Upclose with Julia Lovell
Julia Lovell is a prize-winning writer and translator who specializes in modern Chinese history and literature. Upon the release of her critically-acclaimed non-fiction book, “The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China,” the soft-spoken British scholar talks to Penny Zhou about Chinese studies, her translation works and her new book.
HK Magazine: Where does your fluent Putonghua come from?
Julia Lovell: It all began with my history studies as an undergraduate at Cambridge. We did a week on Chinese history during the time and learned about the Taiping Rebellion (a civil war during the mid-19th Century), which was a topic so incredibly strange and extraordinary for people who’d only studied Western history. Then I started studying Chinese and eventually did my master’s and PhD in Chinese Literature. It’s interesting because I had no background in China at all, but I enjoy languages and had studied European languages. China seemed very excitingly different and at that time, few people in England studied Chinese—in my year there were only two people in the whole university. This was the 1990s and the fashion in Eastern Asian studies was Japanese. But I was always more interested in Chinese because obviously, it’s the root to the Japanese characters.
HK: Apart from writing original books, you also work as a Chinese-English book translator. What kind of works have you translated?
JL: I’ve translated a mixture of books, from modern literature by Lu Xun and Eileen Chang to contemporary works by a variety of Chinese writers such as Han Shaogong and Yan Lianke. Han’s 1996 novel, “A Dictionary of Maqiao,” was the first book I translated. I remember reading it and thinking how wonderful it would be to translate it. I guess in ignorance, you have no fear [laughs]. I didn’t really think about the difficulties, which turned out to be very great. I think translation is a great thing to do because you have all the fun of playing with the language without having to write the stories yourself. If you’re writing your own book as well, translating gives you a wonderful holiday as the aim of translation is to ventriloquize somebody else, to try to recreate the sense of tone and voice in a different language. And that’s a really fun creative process without being as stressful as writing your own books.
HK: Speaking of your own books, can you tell us about the writing of “The Opium War?”
JL: The initial idea came from my early experiences in China. I first visited [China] in 1997, right after the handover, and one of the things I did there in my first couple of weeks was to watch director Xie Jin’s latest film, “The Opium War.” The Opium War is not taught in British schools, I only got to know a bit about it from my studies in university. The film, which was a long meditation on the humiliations of the war and the lessons of the humiliations, made a deep impression on me, and made me wonder how important this war was to contemporary Chinese imagination. I always wanted to find out whether the reality was like what’s portrayed in the film, and I must confess that there’s probably a dilemma of national self-interest as well because the British characters in the film took a real beating—we’re all greedy, duplicitous pirates [laughs]. So I was interested to see whether my ancestors actually were as bad.
HK: And what did you find?
JL: I found a lot of things that embarrassed me as a British [person]. There was a lot of greed and hypocrisy. What the British politicians, soldiers and merchants claimed they were doing—fighting for glorious things like civilization and free trade, was actually much simpler, which was to protect their profits of an illegal drug trade. But I also discovered some things that were more complicated, such as the use of opium in the 19thcentury China and Britain. Of course, opium could be dangerous and addictive, but at the same time, there were a great variety of ways to use it. Say if your son’s getting married and you could afford it, you would offer opium pipes to your guests in a way we would offer wine nowadays—so it was a social drug at the time; it wasn’t necessarily going to lead you to destruction. And also medically, it was absolutely essential because China didn’t make its own aspirin until about 1930s, so opium was the best paracetamol they had. While in Britain, for Victorian mothers, if their babies wouldn’t stop crying, they would put opium in their mouths. And this really assisted the British Industrial Revolution because it kept children quiet so women could sleep at night and go out to work in the morning, leaving their babies at home. It’s an extraordinary hidden history of opium use in Britain.
“The Opium War” is now available at all major bookstores in Hong Kong.