Trans – Cultural Fan Fiction as Translation, and the Reparation of Being a Chinese

Abstract

Being a Chinese is not without trauma when facing the Western civilizations. The feeling of being inferior remains even as China witnessed a rapid growth over the past decades, as the national history education keeps reasserting China’s failures when encountering the West (like the history of being colonized). Western discrimi­nations and hostility against the Chinese are also readily accessible through the internet, aggravating the cultural conflicts.

In this paper, I will argue that by writing and reading Chinese fan fiction based on Western source texts, Chinese people achieve an interaction with the West which repairs the trauma that they feel for being Chinese. “Fan fiction” refers to the re – writings of already existing texts, and I pay special heed to one Chinese re – writing of Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice of a Poor Noble Princess (2013) by Fengliu Shudai. The fan fiction then is a Chinese version of the English classic, and broadly speaking, a translation of it. In this translation, the heroine of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is translated to be a Chinese girl who interacts with the English environment in which she lives. Thus, on the one hand, the fan fiction offers a narrative space where the author, together with readers, fantasize their desired interactions with the West, in which the English environment is in return depicted as an inferior other to the Chinese heroine. On the other hand, the validity of Chinese heroine requests a recognition from the English environment for it is endowed with the authority of the source text, hence reaching a reconciliation with the West. A trans – cultural fan fiction, as a type of translation, thus provides an opportunity to form a dynamic interaction between the Chinese and the Western which dissolves a traumatic and antagonistic relationship.