接上楼
Polar opposite
As a bridge between the two ostensibly polar-opposite cultures of ancient Greece and modern China, Zheng said that he's wrestled with the idea of working in an historically Chinese context, whose written record contains an abundant yet problematic cache of gay-themed stories that have drawn Zheng's attention. The Golden Orchid Fellowship, for example, was a Qin Dynasty-era (221-206 BC) collective of women engaging in sworn sisterhood fellowships, the members of which never married. Other apocrypha like the "cut sleeve," in which a Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) emperor cut his long, ornate sleeve rather than rouse a male lover who had fallen asleep on top of it, are well-known in academic circles but remain hush-hush in mainstream Chinese histories.
"I didn't want to work with these historical Chinese sources because there's not nearly as much detail that can be revealing about human motivations and human psyche as in the Greek-themed works," Zheng says. "The material is simply not as rich."
Hoping someday to parlay his linguistic skills into a full-fledged novel, Zheng says that he doesn't think his talents and knowledge base are nearly well-developed enough - and cited Renault, who didn't write The Persian Boy until she was well into her 60s, as an example. For now, Zheng intends to continue working with Renault's body of work, the majority of which deal with ancient Greek homosexuality.
Lapsed advocate
Regardless of his future in the literary world, however, Zheng describes himself as something of a lapsed LGBT activist, amassing a formidable track record of advocacy work before turning his attention full-time to translating. A 2003 graduate of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Zheng has worked with LGBT web portal aibai.com as well as nonprofits AIDS Care China and China AIDS Info, among others. In addition, his mother, Wu Youjian, is something of a celebrity in her own right, as a founder of the China chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays [PFLAG], giving her a public profile well beyond that of most parents of gay people in China. As a result, Zheng remains acutely sensitive to the issues facing Chinese LGBT organizations as they straddle the line between culling media attention for their activities and flying below the radar of Chinese officials, who still employ something of an arbitrary and cavalier attitude toward LGBT causes.
"In the past few years we've seen so many events get cancelled, so I'd say I'm more on the conservative side of the argument," he says. "No one wants to end up like Mr Gay China."
Arguing that "if [a public event] educates even one participant, it's better than none," Zheng sympathizes with LGBT groups' often tight-lipped stance toward media coverage.
"It's not totally meaningless to organize events like [Mr Gay China] without coverage," he says. "It's more reassuring for the participants, and it still helps to a smaller extent."
As for his own media coverage, what was once a veritable torrent has slowed to a comparative trickle, though the Beijing LGBT Center still held a little get-together to celebrate the release of The Persian Boy, replete with Hellenistic-themed cake, and Zheng will soon be part of a feature in the International Herald Tribune - but for a far different reason than his past brushes with fame.
"It's about a new generation of translators in the literary industry," he says, circling it back, once again, to his ultimate goal: Imparting to Chinese youth the heroic, uplifting stories about gay people that he never had. |
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