Interview #156 — Grace Feng Fang Juan

by Sumudu Samarawickrama

Grace Feng Fang Juan is a writer and filmmaker based in Melbourne. Actively engaged with the multilingual and trans-cultural space, she writes in Chinese and in English languages. She has written and directed the webseries Girl, Interpreted, recently nominated for the Best Drama or Comedy category for the 2020 AACTA Awards.

Outside of her creative practice, Grace works at the ABC as Audience and Chinese Content Expert.

Grace Feng Fang Juan speaks to Sumudu Samarawickrama about translation and the mulitiplicity of languages, and how to write for the screen, against the white gaze,.

Girl, Interpreted is based on experiences you've had as an interpreter yourself. How do you navigate between autobiography, auto-fiction and fiction?

Interpreting has been an essential part of my Australian experience since 2009. I've become accustomed to late-night phone calls, running around between courtrooms and prison cells, migration tribunals, home visit of a grandpa for a dementia test —the strange has become the mundane.

Those years have offered me an intimate look into the migrant frustration and confusion arising from language and cultural barriers. Girl, Interpreted is about that world.

If I compared making Girl, Interpreted to soup making, it is almost like I have done the shopping before craving for the soup—bones, ginger, veggies and all the ingredients are there already. And then it is up to me, how salty I would like to make the soup, and how long I want to keep boiling it, and in the end, how to present it.

I think we all write about ourselves to some degree: heartbreak, loss of youth, grieving, fictional or non-fictional. The body of works says something about you as a writer, and shines lights on something primordial about you as a human, your belief system, and things you're perpetually grappling with. It is not to say that non-fiction bears any more truth than fiction.

Fictional writing grants me some distance and detachment. Girl, Interpreted allows me the creative freedom to sculpt something very specific with dramatic punctuations in a comedic way. It also comes back to that fine line between authenticity and dramatisation.

The politics of the white gaze often reduces artists of colour to their biography. How do you deal with that, during the creation of your work, and then through the long development process that all screen projects go through.

To learn how to be free from the white gaze is to learn a lot of undoing. Girl, Interpreted does have a more natural way out due to the material explored. The act of interpreting oscillates between the mainstream white establishment and the minority who are often silenced or reduced. I would like to celebrate an alternative viewpoint and voice manifested by the richness of diverse languages. By highlighting the conflicts and tension generated by the inability to communicate, the series questions the legitimacy of English and how the access to it impacts on our daily navigation in contemporary Australia. Migrant living is a permanent negotiation of in-betweenness. So, in this sense, it counters the establishment by default and challenges the white gaze. I don't want to spoon-feed some ‘CALD digest’ content that sits at the quiet corner with the sole purpose of white-pleasing. For example, I want to address Chinese cultural norms and comedic moments from a nuanced level, rather than presenting the basic Chinese custom 101 that caters for the white audience who takes no effort in exploring other cultures.

However, it is not to say that I'm not complacent at all in contributing to this white narrative. To recognise my own internalised racism and whitewashing is an ongoing process. For the web series, every episode is set out with three characters (except for one episode, ‘Mukbang’), one English speaker, one Mandarin speaker and Lillian, the interpreter and protagonist of the series. Initially, my original characters for the English speakers who require the service of an interpreter were all written with Anglo surnames. It was both revealing and confronting to me that my subconscious reflected the professional world and people in authority positions as all white.

Later on my producer, Nikki Tran and I chose to cast actors in those professional roles in a way that also reflected the cultural make-up we have in the community. This is our attempt to challenge the pervasiveness of ‘white authority’. Ravi Chand, who is Fijian-Indian-Australian plays a Senior Constable; Joanne Nguyen, Vietnamese-Australian, is the art curator and moderator in the episode ‘Imperial Order’. ‘Imperial Order’ is an episode I'm particularly proud of—there you get to see three Asian women on screen at the same time representing different Asian experiences.

