Welcome to episode 6 of the Mynah Podcast, brought to you by Mynah Magazine! Editors Ruby and Darren are joined by Jeremy Tiang to discuss his translation of Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger, the offcuts of Singaporean history, multilingualism, and the Marxist conspiracy to make us all touch grass.
Jeremy Tiang is a Singaporean novelist, playwright and translator from Chinese, currently based in New York City. He was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize for his novel State of Emergency and for his translation of Zhang Yueran's Cocoon, and he recently won an Obie Award for his play Salesman之死.
To learn more about Jeremy and for more context on this episode, read our newsletter at mynahmag.substack.com
Some notes on the podcast and additional resources:
Jeremy’s translation of Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger is out in Singapore now with Ethos Books. Look out for his translations of Shuang Xuetao’s Hunter and Zhang Yueran’s Women, Seated later this year. His Obie Award-winning play Salesman之死 might be staged somewhere next year. That’s all we can say for now!
Hai Fan’s first novel, 雨林的背影, won the Singapore Literature Prize for Chinese Fiction last year. It’s set in the aftermath of the Hat Yai Peace Agreement (1989), following characters as they leave the rainforest, re-enter civilian life and reflect on the decades that they spent in the rainforest. Jeremy and Hai Fan are looking for a publisher for the English translation, which is tentatively titled Out of the Rainforest.
s/pores journal has published a special issue on Hai Fan, in which you can read Jeremy’s essay Nature-writing: On Translating Hai Fan. He’s also written about translating Hai Fan’s work in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s special issue on the Malayan Emergency.
Peace Villages and Friendship Villages refer to a group of settlements located in the mountains outside the southernmost Thai town of Betong, where many MCP cadres have lived since the Hat Yai Peace Agreement was signed by representatives of the MCP, the Thai government, and the Malaysian government in 1989. As Jeremy explains, different factions occupied the Friendship Villages—the Communist Party of Malaysia—and the Peace Villages—the Communist Party of Malaya, but they're friends again now.
The Malayan Communist Party accidentally assassinated Henry Gurney, the British High Commissioner in Malaya (1948-1951), during an ambush designed to seize supplies from the British. This took place at a high point of the First Malayan Emergency and preceded military strikes from the colonial government and the evacuation and mass detention of Tras New Village inhabitants.
The Transformative Justice Collective is a movement seeking the reform of Singapore’s criminal punishment system, starting with the abolition of the death penalty.
Jeremy’s novel State of Emergency follows a family as they navigate major political upheavals in Malaya, Singapore, and Malaysia. It will be published by World Editions in the US and UK in June this year. The Chinese edition was translated by Lim Woan Fei and Chen Si’an. It has also been translated into German by Susann Urban.
The International Booker Prize, for which Jeremy has been both on the jury and longlisted (of course), is one force behind the increased recognition for literary translators and translation. Jennifer Croft, whose translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker Prize, started a campaign to get publishers to include translator’s names with the writer’s the front cover of books. You can read the open letter and view its signatories here. Yes, Jeremy’s there too.
Mynah Magazine started as a print magazine for untold Singaporean stories in 2016. We’ve published four issues to date.
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The music for The Mynah Podcast was written and recorded by Daniel Seah.
