’s just so incredibly frustrating.

20:43

[Yilin] It is. And the word “hidden” actually has also been discussed as well by a lot of Chinese

20:51

visitors and on Chinese social media, because this was actually a period of history that is really,

20:58

really well-known in China, and specifically, in connection to British imperialism.

21:03

[Courtney] Ah, there it is. [laughs]

21:05

[Yilin] Yeah. It features a lot of items that were taken from China, you know,

21:12

during various confrontations with Britain. And so, from a Chinese perspective too, a lot of the

21:21

discussions of her are about “hidden” being such a euphemism, because it’s actually quite well-known,

21:27

and people are actually quite upset about this period in history, but instead it’s being

21:32

presented as something to be kind of revealed and discovered. You know, hidden for whom?

21:39

[Courtney] Yeah, hidden from whom? Hidden by whom? That’s a really excellent point, and I am glad

21:45

that you brought that up. Because the more we speak, the more it just sounds like so much of

21:52

this was done with the intention of presenting it to a predominantly white Western audience,

22:00

which, don’t get me wrong, [laughing] we love learning about other cultures,

22:05

but there are so many just racial and colonial undertones to taking someone else’s work to

22:14

present it to a white audience in probably a very white, sanitized way. As you said,

22:21

the — were they the curators of the exhibit who were both white, or was that their title?

22:26

[Yilin] Yeah. Yeah, the two folks who are named as

22:31

the co-investigators of the grant are both white, yeah.

22:35

[Courtney] So I would imagine there’s some amount of cultural nuance that maybe fell

22:40

through the cracks, unfortunately. Every time I go to a museum or one of my local museums,

22:48

I always — I don’t know if this is the case for this exhibit; I have not been to see it — but

22:52

I’ll very often see old artifacts, especially from Asian countries, that will just say, like,

22:58

“This is a ritual bowl.” And that word, “ritual,” is what they use all the time.

23:04

“Ritual glass.” “Ritual chime.” And it won’t say what the ritual supposedly was or how it

23:15

was used. So every time I see that word, my skeptic and racism bells start going off,

23:24

because I’m like, “That kind of just seems like the catch-all word.” Like, “This was important!

23:28

Look at how important it was!” without actually giving any real nuance or information to it.

23:35

[Yilin] Yeah. Yeah. And from what I’ve heard, based on the people who have visited the museum after

23:42

they removed Qiu Jin’s poetry, it sounds kind of similar to what you’ve described. Because

23:47

she’s kind of been left as — kind of depicted as basically a woman who is cross-dressing,

23:54

wearing suits. And there’s a piece of clothing with some signs, and, like, that is it for that

24:00

section And the exhibition is supposed to be about creativity and imagination in the Qing dynasty,

24:07

but, you know, where is the creativity? So she’s kind of become just represented as this figure

24:16

that doesn’t have, you know, her own words represented at the exhibit anymore. Yeah.

24:23

[Courtney] Well, because I imagine — not to put words in the mouth of the British Museum,

24:29

but I imagine, once they got caught for using your translation, they’re like,

24:34

“Well, we just got to take all of it down, because we can’t have,

24:38

you know, these Chinese characters on the wall, because who’s going to

24:41

be able to read them?” I can just kind of sense someone saying that. [laughs]

24:46

[Yilin] Yeah, I also have wondered about that. Even though so many visitors seem to be Chinese,

24:53

you know? But they somehow also removed the Chinese, which is in the public domain. And,

24:59

you know, it’s really funny to talk about signs. Because when word spread about the fact that I

25:07

wasn’t getting credited, someone also dug up a very old tweet from a few years ago by the British

25:13

Museum — I don’t know if you saw it, Courtney — that said something like, [laughing] “Oh, we try

25:19

to make our signs accessible to 16-year-olds, so we try not to have too many Asian names.”

25:25

[Courtney] Oh no! [Yilin] Like, literally, that was a tweet from the British Museum.

25:30

Yeah. You can go find it later if you haven’t seen it. And somebody literally dug that up,

25:34

you know? Multiple people were notifying me of that tweet. And I rolled my eyes.

25:40

[Courtney] That is so nauseating. And, again, the only reason why anyone might think that

25:49

Chinese names would be quote “confusing to teenagers” is probably because they live in

25:55

a society that hasn’t let them have exposure to Chinese names. It’s all been whitewashed.

