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Gladys Yang with
Xianyi Yang on their wedding day in
February 1941 |
From Oxford to the Orient
Gladys Yang was the first student to graduate from Oxford with a degree in Chinese. Her story of ‘triumph and tragedy’ and influence as a translator and cultural catalyst is to be celebrated in a collection of her letters, writes Tom Foot
GLADYS Yang was a prodigious translator of Chinese into English who lent a voice to hundreds of writers.
As the first student to graduate from Oxford University with a degree in Chinese, she devoted her life to clearing the channels of eastern thought into the western world.
Eight years after her death, hundreds of her letters written to friends and family in England have been acquired by the British Library and are to be edited into a book.
Together with transcripts from a series of interviews with BBC Woman’s Hour, and an unfinished autobiography, they tell a life story of triumph and tragedy, including her son’s suicide and the aftermath of Yang’s imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution.
More importantly, they are one of the few first-hand accounts of China’s ever-changing political landscape, written without hindsight, and spanning decades of war, upheaval and revolution between 1945 and 1990.
“She was too good a witness to history for her letters to stay unpublished,” says Bill Jenner, Professor of Chinese at the School of Oriential and African Studies (Soas). Soas was Yang’s first port of call during rare trips to London following her four-year imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution.
The book, which is yet to find a publisher, has become a labour of love for Jenner.
He says: “Her letters bring this amazing woman back to life, and let their readers share her unique view of China. It is a China rapidly receding into the past.
“It is time she received the wider recognition that is due to her.”
Born Gladys Tayler and raised in Peking among missionaries, she was sent to London by her parents, aged seven.
As the star pupil at Walthamstow Hall, a small boarding school for the daughters of missionaries overseas, she won a series of scholarships and a place at Oxford when it was very hard for a woman to do so.
She persuaded the university to run a degree in Chinese and, in 1940, left England for China where the invading Japanese already occupied much of the country. She sailed with Xianyi Yang, a fellow student, to marry him in defiance of her parents.
“In her wedding picture [above], she looked like Ingrid Bergman,” says Jenner.
Her first letter came from Nanjing in 1945, retelling the Japanese surrender in August. “In that letter her hopes are hedged with reservations,” says Jenner.
Yang started university teaching with her husband and together they translated a number of classical texts. Working as a team, they developed a unique method of translation.
“With all other translators of Chinese you can tell that English is their second language,” says Jenner. “They worked together with Xianyi first making rough drafts from Chinese into English. Then Gladys would go over his draft and furnish it with her translations. It set their work aside from the rest.”
During the civil war in 1949, the Yangs decided not to travel to Taiwan, which remained under British control, and stayed to form the remaking of China under the Communist regime.
Their skill as translators was harnessed by the political propaganda machine, both working for the Foreign Languages Press in Peking.
“Most of what the press put out was cliché-ridden and ephemeral – but there was more to the propaganda effort than that. It wanted the world to read and admire what it regarded as the true canon of Chinese literature from its beginnings to the present.”
This gave Gladys and Xianyi a mission they relished, turning out superb translations and masterpiece after masterpiece until 1965.
Gladys returned to London briefly in 1961. “At the showing of a Chinese film, I heard her talk. She was thin and smiled and her eyes shone. The China of which she spoke was real. Three years later her flat became my second home as a raw, young translator in Peking. She looked after many of us newly arrived teachers and translators from abroad, and offered visitors respite from official hospitality.
“Because she treated colleagues as people rather than embodiments of ideology they liked her better than they did most Maoist foreigners.”
Yang’s letters from August 1965 to March 1968 give a ringside commentary on the unprecedented events of those years.
“The political and cultural atmosphere in Peking was already heavy with tension,” says Jenner. “People wondered who were going to be the targets this time.”
But all literary translation ended and in spring 1969, when they were arrested and imprisoned separately until 1972. The letters stopped.
He says: “She was jailed in a place for foreigners. She had good food, better than most, but she was in complete isolation. She was not even told when her mother died.”
On her release, Yang’s letters turn to the fortunes of her son, Ye. He had made heavy going of the Cultural Revolution. As a small boy he had been teased at school about his western origins and, rebelling against his parents, he sided with the Red Guard, a political group that were regarded under the Maoist leadership as dangerously ultra-leftist.
Torn between his Chinese and British roots, “he became crazy,” says Jenner.
For 30 years he had rejected his British ancestry, but after the Cultural Revolution he began to deny his Chinese roots. He insisted he was British and even changed his name to David Sullivan.
In 1973, he was he was at the centre of a diplomatic row after forcing his way into the British Embassy. He was eventually dispatched to Britain.
His struggle to remake his identity ended in disaster in January 1979 when he killed himself by setting fire to himself in his aunt’s house. Many of Yang’s letters were destroyed during the explosion. Yang never got over her son’s death but with Mao’s death, she was able to write more freely and increasingly she translated the work of new and progressive writers.
Reflecting on the project as a whole, Jenner says: “The Chinese women’s writings that Gladys translated in the latter part of her career often share her own concerns with how people coped with the human consequences of revolutionary upheaval.
“If you travelled to China in the 1970s and 1980s it was likely you would have sat in that flat,” says Jenner. “Arthur Miller stayed there when he did his Salesman in Beijing in 1984.”
The Yangs’ joint translation of A Dream of Red Mansions – a complex 18th century novel – turned them into a celebrities. Together they toured China throughout the 1980s, giving lectures to prominent institutions as distinguished visitors.
Gladys drifted into alcoholism in the late 1980s, and with the Peking Massacre of 1989 lost any real hope of social reform.
“Yet even as she withdrew from the world she kept to the end both the sweetness of nature and the English bloody-mindedness that had brought her through 60 difficult years,” says Jenner.
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