Profiles

The novel offers a rather informal, unjournalistic, fragmentary and linearity-defying transmission of these little stories about a village that seems so alive but, at the same time, seems to be receding into the elusive substance of memory. As mentioned several times in the book, this kind of chronicle, in its disorderliness, is frequently erased from official history.

Paula C. Park, in Intercolonial Intimacies: Relinking Latin/o America to the Philippines 1898-1964, retraces linguistic and cultural proximities that underline networks of kinship between the Philippines and Latin America. These networks help us to better understand the distant, yet interconnected regions impacted still by the legacies of colonialism, but not by centering the US and Spanish empires.

I wanted to create a new strong, independent picture of an Eastern or South Eastern Asian woman.

French rap is a music where guys express their anger toward France and their institutions, but they will do it with Moliere’s language.

In Part Two of this two-part conversation, Rachel Min Park and Nguyễn An Lý continue their discussion of Nguyễn An Lý’s most recent translation, Thuận’s Chinatown. They talk about the way history figures within Chinatown and how literature might gesture towards more ethical renditions of history. They conclude with a broader conversation on the translation and publishing industry and how general readers might support translated literature as a whole.

Translator and PhD Student Rachel Min Park speaks with Nguyễn An Lý about her most recent translation of Thuận’s Chinatown. In Part One of this two-part series, they discuss the general practice of translation, Chinatown’s formal elements, and the role of (translated) literature in interrogating notions of a homogeneous language, culture, and ethnic community.