26:02

[Yilin] Yeah. It’s very… So, that really reminds me of the signs, you know,

26:09

that really simplify and doesn’t actually give, you know, the full story. Yeah. And,

26:17

you know, [laughing] there are lots of Asian 16-year-olds, so.

26:20

[Courtney] Yeah! Also, that. [laughing] Not to erase the Asian 16-year-olds. But oh, oh,

26:28

my goodness. That’s… [groans] That’s upsetting.

26:32

[Yilin] Apparently, they have a history with Asian names.

26:35

[Courtney] Well, and as this very well esteemed institution that is supposed to be here for

26:45

public knowledge, it’s supposed to teach you about history, it’s supposed to teach you about

26:50

other cultures, you’d think you’d want as many relevant names as possible. Because that’s just

26:58

more accurate, for one; that’s better information. Because what do you — what does that even mean,

27:04

“We try not to have too many Asian names”? Is that just… Do they have a quota?

27:09

[Yilin laughs] [Courtney] “Well, we already have five Asian names. We can’t have any more in this exhibit.”

27:14

[Royce] Yeah, I couldn’t make sense of it, unless they’re treating their

27:18

placards like Tweets or something and imposing a character limit.

27:21

[Yilin] You know, they don’t limit white names, so it’s,

27:25

yeah, pretty ridiculous. And I forgot who said this, but again, I saw it recently

27:31

on Twitter in relation to the British Museum. And someone — like, a person of color — said,

27:37

like, “It’s not that I necessarily want the artifacts back, but I want to rewrite the signs.”

27:43

[Courtney] Mmm. [Yilin] You know, “I want to rewrite the stories of how they’re being

27:47

represented in the museum.” So this is very much a part of that.

27:51

[Courtney] That is an excellent point. I’ve really — especially over the last 10 years

27:58

or so, with all of my work with history — just really begun to get an incredibly

28:04

critical eye for museum placards. Because it started with my very own area of expertise,

28:11

where I would see how many museums had just wildly inaccurate information, and how a lot

28:17

of the museums — since they either don’t have funding or they use their funding very sparingly,

28:22

and try to take others’ work, apparently — they’ll often copy information from each other. So if you

28:29

see a bad piece of information in one museum, you’ll probably see it in a dozen other museums,

28:34

written almost verbatim the same way. So I started noticing that with my own

28:39

niche area of expertise. And then I’m like, “Well, how many others are there out there?”

28:45

[Royce] Particularly because in your area, too, it’s not even crossing a linguistic

28:49

boundary. It’s white Western people reporting on white Western customs from 200 years ago.

28:56

[Courtney] Yeah. Well, that kind of depends. So, Yilin, just to fill you in on what I do,

29:01

I study the history of hair work, artwork and jewelry made out of human hair. And that

29:08

primarily encompasses work from the Victorian era, the 1800s, and a lot of it was very Western — a

29:16

lot of Scandinavian countries, and then England and America did a lot of this kind of work.

29:21

[Courtney] But I have also just noticed, throughout my years of research,

29:26

that nearly every culture has had some iteration of using human hair. And so it’s sometimes a lot

29:34

harder to research these things — like Chinese uses of hair, for example. I know a little bit

29:40

because I’ve been able to find some translations, so even in my work, I heavily rely on translators.

29:48

Chinese examples: taking a baby’s haircut to make a calligraphy brush, is one of them. And

29:57

I’ve seen some gorgeous, really elaborate pieces of embroidery that has been stitched

30:03

out of human hair, just making beautiful, beautiful pictures. And I’m always so grateful

30:08

whenever I’m able to find resources that have been translated for me, because this is my interest.

30:13

[Courtney] But I’m going to challenge all of our viewers: next time you go to a museum,

30:19

just see how many times an artifact from a different culture uses the word “ritual”

30:24

in the placards, or something so vague and broad like that. Because every time I see

30:30

that I’m like, “Um, who wrote that? Who’s the curator here? Who researched this?”

30:34

[Yilin] Agreed. Agreed. [Courtney] My word. So, we’ve covered a lot of ground and got very, very off track here. But

30:42

I do want to hear, is there any more that you can tell us about this amazing feminist queer

30:48

figure of Chinese history? Because I am so enamored with the idea of having writing

30:55

about queerplatonic relationships from so long ago, and even the cross-dressing

31:00

element seems so progressive for its time — especially, even now, in our country,

31:07

in the US, we have all these drag now. People are trying to literally criminalize cross-dressing.

