By Jac Hope
The day I interviewed Linda Jaivin, China expert, translator, and fiction author, was a busy one for her.
She managed to squeeze me in between attending a New York-based book club via Zoom, filming a piece for SBS (our interview was was briefly interrupted by a crew member who had left a jacket in her house), and preparing for the second of three events she was appearing at as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, this one being a part of SWF’s Curiosity Lecture series on the topic of China’s Cultural Revolution.
Despite her busy schedule, Jaivin was generous with both her knowledge and her time and what began as a discussion about the role of the translator quickly spiralled into something far bigger which got to the heart of the importance of language itself and its role in understanding history. Especially for a country like China, which often gets reduced to crude stereotypes.
Jaivin became a Sinologist, a person who specialises in the study of Chinese culture, language, history, and literature, by accident.
She was studying political science at Brown University, which requires students to take classes outside their major to broaden their knowledge, when she asked an older student for a recommendation for a well-taught interesting course and was told to try and introductory course in east Asian history.
For Jaivin, it was a pivotal moment, she ended up majoring in political science and east Asian history and travelling down the path she is still on today.
Near the end of her degree, Lea Williams, a respected east Asian historian at Brown, encouraged Jaivin to start learning Chinese if she wanted to become more than “a tourist” in the field of Chinese history. Williams argued that it is impossible to fully understand the history of China and the Chinese people without understanding the Chinese language.
Having taken up the challenge of learning Chinese, Jaivin now strongly echoes Williams’ sentiment.
Learning the language was difficult. Jaivin recalls “sitting under a tree writing the same [Chinese] character like 1000 times until it finally sunk in,” but the rewards of that effort were great and afforded her an understanding of Chinese history that would simply not be available to her without the understanding of language.
Jaivin’s access and understanding of history through the Chinese language affords her the capacity to write histories of China that stray far from the usual focus on elites and major historical figures, including 2021’s The Shortest History of China and Bombard the Headquarters!: The Cultural Revolution in China, due for release in June.
In both these titles, Jaivin reflects upon the role of those often left out of the historical canon, especially women, because “it’s those people in many ways that are more reflective of what a society was like in a given period”.
For Jaivin, Chinese language, culture, and history are inextricably intertwined. Language codes culture and culture influences history.
For a country like China that has typically placed significant cultural value on literacy and scholarship, stories from ordinary people can be told in ways that are not possible in cultures that place greater emphasis on other modes of communication.
This is not to say that other cultural modes of knowledge transfer are less valuable, but rather that a rich history of China is waiting for those willing to put in the effort to try and get to know it through language.
Featured image: Author and translator Linda Jaivin’s life changed when she started wrestling with Mandarin. Photos: Linda Jaivin, Kevin Malik/Pexels
