Language borders
By William Wetherall
31 December 2025
A few days ago I received an unusual request from the 1st older sister, in Japan, of my adoptive sister in America. She asked me to translate one of the poems from Genji monogatari for her Mainichi Culture Center lectures on Genji in modern Japanese, English, and Chinese translation.
The sisters are Nos. 3 and 4 of 6 daughters born and raised in the People's Republic of China during the early 1960s to a Chinese woman born in the Philippines, and a Chinese man born in the Republic of China before Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong (1893-1976) established PRC and drove ROC into exile on Taiwan in 1949. The daughters were born at time when PRC dictated that families have only 1 child. And boys were preferred to girls.
In 1980, the mother brought her daughters to Hong Kong, when it was still a British territory. People determined to leave the mainland found ways to cross the border. The oldest sister was 22, the youngest 11. Nos. 3 and 4 were 18 and 16.
After coming to Hong Kong, No. 3 worked as a dish washer and No. 4 worked in a factory. In the late 1980s, No. 4 came to Japan to study Japanese. Two years later, she was a fluent speaker of Japanese and addicted to Japanese novels. She then turned her attention to English, and I happened to be one of her teachers.
No. 4 wanted to study in the United States, so my parents sponsored her. She had to apply for a student visa in Hong Kong, from where she went to America on a Hong Kong passport, and became an unofficial member of the family. She took remedial courses at a community college, went on to get a BS magna cum laude and an MBA at a state university, then a law degree, and became a U.S. citizen. She now runs her own law office in a small town in California, where she consults in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese.
Wang, Chiang, and Mao
No. 3 came to Japan from Hong Kong in the early 1990s, just days before No. 4 left for America. She, too, came to study Japanese, bent on enrolling in a Japanese college. She passed the entrance exam to Hosei University, graduated in history, and enrolled in the graduate school of the University of Tokyo.
No. 3 advanced to candidacy in a doctoral program, doing research on the life and political philosophy of Wang Ching-wei (Wang Jinwei 1883-1944). Wang was the nationalist leader that Japan recognized as the president of the Republic of China from 1940-1944, after ROC's nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) was driven into exile in Chungking (Chongqing) by invading Japanese forces in 1937.
In 1945, Japan unconditionally surrendered to the Allied Powers, which included Chiang's ROC in exile. Chiang regained the reins of most parts of ROC he had lost, and an ROC representative accepted Japan's surrender of Taiwan, which the Ching (Qing) dynasty had ceded to Japan by treaty in 1895 -- 17 years before the founding of ROC in 1912, and 54 years before the establishment of PRC in 1949.
Postwar treaties generally make clear provisions for territorial transfers. The terms of Japan's surrender in 1945 required that Japan surrender Taiwan to ROC. However, no Pacific War settlement treaty formally retroceded Taiwan to China by any name.
From the moment ROC accepted Japan's surrender of Taiwan in 1945, it was assumed to have become a province of ROC. As such, it has never been under the control and jurisdiction of PRC.
Chiang's postwar reign on the mainland was short lived. He immediately faced the resumption of a civil war that he had been fighting with Mao before Japan's incursions in China in 1937. And he would again be forced to move ROC's capital, this time to Taiwan, and take refuge there from Mao's People's Liberation Army, in 1949.
Head unbowed
No. 3 was attracted to Wang as a Chinese leader who saw getting along with Japan as the better alternative to war. She had problems with her advisor, however, and left the doctoral program without a degree -- but with her head, like Wang's, unbowed.
No. 3 had naturalized in Japan, so she didn't need a visa to stay. She acted in a few amateur plays, even wrote a couple of plays herself, and penned -- in Japanese --an unpublished personal novel of her family's adventures during the Cultural Revolution in China. She then translated into Chinese -- and published in China -- a collection of early reports on Manchuria by three 19th-century Japanese writers.
No. 4 had come to Japan with only a middle-school education, completed in China at the time she migrated to Hong Kong. No. 3 had started but not completed high school. The sisters were native speakers of Fukien, but had lived in Inner Mongolia, and then Hong Kong, so were fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese as well. They had adopted English names in Hong Kong but had little contact with English. They studied English in Japan only after learning Japanese.
English is now No. 4's principle survival language, but she frequently visits Hong Kong and even Japan. She has lost her spontaneous fluency in Japanese but can manage. No. 3's principle tongue is Japanese. She had to read English writings on China-Japan relations while in graduate school, but didn't feel a need to speak English until visiting No. 4 in America.
I converse with No. 4 in English and No. 3 in Japanese. Since I have also naturalized in Japan, No. 3 and I are both Japanese, for whom Japanese is a common but not native language. I have long since forgotten my university Chinese, other than to say things like "Wǒ bù huì shuō Zhōngwén."
Genji monogatari
A few years ago, No. 3 -- impassioned about the characters and themes of Murasaki Shikibu's Genji monogatari -- began translating this best known massive work of 11th-century classical Japanese literature into Chinese. She has even created a series of talks on Genji monogatari in translation, which she gives in Japanese at the Mainichi Culture Center campuses in both Osaka and Tokyo.
The Genji enthusiasts who enroll in No. 3's Genji seminars include a few Japanese students of Chinese. She presents the original texts, then shows how they have been translated into modern Japanese, Chinese, and English by several hands in each language. Finally, she recites passages from her own translation.
No. 3's Genji seminars are a study in variation. All the translations are different. No. 3 sought my translation to fill a gap, for I am both a structuralist and a minimalist, who endeavors to translate as close to the metaphorical and stylistic bone of the original as possible. More about which in a later post.
Last revised 31 December 2025