Know My Name has been published in many editions and translations.

Yang Xin, a schoolmate now working as an editor at a publishing house in Shanghai, contacted me in early December 2019 and asked me if I would like to translate Zhang Xiaoxia aka Chanel Miller’s Know My Name into Chinese within three months.

She said the publisher wanted a woman translator of empathy to do the job. After reading the book sample and reference files that came with the sample, I took the assignment. A year has elapsed.

The Chinese edition of the memoir, published in August 2020, ranked high at the year-end booklist issued in December 2020 by Douban, the most popular ranking website in China. Though the translation contains some defects, I feel proud that I have done the translation.

In my heart, the name of author is Zhang Xiaoxia due to her Chinese ancestral roots, even though she wants the world to know her as Chanel Miller.

Zhang Xiaoxia said writing is the way she copes with the world. Her nightmare occurred on January 17, 2015. After a long trial and appeal, the case ended in August 2018. Turner Brock was found guilty of three serious felonies and identified as a lifetime sex registrant. Then she decided to go back to the nightmare and wrote it out in full.

It goes without saying that the experience of writing and going through the tribulations again and again was hard, to say the least. In the memoir, Chanel Miller uses the first person perspective to shed light on her trauma. If you read the book in English, you run into quite a few incomplete sentences. The truncated sentences of one word, two words, or three words vividly delineate what the victim went through: shock, confusion, fear, hollowness, anguish, depression, inability to focus, etc.

She was in a distressed mental state for a long time, unable to feel normal. In translating, I doubted long complete sentences in Chinese could recreate the same tension and urgency, reinforces what’s being said and make the same impact. I decided to hold fast to the original style, imitating it down to punctuation marks.

The book presents raw facts and speak out candidly, making some readers feel suffocated in reading. Some readers say that they failed to go through the book at one sitting. They had to put the book down to take a deep breath so that they could dismiss rage, despair, grief, sadness that occurred in reading so that they could pick up the book again. If readers go through all these feelings, I as a translator experienced the same feelings more sharply.

As the translator, I could feel the Chinese element in Xiaoxia’s writing. For example, “I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote,” she wrote in the book. “Remaining soft” resembles an ancient Chinese concept promoted by Laozi, a philosopher of 2,500 years ago, in his timeless work Tao Te Ching.

Chanel Miller loves drawing. Many of her drawings feature animals.

What the ancient sage says can be paraphrased as follows: “The perception of what is small is the secret of clear-sightedness; the guarding of what is soft and tender is the secret of strength.”

I admire Xiaoxia’s courage. What she wrote about is far more than her personal sufferings. With the insight and heart of a writer, she spoke out for those who are crushingly victimized and prejudiced. Her book presents her bravery and wisdom, which should be made known to the world.

I admire Xiaoxia’s fighting spirit. She fought Turner Brock, wanting him to be punished for his heinous sexual assault, and wanting the world to know such sexual offenders should pay for what they do. But her kindness and humanity can be read between lines. She wrote in the book, “I wanted accountability and punishment, but I also hoped he was getting better. I didn’t fight to end him, I fought to convert him to my side. I wanted him to understand, to acknowledge the harm his actions had caused and reform himself.”

I understand Xiaoxia’s fight was meant to enable herself to face the world and herself now and in the future. I hope the book I translated can let Xiaoxia’s name be known to more people in the world, and urge people to more relentlessly fight those who dare to harass and assault women sexually.