31:15

It’s just wild to me. So, I’d love to hear anything else that you’re able to share with us.

31:20

[Yilin] Yeah. Yeah. So she was writing a lot about Hua Mulan, which is the full name for Mulan,

31:30

which I’m sure everyone kind of knows of, and — even though maybe through the Disney version.

31:35

But Mulan was very much known as a warrior who cross-dressed, and she was very inspired

31:44

by that. And she herself started cross-dressing when she moved to the capital, and, later on,

31:52

decided to become a revolutionary and an activist and feminist. And she wrote many poems about that.

32:03

I actually — I think I have one that I have translated. If you want,

32:06

I could read it for the podcast. Let me see if I can find it.

32:09

[Courtney] I would love that! Yes, please.

32:12

[Yilin] And then I could talk about it a little bit more specifically.

32:16

Yeah. So I’ll just read the poem and then we can talk about it. So, it’s called “Inscriptions

32:23

on my Tiny Portrait (in Men’s Clothes).” And this poem was written on the back of a photo

32:31

of Qiu Jin that survives, that shows her wearing a very classy and kind of stylish suit, and

32:40

she’s kind of grinning into the camera and kind of showing a lot of personality.

32:44

Solemnly, a gaze ahead: who is this before me?

32:48

The bones of a heroic spirit from a past life, resentful of this body.

32:53

The physical form of a deceased self is mere illusion,

32:57

but the broadening of future horizons can be a real possibility.

33:02

Regretting that we didn’t know each other sooner, let us unite:

33:06

heads held high, sighing at the times, our spirits emboldened.

33:11

In the future, when I meet my friends from bygone times,

33:15

I shall declare, I have swept the murky dust of the world away.

33:20

[Yilin] So that’s the poem. And she writes about looking at the photo and looking at herself,

33:27

and she writes about feeling as if there’s another — the bones of another heroic spirit

33:35

in her body. And in a way, that feels almost like talking about dysphoria,

33:41

and I found that, like, really resonates. And she writes about, you know, the physical form

33:47

of the past, when she was dressing as a woman, being an illusion, and also the future, when she

33:55

cross-dresses, as a possibility. And she was kind of dwelling in that space in between, you know,

34:02

where she is, kind of, questioning maybe gender and sexuality and who she is. She also talks about

34:11

the two meeting and uniting and joining with each other and thinking about what the future holds.

34:22

[Yilin] So that’s an example of her writing on cross-dressing. And oftentimes, we also

34:29

see her taking on a male persona in a poem or a female persona or kind of back and forth, and

34:37

she inhabits kind of different voices, and also kind of do cross-dressing in terms of

34:44

who she is as the speaker. So I find that very interesting about her poetry.

34:50

[Courtney] Wow, that is so very, very cool. Because this happens with all historical figures, I think,

34:59

where someone will sort of pick up on something a little bit queer, and they’ll almost always just

35:06

default to gay. “They are gay.” “They are lesbian.” That’s just been the default for

35:11

years. But we know there is so much more nuance to it. We have so much more vocabulary about it.

35:17

[Courtney] But when it comes to something like translation as well,

35:21

I’ve always been very fascinated with what queerness looks like in other cultures.

35:28

Because I have definitely noticed that Western white queer people don’t have

35:36

the best media literacy for picking up what queerness looks like when you put

35:40

it in a different cultural context. Because it’s way too easy for someone who is white,

35:45

who has lived in a white culture, to just sort of assume that queerness is universal and that

35:51

it’s going to look the same in all cultures. But that is very, very much not the case.

35:56

[Courtney] In fact, I remember when even Western-made media that attempts to get

36:04

set in another culture — like Raya and the Last Dragon, there was a big sort

36:09

of argument on Twitter of all these queer people being like, “This is a queer story,

36:13

and here’s why.” And it’s because this one character has half her head shaved. And

36:18

then I listened to hours of video essays and articles put forth by Southeast Asian

36:26

queer creators who were saying, “This is what queerness looks like in our cultures,

36:32

in our countries. You wouldn’t even know how to identify it. But we didn’t see these things that

36:38

we would want to see for what queerness looks like in our context.” So I imagine there is so much

36:46

cultural understanding that is needed in order to do justice to a historical figure like this.