I don't think auto-biography or migrant writing automatically translates into submitting to the white gaze, or that all autobiography or biography is necessarily reductive. How to counter the white gaze lies within, how to treat the story with humanity in a considered way, explore the multitude of perspectives, as well as mould the characters with real flesh instead of making them caricature. I have a great sense of self-validation to see a character like Lillian, navigating her diaspora life in Australia. She is awkward, relatable, and but she manages to pick up her confidence along the way too. The role is played by our wonderful lead actress Jenny Zhou, who killed in both languages!

Girl, Interpreted shows how multilingualism also gives access to multiple viewpoints, and connection points. ‘Mukbang’ in particular deals with the language of behaviour, and how it shifts across cultures. Is this an ongoing concern of yours?

Yes, definitely. I think that's carried out through different episodes. What interests me most is often a point of difference, and what has constituted and shaped that difference and the broader context within. For example, in the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ episode, an old grandma upholds Feng shui as her life compass while the council worker considers the measuring tape his. The inability to communicate is a cultural one—they fail in understanding each other. Then in ‘Imperial Order’, the interpretation of art and art-making is perceived differently and manifested in different language registers. Language works as an identity, a collapsible tool, a weapon, dictating the ways of our lives and social behaviours.

Some of my friends told me that I sounded like a different person when speaking Mandarin or Cantonese or English. I find that fascinating. The multiplicity of languages and how they operate in a cross-cultural context is an ongoing interest for me, and I would like to continue exploring it in all my future works. In ‘Mukbang’ episode, Lillian plays an active role as a ‘language doctor’, which goes far beyond the role of an interpreter, she constantly adjusts Strawberry Crush, the live-streaming host, to normalise and localise her and make her fit into the Chinese culture, a Chinese context. ‘Interpreting’here is an external process—like a human auto-correct in order to fit in. Lillian does this in ‘Mukbang’ for Strawberry Crush, and I’m doing that myself when speaking different languages to different people.

Girl, Interpreted is as much about the (hilarious) limits (way of communication and discoveries of translation) as it is about Australia's relationship to languages other than English. Do you agree?

The limits of translation and the untranslatable are the comedic engines for Lillian, as they create tension and discomfort for both Lillian and the audience. There won't be a show if we are all able to effortlessly find the perfect linguistic and cultural equivalent in other languages. For Lillian, how to react to the limitation of translation, is a constant dilemma both professionally and morally. The way Lillian interprets a curse word to negate conflicts in Bamboo Ceiling, referring to a reality TV show as an Ancient Chinese literature classic, or giving a lengthy contextual explanation of a misogynistic term expose and explore the limits of translations and languages. The act of presenting something raw and literal out of desperation can be quite freeing and powerful too.

In theory, multilingualism is to be celebrated, but the how-to and the specific terms are controlled by White power. You'll see that interpreting services for non-English speakers are embedded in almost every single aspect of one's life in Australia; from birth all the way to palliative care. The infrastructure is available but it’s designed and assessed based on blueprints in English, which is essentially a monolingual practice. Our day-to-day experience is pretty much determined by our command of English. The cultural and emotional experience of isolation and being marginalised is not something the interpreters can erase.There's a power structure at play. Girl, Interpreted magnifies these particular day-to-day moments through comedy and languages, exploring how power play unfolds. There’s a limitation in translation, in the way we cope with other languages other than English, and the limitation is inherent in the system as there is very little room and time for cultural footnotes.

Your writing is often multilingual—do you often find that as an adult immigrant to Australia your view on its monolingualism is critical?

I associate monolingualism with hostility and exclusivity. When I was little, I had to move from Beijing to a rural town in the south, switching from Mandarin to learning Cantonese. I experienced culture shock at a very young age in China and realised how a different language could shape your identity, impacting on your sense of self.

After coming to Australia, my lack of English frustrated me. I had this creative urge, but I couldn't express myself. I've also become someone who is a lot more introverted when speaking English than I used to be in China.

