Hybridities and Affinities

Asian/American Transits #6—NEW YORK x JEREMY TIANG

Howdy. Last time we journeyed to Hong Kong with Phyllis Chan, designer, entrepreneur, and one half of the duo behind YanYan Knits. After a long tour into filmmaking, visual arts, and screenwriting, I’m pleased to shepherd us back into the literary realm, my own persnickety homeland, with this month’s feature.

Jeremy Tiang is an award-winning literary translator, novelist, and playwright. He is perhaps the most prolific Chinese-English translator working today, his publications from the past few years including, but not limited to, works by Lo Yi-chin (Faraway), Shuang Xuetao (Rouge Street), Yan Ge (Strange Beasts of China), and Xu Zechen (Beijing Sprawl, co-translated with Eric Abrahamsen). Tiang is also a storyteller of the theater world and has a bilingual play coming to New York in the fall. He is a founding member of the BIPOC Literary Translators Caucus of the American Literary Translators Association and teaches writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

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1. Where did you grow up? How did this environment affect your sense of cultural identity?

I was born and raised in Singapore, leaving (for the first time) when I was nineteen and spending most of my adult life abroad. Singapore’s multiethnic, multilingual, postcolonial environment, along with my Sri Lankan-Tamil father and Cantonese-speaking Malaysian-Chinese mother (with whom I speak English, the only language we have in common), meant I was primed to view my cultural identity as hybrid from the beginning. It didn’t help that I attended The Chinese High School, which as the name implies, was a very homogenous environment—I was one of only a handful of students who weren’t “pure” Chinese. I have a distinct memory of a reporter speaking to me for an article she was writing about the school, and referring to me not as 混血 (mixed blood) but as 混种 (mixed breed). It was an odd moment.

From a performance of Aya Ogawa’s The Nosebleed.

2. Can you describe how you came to your current creative practice? Who or what have been your biggest inspirations or influences?

I trained as an actor at Drama Centre London, then moved into playwriting, and then to fiction—and as someone who exists between language and cultures, the practice of translation felt like a natural complement to my writing. It makes sense to me to move between genres and modes, rather than doing just one thing. I draw inspiration and/or influence from a wide range of people; right now I am vibing with Aya Ogawa, whose writing, translation and performance embody so much of what I wish to put out into the world. I first came to know Aya’s work through their translations of Toshiki Okada’s plays, and their recent play The Nosebleed at Lincoln Center really blew me away with its excavation of family trauma and deft handling of language, not to mention Aya’s devastating performance as their own father.

Jeremy’s rendition of Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge was lauded as a “tremendous, fine-drawn translation” by the Washington Post, and won an English PEN award.

3. When did you move to New York? Has the experience of living here shaped your creative, personal, or social sensibilities?

I moved to New York ten years ago, and I don’t think I can quantify exactly how the city has shaped me, but I imagine I’m a different person than if I'd spent those ten years somewhere else. I’ve met so many people here—writers, translators, theatermakers and more—who have become friends, collaborators, influences, nemeses, and being in community with them has sustained and inspired me. I also think distance from Singapore has freed me to write about it, something that didn’t feel possible when I was actually living there. It was too close, too stifling. I needed to leave in order to see it clearly, and New York has provided this vantage point.

A man of many talents: Jeremy’s debut novel State of Emergency received the Singapore Literature Prize.

4. How often do you visit Asia nowadays? Do you have any favorite cities or places?

I used to go back to Asia at least once a year, often twice, but the pandemic put a stop to that, and I don’t know what that looks like “nowadays.” This summer, I traveled to Asia for the first time in three years, to Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan, and it felt like I’d regrounded myself. Will I resume my regular visits? The new normal seems to be that there is no normal, so who can say. I find it increasingly hard to justify these long-distance flights with climate change upon us, but my entire family is in Singapore, and most of the authors I’m working with live on the other side of the planet from me.

I have a soft spot for Bangkok, where I holed up in a cheap rented room and wrote my first novel. I love the bookshops and night markets of Taipei, the narrow hutongs of Beijing, the hawker centers of Singapore. But the longer I stay away, the less real these places feel, and I wonder if they’re my favorite places or if I just miss the person I was when I was there.

A collection of essays by writers and translators on disrupting and decolonizing translation, co-edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy.

5. What significance do you see in finding, making, and/or nurturing community connections between Asia and America, broadly speaking?

I don’t know that I can speak broadly, because this feels so personal. As someone with a foot in both continents (or at least, with ties to several places in both continents), I find myself instinctively making these connections. So much of my impulse to translate comes from wanting to make sense of the different affinities I feel for various locations.

The play that I’m working on at the moment, Salesman之死, delves into many of these issues. Taking as its starting point the 1983 production of Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theater that was directed by Arthur Miller himself, the play asks what an artistic collaboration looks like across such a huge cultural gulf, and what happens to a quintessentially American story when it is removed from its context. Through the eyes of rehearsal interpreter Shen Huihui, we see the often painful yet rewarding process of finding common ground, and the joy of the hybridity that can result from that. I’m really looking forward to going into rehearsals soon with a multilingual, transnational cast and production team; the show is being performed at the Connelly Theater in NYC this October 10-28. 

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You can keep up with Jeremy on Twitter (a.k.a. X or whatever) via @JeremyTiang and learn more about his projects at www.jeremytiang.com. Tickets for Salesman之死 go on sale on August 24!