36:52

[Yilin] Yeah. Yeah. And in the Chinese context, too, because of censorship in China,

36:58

feminism and also queerness are often also kind of erased and hidden in terms of the

37:05

formation of literary canons and what gets taught in history as well. And so there’s

37:11

this kind of erasure going on, both in terms of what is lost in translation, depending on

37:17

who is translating it and who is reading it in the West, and also in the source country.

37:24

And so I also find myself having to look harder and search in places that other

37:32

people haven’t kind of considered to find these kinds of voices and perspectives.

37:38

[Yilin] Because Qiu Jin, you know, was a household name. She has been very, very well-known for her

37:45

revolutionary work. But all the textbooks gloss over her in terms of what she did as a feminist.

37:52

So they don’t really go into the fact that she cross-dressed, or they kind of portray it in ways

38:01

that are very much about her trying to just kind of fulfill certain… still kind of patriarchal,

38:11

like, hierarchical expectations around becoming an acceptable hero in that time period.

38:19

[Yilin] So, yeah, the queerness often gets erased. And the cross-dressing poem that I read

38:28

recently — after I translated it into English, I had scholars of literature from this time period

38:33

come to me and be like, “Oh, I didn’t know that Qiu Jin wrote that poem.” Like, even though they

38:38

specialized in literature from that era and knew her work, they hadn’t encountered that poem. So,

38:45

yeah, I find myself doing a lot of editing and curation as a translator as well.

38:52

[Courtney] Yes! I mean, you are a researcher; you’re finding her entire body of work. You are

38:59

a historian; you’re putting it in the historical context. You are a poet and an artist, trying to

39:06

bring the life of the poetry along with the fresh translation. And it actually has me wondering,

39:15

because, especially for the work of Qiu Jin, for this historical period, for the queerplatonic

39:24

representation, it seems to me like you are just the right person for this job: you have

39:30

the queer context, you have the cultural context, and, clearly, the poetry and language skills. So

39:37

I’m curious about how you got into doing this work. How did you find her work, and how did

39:44

it resonate with you, and how did you decide that translation was what you wanted to do as a career?

39:52

[Yilin] Yeah. So, I started out as a writer and poet. I’ve been writing fiction and poetry

39:59

for a number of years. And I actually got into translation partially because I was really

40:06

dissatisfied with existing translations of Chinese poetry. There have been a lot of mistranslations —

40:15

historically and also now still — and I wrote about this in an essay for Words Without Borders.

40:23

If anyone is interested, they can check that out.

40:26

[Yilin] In that essay, I talk about translation often — especially literary translation — being a

40:35

privileged kind of work, because there’s a lot of overlap between who is doing literary translation,

40:41

or who gets the chance to do literary translation, and academics. You know,

40:46

graduates from Asian Studies programs are often the ones. The scholars,

40:51

the white professors tend to become also the literary translators of these works,

40:56

even though they don’t necessarily have the cultural background or the kind of knowledge as,

41:03

like, a poet. Because of their degree and their access to that degree, they’re often

41:10

seen as an expert on Chinese culture or Asian cultures. So I was very frustrated with that.

41:17

[Yilin] And historically, there’s also been mistranslations by poets like Ezra Pound as well,

41:27

who didn’t know Mandarin but translated Chinese poetry using notes that a white scholar made

41:34

into a book called Cathay. And it’s kind of like his own imagination of what Chinese poetry is.

41:43

[Yilin] So, given this history, I wanted to actually do translations myself,

41:50

because I’ve always been interested in Chinese poetry. I’ve read a lot

41:53

of Chinese poetry growing up. I just didn’t think of myself as a translator, initially,

41:58

because I didn’t have that kind of academic education. But I have, you know, lived

42:04

experience and poetry-writing skills and a more personal relationship with the work.

42:12

[Yilin] So I started kind of translating Qiu Jin. I started to translate other Chinese poets.

42:18

And I felt that it really resonated with a lot of readers, especially people in

42:25

the diaspora who didn’t know about Qiu Jin before and didn’t get to read her poetry.

