"Refraction: An American Girl in China" tells the story of the American-born daughter of a U.S. Embassy military attaché in Chongqing and a Chinese actress. Sent back to China to live with her grandmother, the 2-year-old girl arrives in Shanghai on the eve of the Communist takeover. Moving to Beijing, she faces hostility because of her nationality and her refusal to denounce her father. After graduating from high school, she is sent to work in rural Shanxi Province in 1962 and later, to escape the madness of the Cultural Revolution, she moves to Xinjiang, where she spends nine years in farm work. Returning to Beijing after the death of Mao, she struggles against Chinese officialdom to reassert her American citizenship and return to the land of her birth.
Funny, sad, heart-breaking, and thrilling, this novel shows China at a very human level during a thirty-year period of great social change, with all the goodness, evil, kindness, and greed to be found in mankind on display.
About the author
Author Teresa Buczacki (Hen Xiu) was born in New York City in 1946, but lived in Mainland China for most of her life before the age of 32. She returned to the United States in January 1978 and began teaching at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.. She began to write in 1982. In addition to Refraction: An American Girl in China, she has published more than 30 works of fiction and non-fiction.
Foreword
For many years, my friends have been urging me to write, to record everything that had happened. I tried. But every time I picked up a pen, images of the past would surface in my mind and cause me such unspeakable pain that I could not bear to go on.
Several years ago, I met a special person. Even though in the beginning, we could only communicate through my limited English, he soon learned to speak Chinese. Starting as my Chinese language student, he became in time my friend, my confidant and eventually my husband. In the beginning, his uncompromising attitude towards the truth, his deep sympathy for me and his passion for Chinese culture brought us close together. As our friendship developed, I began to feel secure enough to begin to recount my stories to him. So we talked. After we were married, in Washington, in Connecticut, in New York and during our trips abroad, we continued to talk. Remembering the past no longer became distressing to me, and thoughts which I had suppressed for many years kept pouring out.
Since we both worked, and Jeffrey’s job, in particular, was an extremely demanding one, our little free time together was precious. Stories which were welling up inside of me got interrupted often in the recounting, which was frustrating. For that reason, I again picked up my pen and started to write.
If there was any value in my stories, it would be in their complete truthfulness. They are all first-hand experience. To me, what happened to an individual like me is inconsequential. But I can not forget, nor is it possible for me to describe, the utter sadness of what befell a whole nation. I hope that through my writing, I can communicate some of my intense love for the Chinese people as well as for those of other races which share that vast land.
In the end, the book is simply a record of a period of my life. To my dearest husband, I dedicate it.
Han Xiu
Translator’s Remarks
Autobiographical writings are impossible to fully translate because the process of giving first- person narratives foreign voices can not but compromise their authenticity. This issue is further complicated when one is dealing with two languages as distant as Chinese and English, since there are no formulas derived from a common linguistic or cultural background to follow. Some translators choose to handle this problem by preserving the sentence sequence of the original text. However, since narrative structures are themselves culturally idiosyncratic, this method tends to add a feeling of foreignness to the translation that is unintended and perhaps largely undesirable.
In translating “Refraction,” I tried to recreate the sense of immediacy in author Han Xiu’s narrative by eliminating as much as possible any awkwardness in my writing through repeated editing. To provide a measure of control, I had the original Chinese text re-word-processed at triple spaces and did my draft in longhand in the interlines. Then I had the draft typed up in a similar way and repeated the steps five or six times. By this method, I knew exactly where I had been and how the translated text evolved. It took me a year to complete the work.
I had never spoken to author Han Xiu. Our communication had been limited to my sending final drafts to her and her sending them back to me with comments. However, throughout the past year, the courage and fighting spirit shown in her writing were a constant source of inspiration for me as I faced the hardship of being separated from my family and the challenge of setting up an independent architectural practice at midlife. Now I feel very privileged in being able to offer English-speaking readers a similar opportunity to get to know her.
In the end, I would like to thank my parents for their constant encouragement, the Youth Cultural Enterprise Company for their interest, the Council for Cultural Planning and Development for their support, Mr. Buczacki for his criticism and Miss Jeanette Tan whose tireless and nothing short of superhuman word-processing efforts made the present publication possible.
Carl Shen April 26, 1995
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