Language and Identity: Good Communicator!

Translator, editor, finance-pro and now author Flora Qian looks back on her youth in her first novel, South of the Yangtze. Elizabeth Kerr reports www.richardgordonphotography.com=">www.richardgordonphotography.com</a>" &="&" courtesy="courtesy" of="of" Flora="Flora" Qian="Qian">The revelation that Flora Qian’s father is a retired philosophy professor isn’t really much of a surprise. Her first novel, South of the Yangtze, has just come off the presses but she’s looking fairly relaxed. Sitting in Moojoo near the Discovery Bay ferry pier, she comes off as, for lack of a better word, philosophical about it all. About a lot. “I think writing is essentially building bridges. The urgency to write something often comes from a very lonely place,” Flora begins of what she calls an only-child hobby. “The page becomes the only destination for thoughts that are uncompromised. It’s communicating.” Communicating is something Flora puts a lot of thought into, and she’s confident her novel strikes that fine balance between universality and specificity. The vaguely autobiographical South of the Yangtze won 2022’s Proverse Prize, sponsored and created by longtime DB residents Gillian and Verner Bickley of Proverse Publishing. Its reflective tone about language and identity promises to resonate with Hong Kong readers.

THE BACKSTORY Born in Shanghai, Flora studied English literature at Fudan University and got her first gig working in words after graduation, but it was kind of in the blood. “I do have a professor parent… so I was always surrounded by books and a dad who talks a lot about deep questions,” she says with a chuckle. “I worked at a publisher in Shanghai for a little over a year. I was editing and I translated one of Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series. I wasn’t terribly excited by my job.”

By 2007, Flora was enrolled in a translation programme at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Though armed with an MA in Translation, she wound up working in finance, which connected her with her future husband. In 2014, she went off to do an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, finishing her degree in her husband’s native Washington DC, while he stayed in Hong Kong for work. After a pit stop in Singapore in 2016, the couple made their way back to the SAR in 2018. The duo lived first in Mid-Levels but made their way to DB when Flora got pregnant with their now two-year-old daughter.

“We wanted more space, someplace safe,” Flora explains. “We like it here. When you have a young child, it restricts what you can do. For us a fun activity is just taking a walk. DB is beautiful, the landscape is beautiful and there are a lot of people with kids.”

THE NOVEL

Flora’s short fiction has appeared in the Asia Literary Review, Eastlit and a few anthologies. While experimenting with short stories, she really dug in for a first draft of South of the Yangtze in 2018. She was inspired by a trip she and her husband took to her ancestral village in Zhejiang Province. “My grandparents came from there. They moved to Shanghai in the 1940s. That trip was quite memorable,” explains Flora. “For my husband it was to get familiar with my culture and for me it was to remember my childhood and some of the folk tales and poetry that were specific to the area.” Flora describes South of the Yangtze as a nostalgic coming-of-age-story set in the 1980s and ’90s about a woman growing up in a fast-evolving China. Following her journey from childhood to her teens, the novel touches on family history and how hard it can be to reconcile, it ponders language and how it impacts everyday life, and finally it interrogates her decision to put her original culture and language in her past. “It’s personal and political. I feel these are hard to separate,” Flora says. “When you look back, the 1980s was only 10 years after the Cultural Revolution. Things were still being built from the ashes,” she adds. “I have a cousin just a few years younger than me who doesn’t realise how much it’s changed. So I wondered if I was the last generation that remembers the poverty, the transition to a market economy and how different it was.” Ask Gillian about Flora’s Proverse Prize win, and she says: “We are delighted that Flora is one of two writers awarded the Proverse Prize 2022 for a booklength previously unpublished work of fiction, nonfiction or poetry, submitted in English. Beginning from the first edition in 2009, we have each year received interesting and individual works as entries for the Proverse Prize and 2022 was no exception. What stood out in Flora’s submission was the interplay of background and personality, and the extremely interesting discussion of how the way we write and read impacts our emotions and thoughts. The world Flora describes is, as she comments, vastly changed. The thoughts of the central character in South of the Yangtze record and help us understand many of the experiences which have shaped a huge number of our fellow human beings.”

THE POWER OF LANGUAGE

As a translator and literature student – with that philosophical dad – Flora often considers the power and meaning of language, how we use it, how it defines us and our experiences, and how hard it can be to describe those experiences with just one tool at your disposal. It’s one of the reasons she wrote South of the Yangtze in English, even though she’s trilingual.

“I think when I first started writing fiction seriously it was in Hong Kong and it was all in English. The writing groups and communities were in English and I found it very liberating. There’s a lot of baggage with Chinese. Whenever I wanted to talk about something original when I was growing up, my father would always give me some quote from the past. And it was never what I meant. So I found writing in a second language made it easier to express myself.”

When Flora isn’t running around after a toddler, she’s hiking on her own hidden trail, where she can turn over what she might like to tackle next in her head. An attempt at folk and fairy tales might be in order, stories along the lines of personal favourites Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde (The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince), or Frederik van Eeden (Little Johannes).

“When I saw the advert for Proverse Prize submissions in Around DB, I had just moved here and was finding out what the community was about,” she says. “When I was accepted, I was delighted: Hong Kong is a good place for me to publish. My main audience is here. In addition, Proverse books are available world-wide, including via Amazon, and distributed by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. Proverse has bookshop friends in Canada, Andorra and the UK as well as Hong Kong. For an author, it is a dream come true to be able to reach out to such a broad audience.”