Chanel Miller has a passion for writing and drawing.

Chanel Miller is the standard rape survivor formerly known publicly as Emily Doe who has come forward and revealed her identity in Know My Name in an effort to help others who have been sexually assaulted. The book has been translated into sixteen languages. The Chinese translation ranks high in a booklist for faction for 2020 at Douban, an authoritative website for rankings of books, television series, documentaries and feature films. In this issue of Cultural Dialogue we print three articles respectively by Yang Xin, the editor of the Chinese version of Know My Name, Chen Yufei, the translator who works as a teacher at Zhejiang Foreign Languages Academy, and Zhang Ci, Chanel Miller’s mother, who is an American Chinese. With Chinese ancestral roots, Chanel Miller’s Chinese name is Zhang Xiaoxia.

Shortly after my college graduation I remember the day I went to visit my friend working for a company in Beijing. We were chatting when someone knocked on the door. A girl came in holding a plate of grapes for me. She put the plate down on the table and went out like a doe as if she thought her stay could disturb us. I saw her just for a brief moment. She was a pretty girl with long hair down the back. My friend said the pretty girl had a genial and lovely character and supervisors liked her. About six months later, my friend told me that the pretty girl had resigned shortly after the Spring Festival. At the company’s year-end party just before the Spring Festival, she drank wine and afterwards she slept with a supervisor. She said it was rape and the supervisor said it was consensual. She complained to the management. Her complaint came to nothing and she found she couldn’t continue to work for the company. Her complaint didn’t hold water, I learned. She was an adult and knew what she was doing. Why did she go to his place after the party?

The supervisor was in his fifties, married and had a past of similar incidences. Eventually, the supervisor paid several tens of thousands to her. The word “compensation” hit me hard. What happened to the girl may be not unusual and what the pretty girl looked like is rather vague in my memory, but the sharp bitter pain I felt about ten years ago when I heard the word compensation has stayed.

I often wonder what she would do with the cash and whether she would feel humiliated about herself when she thought about the amount. In my eye, behind the so called compensation is a gaping abysm. 

I worked in India in 2016. After learning I was going to work in India, my friends asked me to be careful. I realized that the same bad thing could happen to me.  I learned about very vicious rapes there through media. BBC produced a documentary based on these cases.

It was in India that I read about the “Stanford Sexual Assault” case in the international page of The Times of India. The rape occurred on the Stanford campus in 2015. The suspect was arrested on the spot. There were witnesses. The hospital provided a complete report on the victim. She drew national headlines in 2016 when she confronted Brock Turner during sentencing with a powerful statement about the impact he had on her. The jury found the defendant guilty on three counts. Turner was sentenced to six months in jail. Her victim impact statement instantly went viral after it was posted online, viewed by eleven million people within days. It was read on the floor of Congress. The judge in the case was recalled in 2018 because of the outrage over Turner’s sentence.

While reading all this in India, I could feel the rage of the Indian reporter. In 2019, I as a book editor felt the same rage when reading the proofs of Know My Name.

 I received the translation documents on March 31, 2020. The translator had shut herself up at home largely because of the pandemic. The translating work for months at home gave her no room to escape from the sentiment seething and tormenting. She said, “You can feel what I have been feeling over the past months when you go through the translation.”When Chanel Miller made her statement at the court, she used Emily Doe as her name. Now she stepped forward and revealed her real identity to the world, hence Know My Name.

Chanel Miller and a drawing she creates.

The book is full of details graphic, ruthless, and suffocating. Even today I can feel the blunt force of the book. I wanted the book to be printed in a day and marketed on the next. I wasn’t sure if the world could change a bit because of the book, but I knew the book was the only thing I cared at that moment and I wanted it out onto bookshelves as soon as possible for Chinese readers.

One night, I worked at the translation text as usual. Then I took a break and looked down at the street scene from the veranda. The cityscape was like a huge pantomime. Suddenly I thought these vehicles and pedestrians in the street below were a scene under the sea.

The sexually abused victim in the book I was editing and those I had read in the media suddenly popped up in my mind’s eye, struggling in the undercurrents beneath the sea surface.

Editing the book also gave me an experience of relief. Especially, I found the most soothing part of the book is how Chanel Miller left the nightmarish experience behind and rehabilitated with the assistance of her boyfriend and other friends and the public.

I was impressed by Chanel Miller’s description of diving in the sea with her boyfriend.

After the book went to press, I felt another round of relief. Thanks to the editing work I did, I have made friends with many people including some journalists and writers, and some commentators whose online comments on the book were used with their permission in the promotion of the book.