from 'Direct Translations: Words and Stories' (2011)

WAIST FRUITAfter some work in the city, I got so hungry when I got home that I took a quick bite. Soon I found the chips as well as some yooguo. It was not till then that I realized I didn't even know what its English equivalent was, although I could easily directly render it as it is in Chinese: waist fruit. By then, was still no wiser, perhaps because I was so hungry that my brains were not functioning properly.I had to check with her as she is an excellent cook and food acquisitor as she is the one who goes to the market and does all the vital purchases. I began, Do you know what the thing I just took is, the kind of thing that looks a bit like the shelled peanuts?It's not till I said its Chinese name, yaoguo, that she ohed and said, 1 know. It's cashew.A detail emerged then. A year or so ago when I did an interpreting job for a patient suffering from bowel cancer, I got stuck with a word when he was asked to go through the list of daily food he liked, including one that was gan bei, which I directly interpreted to the bewilderment of the professional as shell, as I knew it was a kind of seafood with meat dried after being shelled. Having thus explained it, I remained unsatisfied myself till I got home when I found that it was actually dry mussels.3 vs. 30In my past experience submitting poems to various magazines or journals in the English-speaking world I have gained sufficient knowledge to know that 3 poems or not more than 5 is the limit.The day before yesterday, a poet friend of mine emailed from China to ask me for a submission of poems, to be published in a China-based magazine. How many did he ask? You tell me.30 poems! It took me an hour or so to go through the seven months from January this year, working back from winter to summer, before I handpicked 30 poems, treating them like a total stranger, delighted with stuff that I wrote as if I had read it for the first time and rejecting the bad ones that I wrote as if they had been written by common submitters.When you send the poems in the West, it is common that they may sit on them for 3 months or 6 months and, in some cases, a year. When I sent the 30 poems to my friend, he came back overnight, saying that he'd read all of them but he'd like me to give him a bit more, just to leave enough room for selection and maneuver. I followed that with 10 more, from an as-yet unpublished collection.That is the speed of China today. Cynics may say little can be good if things are done that fast, but cynics may also say that things produced in Oz, for example, are not perfect when they take months or years to produce. Sometimes, they may appear perfect but hardly palatable, hardly readable at all. Scarily, that often seems part of my reading experience.3 vs. 30, in the ending year of the first decade of the 21st century.IF WE MUST DIEIt's not till I finished reading the poem today, titled If we must die, and had a look at the name of the poet who wrote the poem, Claude McKay, that a door seemed to have opened somewhere in my memory. I must have read this sometime ago; no, a long time ago, and it must have been when I was a university student in China, about 30 years ago. Back then, the poem was incorporated in a school text. In retrospect, the Chinese university texts then must have been politically correct, meaning racially correct, trying to decolonize the young minds, a very good thing from today's point of view, particularly when what I see each night on SBS TV alerts me to things that should never have happened, such as the 4 white students at the University of Free State in South Africa pissing into the stew and passing it back to the 5 black housekeepers; I was so disgusted that I told this to a couple of friends who expressed their feelings with a single word, disgusting. (See the article here: http://news. theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/fourwhite-safricans-to-be-sentenced-20100728-10uqp. …