42:30

[Courtney] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’m glad you mentioned lived experience, because in

42:37

worlds of academia and history and universities and museums, the degree is kind of like the

42:47

end-all be-all for a lot of people. But lived experience is what the research is being done on,

42:54

I find, and that’s true in cultural contexts, racial contexts. It’s also true in queer contexts.

43:04

[Courtney] There are queer academics who are studying Asexuality, for example, and some

43:10

of them are Ace themselves, but not all of them are. And for as happy as I am that it is getting

43:17

discussed in academic circles as well, because I think we just need more representation in

43:23

more areas of the world and in all conversations, there is sort of the same effect that’s going on

43:30

with the “hidden century” and “look what we’ve unveiled” with a lot of Queer Studies as well.

43:37

[Courtney] Because there will be academics, for example, be like,

43:40

“This amazing thing I learned while studying Asexuality!” And they’ll come out with,

43:46

you know, “Most Ace people don’t identify with gender, or they’re genderqueer,

43:51

or Aces have a much higher percentage of being trans.” And it’s like, “Well,

43:55

I know that because I have a ton of Ace friends!” Like, that is just my life and my social circle.

44:01

[Courtney] So I think people need to really start reevaluating how they see and appreciate lived

44:10

experience. Because often, once you get the academic paper handed to you,

44:15

that was just sort of playing telephone. It’s a secondhand

44:19

version of the original lived experience, as observed by an outsider, essentially.

44:25

[Yilin] Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And with

44:30

Asian poetry in particular, there’s this thing called bridge translation, which is someone who

44:37

is monolingual — like a white scholar or writer — would find someone who’s actually bilingual,

44:44

and they call them this phrase I really dislike, but quote, “native informants.” And the native

44:52

informant is someone who will supposedly then provide a literal word-by-word translation of

44:58

the poem for them. And then they would take it and rewrite it into their own poem, and then call it

45:05

their translation. And sometimes the native informant gets credited as a co-translator.

45:10

Sometimes you just get erased or just acknowledged as, “Oh, like, so-and-so helped.”

45:15

[Yilin] And we end up with this quote “translation” that is much more, you know,

45:21

creative rather than an actual translation, because the person who wrote the final poem

45:28

didn’t even understand or know the original language. And this, believe it or not, still

45:34

happens to this day with Asian poetry. And I can’t imagine that happening with some other languages,

45:41

like European languages, for example. I don’t think people would tolerate that, you know?

45:46

[Courtney] No, probably not — at least not as easily or as readily. Goodness.

45:50

There’s just so, so much here. So is there anything that you wish to

46:00

share with us about your own experience as a queer poet, with your Asexuality,

46:08

Aromanticism, you mentioned genderqueer as well — what has that been like for you?

46:14

[Yilin] Yeah. So, for me, it’s… I think about that a lot in, like, intersection with culture and race

46:23

as well. So I find myself very much being inspired by stories and poetry related to queerness and

46:34

genderqueer identity and also Asexual Aromantic representation as well. A lot of my fiction are

46:43

speculative fiction short stories. And so I work a lot with retelling folklore. And I get inspired,

46:50

again, by stories about cross-dressing in Chinese culture, stories about queerness.

46:57

[Yilin] For example, we have a rabbit god who is queer. There’s a temple in Taiwan that

47:06

you can visit and burn incense to the Tu’er’shen 兔儿神, who is a

47:10

queer god. And it’s the rabbit deity, and we’re in the Year of the Rabbit,

47:14

so there’s been a lot of jokes around this year — about the year being super queer because of

47:20

that. So there are a lot of these sources of inspiration that I draw upon in my writing and

47:26

in my poetry. And I also find myself, again, seeking these kinds of works to translate.

47:31

[Courtney] Yeah. Did you start seeking this out because you were sort of experiencing

47:38

and trying to immerse yourself in more queer work? Or did you

47:42

sort of find the work first and then say, “Wait a minute, this is queer”?

47:46

[Yilin] I deliberately tried to kind of seek them out. Because, as I mentioned before, like,

47:52

there is a lot of erasure going on, both in terms of translation and also in Chinese publishing and

47:59

education systems. So it’s something — as a part of my journey of coming out and

48:06

realizing I’m queer and learning about, you know, Asexuality and Aromanticism and genderqueerness,

48:14

I also started reading a lot more about this. Because I do feel like I have a different

48:21

experience from folks who are white. And so I want to look at the topics in intersection with

48:28

Chinese and East Asian experiences, too. So I found that to be really interesting.

