All entries for Friday 22 December 2006

Happy Western Winter Holiday??

This is the greeting I got from Yvonne---an obviously resistant translation of Merry Christmas. I told her that Venuti might adore that.
This resistant/foreignizing/covert translation somehow reminds me the simple fact that this is not my holiday after all. There was a stupid and perhaps ridiculous incident that happened to me when I was a sophomore in GW. Qi and I organized a fantastic Christmas party for our department, and it was until several hours before the party started we were informed that the university would not ‘appreciate’ any festival event with relate to the ‘western’, perhaps worse ‘western and religious’, holidays, and we’d better cancel the party for the sake of ‘being politically correct’. Qi and I were astonished, and eventually outrageous. After arguing with the ‘authority’ for a long time, the deal was that we could still have the party on the Christmas Eve on condition that there was nothing that connotes ‘Christmas’. We tear down smiling pictures of Santa Clause and removed the huge Christmas tree, and changed all the signs to ‘happy new year’. It turned out to be a very successful party after all, but that stupid ‘happy new year but not merry Christmas’ warning really pissed us off: For Buddha’s sake, this is a English Language and Culture Department!
Today nobody can say anything if I want to dress up Edward into a Reindeer. His kindergarten actually organized a grand Christmas party and put them on stage in XinHai Theatre, the most prestigious ‘high culture’ place in my city. Edward played a cute monkey with ‘Xmas’ on his belly, and the dance he performed was ‘All little animals singing Christmas Songs’. I really loved it, with out any feeling that this is a cultural invasion of the evil ‘west’.
Finally we have to agree the political is not the personal, but rather the personal is the political. The western and the Chinese, the religious and the Communist, the past and the present, the mother and the child, boill down to nothing but the life that I live every day.
This is written today, on the traditional Chinese Winter Festival. I bet Edward will also be very happy tonight---we reserved his favorite lobster from Australia and clam from Canada to celeberate this Chinese day of winter…

Xiu Wang : 22 Dec 2006 03:31 |  Tags: Life Thoughts |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem