J V D’Cruz in conversation with

MABEL LEE

Mabel Lee is a third-generation Australian of Chinese heritage. She served on the academic staff at the University of Sydney for thirty-four years, and her translation of Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain played a significant role in the author winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000.

On being born a Chinese in Australia
It was the Depression. My father left the Parramatta greengrocer’s shop in which he had a share. Profits had dwindled and he had nothing to send his wife and three young children in China. Deciding to try to make some money in the country town of Warialda in northern New South Wales, he rented a corner store. Meanwhile, my mother who had received neither letters nor money from my father heard a rumour that he had gone bankrupt. It was time for her to take action and, together with my three older siblings Stan, Desmond and Judy, she resolutely boarded a ship bound for Australia. They arrived in Warialda in April 1939 and I was born on Christmas Eve that year. My three younger siblings, George, Hazel and Harry were also born in Warialda.
    My birth coincided with an upturn in business, and my father thought of me as ‘lucky’. The dole cheques arrived for Christmas and customers came to settle their accounts. I have indeed been lucky: doors to wonderful opportunities have continually opened for me, and I have simply walked through them. I have also for a long time been aware of a protective energy that surrounds me.
    While each of my older siblings had been conceived in China, my father had returned to work in Sydney before they were born. I was the first of my father’s children he had seen as a baby. He and I developed a very strong bond based on mutual love and respect, and also on a shared interest in discussing what it was to be human. I used to be playful and cheeky as a child. At the age of 11, I took my father by surprise when I grabbed him from behind and lifted him a couple of inches off the floor to show how strong I was. My mother scolded me for being disrespectful, but she could not help chuckling. As a university student I sometimes went at night with friends to drink coffee at King’s Cross. My father disapproved, saying that if one goes into muddy water one becomes muddied. My response startled, but pleased him. I said that the lotus grows in muddy water yet remains upright and pure. Such was the nature of our discussions, and we continued these until his death in 1990.
    My mother was born in the town of Shiqi, in Zhongshan County, Guangdong Province, China. She believed in Buddhist karma and believed that her accumulated good karma would protect those she loved. When my mother died suddenly in 1976 my father was bereft. My siblings and I took good care of him, and on their days off work employees would regularly take my father on outings. From my mother we all inherited a generosity of spirit to help those in need, depending on our earnings. Each of us has always supported charitable causes. There is a strand in traditional Chinese thinking that strongly promotes the support of charities to help those less fortunate. The rationale was that regardless of one’s social status or wealth, one requires only so much space to lie in a coffin.
    My paternal grandparents were also from Shiqi. They arrived in Sydney during the 1890s. My grandfather had an import/export business, and my father was born in the People’s Palace in Pitt Street. My grandmother took him as a baby to China, and he returned at the age of 17 to work. Every two or three years after earning his sea passage, he would ‘return’ to China. Finally, he had enough money to marry my mother to whom he had been betrothed as a young boy.
    My parents were very happy to be reunited in Warialda but were worried about feeding a family of five. When my mother became pregnant with me they consulted the town doctor about an abortion. Poor language communication resulted in my mother taking Epsom Salts. It failed to abort me, and I was born. My three younger siblings were each born eighteen months apart, so within five years there was a family of nine to feed. However, my mother was exceptional as a household manager and wasted nothing. She made all our clothes and ensured that there was nutritious food on the table.
    My eldest brother Stan, who was a young teenager, helped with the household chores as well as doing deliveries on his bicycle. He would do the laundry for the whole family. He also looked after his younger siblings. Not knowing any lullabies he would instead sing ‘hillbilly songs’ which he had heard on the radio: “I found my thrill/ On Blueberry Hill . . .”

Living in Australian country and suburban communities
My parents were keenly aware of being poor but they worked hard and were not ashamed of being poor. The Chinese in the town despised us for our poverty, but the Warialda community was kind and friendly.
    My father’s name was Harry Hin Hunt, and all of his children have the surname Hunt. In Cantonese my father’s name is Chan Hun, ‘Chan’ being the surname. The immigration officer said that ‘Hun’ should be the surname because it came last. Moreover, he added, it sounded like ‘Hunt’, so that was how it should be spelt. In the 1910s and 1920s this practice of naming Chinese immigrants was common, but only in Australia and New Zealand. My mother did not adopt an English name. She was Leung Wun Gin, ‘Leung’ being the surname. The local community addressed her as Mrs Hunt.
    My parents had no formal schooling in China but could read and write Chinese. My father acquired some English by attending a protestant Sunday School when he returned to Sydney as a teenager, and through talking with customers in the greengrocer’s shop in Parramatta where he worked. The women at the Sunday School liked my father. One of them remarked, “Harry, your collar is always clean, unlike those of other Chinese men.” My father, who had been clean and immaculate in his appearance from childhood, felt it was important to debunk the stereotype of the ‘dirty Chinaman’. Meticulous attention to one’s physical appearance and one’s surroundings became an aesthetic for all of us. Justice and fair play were also instilled in us from childhood.
    My family left Warialda and came to Sydney in 1945. My father first rented a market garden in Wetherill Park where he became obsessed with growing the perfect cauliflower. My mother was quick to realise that the family would soon starve to death. She threatened to return to China and leave my father to fend for all the children on his own. She had came from a bustling town in China and hated the isolation of the place and living without electricity. Prodded into action, my father opened a fruit shop in Merrylands.
    My older siblings terminated their schooling to assume roles of responsibility in the family business. As a team they ran a fruit shop with a reputation for being exceptionally clean and well managed. Customers were attracted to the shop from miles away. There was another reason for the popularity of the Hunt family fruit shop. In times of potato shortages that sent the price soaring my father insisted on keeping the price low because this was a staple food for Westerners. This did not go unnoticed in the community. As pre-school youngsters I and my younger siblings would do light chores like removing the paper wrapping from apples, then as we grew up we would bag and weigh potatoes after school until there was enough for the next day. I got into the habit of reviewing while working what I had learned during the day at school.
    At first my family did not engage socially with the local community. The shop was open six days, and Sundays were reserved for household chores and occasionally a family outing. We did not engage socially with the Chinese community either, and anyway people did not like us because we were poor. However, my father was dismissive of such slights. As a family we adopted his fearless attitude. I grew up thinking I was as good as anyone, and I have never stopped believing this.

Awareness of being Chinese
My father believed that our cultural identity as Chinese should be maintained, and insisted that we spoke Chinese at home. When the Pacific War ended and the Japanese troops withdrew from China, he seriously considered relocating the family to China. A brief visit there during the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists made him decide to make Australia home.
    My family began to mix socially with the local community in the 1950s when my brother Stan joined Apex, Rotary, Lions, and the Masonic Lodge. Later, my youngest brother Harry also became deeply involved in Rotary and other community activities. Stan and Harry are both outgoing personalities and enjoy community work and the social aspects of such activities.
    I became aware that I was Chinese and different from the time I started infants school at the age of 5. Some of the children called me ‘Ching Chong Chinaman’ in a decidedly unfriendly way, but I had no qualms about hitting them. My Chinese identity did not ever worry me. My younger brother George and I were once waiting for the school bus to take us home from Parramatta West Primary School when a group of older boys started pelting us with stones. We retaliated in kind but were outnumbered. Luckily the bus arrived. When two Greek sisters at the school were taunted with nasty jibes about their eating garlic and smelling like it, I immediately went to their defence. They were recent arrivals, and I comforted them and befriended them. My abhorrence for any sort of bullying was already well established, and I was aware of not being afraid of anyone. At Parramatta High School, the only co-ed high school at the time, I was treated like everyone else. My being Chinese did not create any borders for me, but my being short did. It meant that I would always come last in the cross-country races.

University life and career
I went on to study at the University of Sydney in 1957 with the help of a Commonwealth Scholarship. My parents were delighted. None of our acquaintances had completed high school. In those times there were few Chinese in Australian universities, and certainly very few Australian-born Chinese. Chinese students at the University of Sydney were either Colombo Plan students or the offspring of wealthy families. The women from the latter group wore designer clothes and shoes as well as diamond-studded jewellery, while I made my own clothes. I joined with a group of Chinese whose socio-economic backgrounds were not too different from my own. They were mostly men and we liked talking about the political situation in China. Later, I was elected the first president of the Chinese Students’ Society at the University of Sydney, but did not join other clubs or societies because I worked most evenings in the restaurant my father had by then acquired. Rather than wait on tables I chose to wash up because it was mindless and allowed me to revise the day’s lectures in my mind.
    I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree with First Class Honours in Chinese in 1962. A Cambridge scholar, Professor A.R. Davis, had been appointed to the Chair of Oriental Studies, and I was amongst the second intake of students in Chinese Studies. I went on to study Chinese political and economic thought from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century for my PhD degree. I wanted to find out why China had failed to effectively deal with the Western powers and Japan in this period. It had become clear to me that Chinese history was important to me because it was an integral part of my own history. I joined the Chinese Studies academic staff at the University in the year I graduated as a PhD, in 1966.

During her thirty-four years as an academic at the University of Sydney, Mabel Lee supervised to successful completion ten PhD theses, a number of MA theses, and about forty BA honours theses. She taught Chinese language, and early twentieth-century Chinese literature and history at all levels. She was elected founding president of the Chinese Studies Association of Australia in 1989.

    I was committed to teaching creatively and effectively. I thoroughly enjoyed all the courses I taught. However, while I enjoyed teaching Chinese literature, nothing I read inspired me until I read a book of prose poems called Wild Grass by Lu Xun (1881–1936). These poems spoke to me and my research began to focus on this powerful intellectual and writer. Two research papers that I published in 1982 mark my entry to literature: ‘Suicide of the Creative Self: the Case of Lu Xun’ and ‘Solace for the Corpse with Its Heart Gouged Out: the Classical Poetry of Lu Xun’.

On becoming a translator, and translating Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain
From the mid 1980s Chinese writers began to visit Sydney. I would always be contacted and would arrange for them to speak in the University Staff Club. With my extensive network of past and present students I could call on a few and they would inform others, so audiences always numbered eighty to a hundred people. One such writer was the poet Yang Lian who I first met at the home of Lyn and John Tranter in late 1988. When he asked if I would translate two cycles of poems he had written in Australia, I told him I was not a translator. He looked forlorn. I knew he desperately needed translations for his poetry readings and as I liked his poetry I agreed to help him. I eventually translated and published three books of Yang Lian’s poetry: in 1990 Masks and Crocodile and The Dead in Exile and in 2002 Yi, a book of sixty-four long poems based on the ancient shamanistic text Yijing (Book of Changes). My academic training had equipped me for translation, and I believed I was playing an important role in making contemporary Chinese writings accessible to English readers. I have never received royalties for my translations of Yang Lian’s poetry, nor did I expect any. Yang Lian himself has received very little in royalties for those three books, but they have enabled him to win substantial international poetry prizes.
    Yang Lian relocated to London, and when I travelled to Europe in 1991 we arranged to meet in Paris. It was through him that I met Gao Xingjian. Gao talked about his novel Soul Mountain that had recently been published in Taipei. As I scanned the copy of the novel he had given me, I found myself drawn to the beauty of the language: it read like poetry. I surprised myself by suddenly saying to Gao, “Do you have a translator? Do you want me?” It was as if some mystical force had pushed me to ask this of him, and, taken aback for a minute or two, he agreed. Translating Soul Mountain then became a mission; I could sense that it was a very important work. However, until my appointment as Head of the School of Asian Studies ended in 1993 it was impossible to devote time to the translation. I was also mindful that translation counted for nothing in my academic career.
    When I completed the translation at the beginning of 1999 I sought out Lyn Tranter who was a literary agent. I wanted the manuscript to go to a commercial publisher to ensure that Gao would receive adequate royalties to support him in his future literary endeavours. We had not at any stage discussed royalties, and it had never crossed my mind that I would be receiving a share. Lyn Tranter insisted that we clarify the matter of royalties, and Gao and I agreed upon a 60:40 split.
    I terminated my contract with the University of Sydney in January 2000, and I have since translated Gao’s novel One Man’s Bible (2002) and a collection of his short stories called Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (2004). Gao’s winning the Nobel Prize meant that I had been sprinkled in gold dust. This gold dust has increased my support for the disadvantaged. It has also subsidised my various projects aimed at promoting a better understanding of Asian cultures in the English-speaking world. Wild Peony publishing company, which I own with Dr A.D. Stefanowska, allows me to do precisely this. In recent years we have published four volumes by Australian poets with Asian backgrounds.

On being ‘a Sydney person’
I like to think of myself as a Sydney person, because in Australia I see no need to assert my Australian identity. After Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize, reports in the Australian media only once referred to me, his translator, as “Chinese Australian”. I was generally described as “a Sydney woman” or “a Sydney University academic”. These descriptions meant that I was acknowledged as Australian, and I like this.

Since 2000, Mabel Lee has been awarded the following honours: NSW Premier’s Prize for Translation and the PEN Medallion, Life Member of PEN International (Sydney Centre), Centenary of Federation Medal “for service to Australian Society and literature”, University of Sydney Alumni Award “for her commitment to the promotion of Asian scholarship and creativity in Australia” and Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

This interview was conducted at the University of Sydney Library on 19 February 2005 and transcribed from audio tape by Rita Camilleri, Hon. Research Fellow, Monash Asia Institute, Monash University.

J.V. D’Cruz is Adjunct Professor in Australia–Asia Relations, Monash Asia Institute, Monash University.

Overland 179–winter 2005, pp.65–68