48:33

[Yilin] And then something else that’s been going on as well is that there’s

48:38

been a revival and kind of emergence of interest in a Chinese… I guess a subgenre

48:46

called danmei 耽美, which is boys’ love or girls’ love stories. And this is, again,

48:52

kind of inspired by historical tales and folklore. So that’s something that’s become more well-known,

49:02

and that’s something that, also, I’m, yeah, very interested in. And oftentimes,

49:08

those stories are also kind of representing the relationships in an Asexual kind of

49:14

way because of what they’re able to show on screen, and I find that really interesting.

49:19

[Courtney] Yeah. We haven’t necessarily seen as much Chinese representation of sort of

49:27

queerplatonic or AroAce relationships. But for more broadly just Asian media,

49:34

we have found so much more there than in English. And it’s been really, really encouraging for us.

49:40

And we want there to be more translations of these things. One of the best TV shows we’ve

49:47

seen depicting an AroAce relationship was Koisenu Futari, which is phenomenal. But that has not

49:55

been… it’s had fan translations. There isn’t a legal way to watch it in English [laughs], but

50:04

there are all these just like really passionate fan translators who have subtitled things like

50:10

that. So we’re always really encouraged when we see more of those things. But I always wonder,

50:15

like, what do we have to do to get that to a wider audience in an accessible way?

50:23

[Yilin] Yeah, for sure, I would love to see more of that translated,

50:27

and I would love to translate more of that too.

50:30

[Courtney] So, let’s dive into — because I am really passionate about history and

50:37

cultural context and museum work, since I myself have done so much work with history,

50:42

but also just to find out that something on this big of a scale has happened to a member

50:49

of our community has just really gotten me all riled up, and we want to do anything and

50:55

everything we can to help you out. So you mentioned that you are fundraising right

51:01

now for legal action. How much do you have to make? What’s the lowdown on the lawyer you’re

51:08

consulting? And what is the deadline? How can we help push you over this edge for our listeners?

51:13

[Yilin] Thank you. Yeah. So I’m aiming for a deadline of July 10th, and I need to raise

51:22

£15,000. From what I checked earlier today,

51:24

we’ve made it to one-third of the amount, so we’re doing very well.

51:31

[Courtney] Ooh, good. [Yilin] But I really urge folks to support by donating, by spreading the word,

51:37

by sharing with folks they know. I’m really encouraging people to just spread the word in

51:42

different circles, because it affects a lot of communities — academia, Museum Studies,

51:48

queer and trans communities, and also writing, publishing, translation, of course. Yeah, and

51:56

also Asian Studies and Chinese Literary Studies. So I’m really hoping that the word can get out.

52:02

[Yilin] And this is the minimum amount needed to officially appoint a lawyer to represent me

52:10

and file in court. So that’s the next step. If I’m able to meet the goal by July 10th,

52:19

that’s what would happen. And it’s an all-or-nothing situation because the

52:25

lawyer I’m talking to feels like that is the minimum amount needed for him to responsibly

52:31

take the case forward. And then any more amounts we’re able to raise beyond that

52:36

would help strengthen my position in terms of if we had to actually go to court.

52:40

[Yilin] And right now, I can’t share anything about the law firm or the lawyer, because they are not

52:48

officially, yet, representing me yet. But if I pass that goal, then definitely, everyone

52:53

will know. And they are quite experienced, and the person specifically has already been

52:58

helping me behind the scenes. And he’s an IP lawyer in the UK with a lot of experience. And

53:04

he’s also been very supportive, and I really appreciate his help.

53:08

[Courtney] Awesome. So that, along with every other link that we have mentioned, as always,

53:13

in the show notes. Please, listeners, check it out. Donate if you can. If you cannot, share it. I

53:20

would say, if you’re on Twitter, go ahead — and we will have all of Yilin’s social media information

53:26

as well, so you can retweet some of her Tweets, engage with those to get more eyeballs on it. But

53:32

especially if you’re in other places online, if you’re on Facebook, if you’re on Tumblr.

53:37

Are people still on Mastodon these days? I know there was a big push to go on there at one point.

53:43

[Yilin] I’ve been using Mastodon, and I’ve been getting some good engagement. Some

53:47

folks have left Twitter for Mastodon, so definitely there. There’s been some

53:52

Chinese TikTokers who have been posting, and I would love to see more posts there.

53:57

[Courtney] TikTok, yes! [Yilin] A lot of critiques and discussions about the British Museum’s history happens on TikTok,

54:03

so I would really appreciate that. And,

54:06

yeah, Tumblr, Instagram, just all the different platforms would be great.

54:10

[Courtney] Yes, let’s get the word out. And if, by the time you’re listening to this,

54:16

if the fundraising period is still up, it sounds like £15,000 is the minimum,

54:23

but more than that is still better, so definitely help donate and share if you can.

54:30

And pre-order the book as well. When is that book coming out, by the way? It’s next year, right?

54:37

[Yilin] The book is coming out in, yeah, it’s slated for the Spring 2024. It was

54:43

originally actually not supposed to be ready for pre-ordering yet, but because of what’s

54:48

happened with the museum, my publisher has been very supportive and wanted to get the

54:52

word out earlier so that people could actually support my work in the ethical way instead of

55:00

kind of what the museum has done. So, yeah, we kind of scrambled to put together a pre-order

55:06

page. And a lot of people have supported by pre-ordering, and I really appreciate that.

55:11

[Courtney] Good. I’m glad that your publisher did that. Because, yes, while you have the engagement,

55:16

we want to support you as much as we can. And for those listeners out there as well,

55:22

you have probably heard me mention our Discord server on a number of occasion,

55:27

Aspecs Committed to Anti-Racism, also ACAR for short. I’ve often talked about it in the context

55:34

of the anti-racism book clubs that we run and other events. But over the last couple of months,

55:41

we’ve really gotten into doing more hands-on community projects, more hands-on activism.

55:47

[Courtney] And, in fact, earlier this week, as of the time we’re recording,

55:51

we had an activism and organizing night scheduled, slated for the calendar,

55:56

and once all this popped up and we saw that a community member of ours was being affected,

56:02

we really wanted to help out as much as we could. So we got together for a couple hours,

56:08

and we all collaborated on just sort of finding names and contact information for trustees at the

56:15

museum, ways to contact the museum and its sponsors of this exhibit, and just drafting

56:21

example emails where we can send our concerns, and example social media posts, et cetera.

56:28

[Courtney] So if work like that, for when major community situations like

56:34

this come up where we want to support each other and we want to help each other out,

56:38

definitely please do join us there. Because this fight right here is definitely not over,

56:44

but we also never know when the next one’s going to come up. So we’ll also

56:48

have a link to that Discord in the show notes if you want to join us over there.

56:53

[Courtney] And before we wrap up for the day, is there anything else that you want to share with us

57:00

about your work, your own identity, your favorite bits of representation, queer joy, anything?

57:11

[Yilin] Yeah. So, I think, again, Qiu Jin is definitely one of my favorite Chinese women poets,

57:20

queer poets, you know? So I

57:24

highly recommend checking out her work if you read Chinese or in translation. And also, just,

57:32

you know, support more translators of color. Support more queer, Ace, Aro translators. They

57:39

all do really important work. And, name the translator, you know? Pay the translator.

57:45

[Courtney] Name the translator. Yes, if you are talking about this on social media,

57:49

I have seen that hashtag start to take off — more and more people using

57:54

#NameTheTranslator. So that is a hashtag you can use to also just read what other

57:59

people are saying about this as well and to join the conversation. Has there been

58:07

a big history of this, of translators not being named and not being credited?

58:12

[Yilin] Yeah. Yeah. Actually, that’s good context as well for this conversation. So, just a brief

58:18

note about that. The hashtag #NameTheTranslator came up, I think, a few years ago as a result of

58:25

discussions about translators keep getting erased and omitted. So this is why British Museum’s

58:32

refusal to credit translators is especially problematic and upsetting a lot of translators.

58:38

[Yilin] Because there’s a history of, for example, book publishers refusing to put translators’ names

58:45

on the book cover beside the writer’s name, because they kind of want to hide — again,

58:50

hidden — hide the fact that it is a translated work, and want to make it appear as if it were

58:56

just written in English. So they try to not present the translator’s name,

59:01

or kind of put it somewhere not noticeable. And reviewers, critics, people talking about

59:09

translated literature will often leave the names of translators off when they’re talking

59:16

about reviews. So instead of, you know, Murakami translated by so-and-so, they just talk about

59:22

Murakami as if Murakami wrote in English. And similarly, literary contests, prizes,

59:31

awards oftentimes gave awards for translated literature, world literature, but they would

59:38

only again give the award to the writer, even though they were actually reading the translation.

59:43

[Yilin] So this happens frequently, and that’s why that hashtag kind of popped up. And there’s been a

59:50

movement to call on publishers and institutions and everyone to name the translator. So if

59:58

you ever see basically any kind of translated work where the translator’s not named, you’re

1:00:04

encouraged to use the hashtag #NameTheTranslator and ask for the translator to be named.

1:00:09

[Yilin] And PEN America also published, recently,

1:00:14

a manifesto on translation with some specific kind of calls to action that

1:00:19

people can take to support translators. So I also recommend folks checking that out.

1:00:24

[Courtney] Definitely. We’ll pop that in the show notes

1:00:26

as well. Do we know why this is the precedent and so common? Because it

1:00:33

seems to me like a translator is such a vital position. [laughs] We wouldn’t have so much

1:00:42

media if we didn’t have translators. So, why? Why is this? Do we even know?

1:00:50

[Yilin] Yeah, it’s very frustrating. And it seems to come from this very misguided belief of who is

1:00:58

the reader — like, assumptions about the reader being white, being maybe of European descent,

1:01:06

of kind of not being open to translation, of not wanting to

1:01:10

read literature from other countries. Because the translator has to be hidden

1:01:15

to kind of appease this imaginary reader that doesn’t actually exist.

1:01:20

[Yilin] And publishing houses keep kind of using that argument of marketing. So they would make

1:01:28

the translator’s name really small. They would put it only inside the book instead of on the cover,

1:01:33

or they would just even put it at the end, like in… somewhere. So yeah, that is unfortunately

1:01:42

happening a lot withing publishing. So the British Museum really has an opportunity here to set an

1:01:48

actual example for treating translators well, instead of doubling down and refusing to credit.

1:01:54

[Courtney] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as you were explaining that,

1:01:59

making it small print, putting it inside the book,

1:02:02

not on the cover — like that just has the same vibes as “We can’t have too many Asian names.”

1:02:09

[Yilin and Courtney laugh] [Courtney] Like, that — it’s the same vibe.

1:02:12

[Yilin] Very unfortunate. [Courtney] Very unfortunate!

1:02:15

[Yilin] Yeah. Yeah.

1:02:18

[Courtney] So, Yilin, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.

1:02:24

This is obviously such an important issue, and you have had such a stressful couple of weeks,

1:02:29

so we are happy to help get the word out as much as we can. Where are all

1:02:36

the places that people can find and follow you?

1:02:39

[Yilin] Yeah. So, I’m on social media. I use @YilinWriter everywhere I can,

1:02:47

just to make it easy and consistent. So my main presence is on Twitter, but I’m also on Instagram

1:02:53

and TikTok. And I’m also on Mastodon. I’m on the server Wandering Shop, which is a server

1:03:00

for SFF writers, so @YilinWriter@wandering.shop on Mastodon. And then my website is YilinWang.com.

1:03:10

[Courtney] Outstanding. So, before we wrap up,

1:03:14

is there anything else? I want to make sure we didn’t forget anything important.

1:03:17

[Yilin] I think we got everything. And I really appreciate it — you know,

1:03:21

being able to talk to both of you. And just, yeah, thank you so much for having me.

1:03:25

[Courtney] Yes! Thank you so much once again.

1:03:28

Listeners, do go down to the show notes. Find those links. Share them out. Help support

1:03:33

Yilin’s work. Help support the crowdfund. Pre-order the book. Do all of these lovely

1:03:38

things. Share this episode, especially if this is the day it comes out, the day after it comes out,

1:03:43

during the crowdfunding period. Share this with others in the Aspec community

1:03:48

or anyone else who may be interested in the Chinese cultural context, the queer context,

1:03:54

the poetry context — because we’ve got so much here, we’ve got a lot of interests to cover here.

1:04:00

So let’s set a better precedent and treat our translators with the respect that they deserve.

1:04:08

[Courtney] So, until next time, thank you all so much for being here, and