Then I read Guo Xiaolu's interview on how she decided to write in her second language after failing to get anyone to translate her work after moving to London. Her sense of distance to the language actually generated something quite vibrant and lively in her new writing. I thought to myself; maybe I could do the same thing!

I would love to see more writing free from that monolingualism norm. Sometimes I do believe this limitation of monolingualism can force writers to be more creative as well. We spend a lot of time re-molding ourselves to adapt and be part of the norm and forget to question the status quo living in a very English language environment.

I think we all write about ourselves to some degree: heartbreak, loss of youth, grieving, fictional or non-fictional.

How do you view the politics of language, especially how it interacts with the imprecision of translation?

I see the politics of language as a direct reflection of today's race and cultural relations. It's heavily skewed towards the dominance of English and the West; which is seen as more legitimate in many ways.

When we try to render the languages from English to Chinese or vice versa, new meaning and fresh interpretation arises due to language’s imprecision; and it changes the power dynamic across different settings in our daily living. Lots of the time, a very harsh cruel literal translation due to a lack of linguistic equivalent can trigger new interpretation, just like the way Lillian reinvents the curse phrase in ‘Bamboo Ceiling’, the impression of translation in this context has become empowering. It's precisely this imprecision or even the inability of translation I would like to put under the magnifying glass.

Is working for the screen, in practice, different to the perception that it is an overwhelmingly White industry? Does working for the web differ from working on TV or film?

Prior to Girl, Interpreted, I've only been on a professional set once in Shanghai, so I'm pretty much still a newbie in the screen industry and cannot speak to its cultural make-up outside of my experience. However, I’m very proud to say that Girl, Interpreted’s cast and crew is an extremely talented and diverse team; partly because of the series’ subject matter which required Mandarin-speaking crew in some roles, and partly because my producer Nikki Tran, made a conscious effort to champion cultural diversity in crewing. It's a call for recognition and to say, ‘hey: we are here and we are great!’ We even had Asian catering on set too. Our production manager Liv Cheung convinced her mother to feed the cast and crew with hearty soup and fried vermicelli. You can't get any more Asian than that!

What role does collaboration and community play in your work?

There was a long, frustrating period of self-doubt in the beginning. I wasn't sure whether people genuinely didn’t have any interest in the interpreting world, or that I was just a terrible writer. I remember I first started writing about it around 2011 when I was still an interpreter. It was such a solitary journey.

It has been great to bond with my producer, Nikki Tran. I met her at the Talent Camp, a skills development initiative for creatives from diverse backgrounds run by AFTRS and Film Victoria. Nikki later introduced me to West Writers Group, a writers' group that I found immense support from. I found my people!

During the writing process for Girl, Interpreted, there were lots of ideas bouncing around and lots of redrafting with Nikki. Especially for the episode of ‘Mukbang’, it was tough to carve out a story structure at first as I hadn’t interpreted a live stream in the past—it was pure fiction. I realised I'm not that type of writer who works with an outline very well. For this project, we engaged three different script editors, who worked with me to refine structure and character, bringing different strengths and expertise to the page.

I'm very comfortable working and collaborating with others. But you have to find the right people who share your vision and appreciate your voice. It is so fortunate that Girl, Interpreted came to its fruition with so much support and love.

You work in multiple forms—how do you find poetry to be different to screenwriting in terms of artistic endeavour?

Writing poetry came into my life much later than scriptwriting, and it creates a new possibility for me. I tend to write very visually a lot of the time. It's less labour-intensive as there is never a deadline; just something I enjoy doing. It is freeing.

These two forms of writing have certainly impacted on one another. I would love to incorporate poetry elements in my filmmaking in future, such as in Bi Gan's Kaili Blues (2015) where he superimposed his own poetry on the screen, or what Jim Jarmusch did in Paterson (2016).

Do you have any advice for emerging writers?

Believe in yourself, keep writing and be disciplined, go and find your own support group and write with them.

How do you practice self-care?

Swimming, walking on grass, having hotpot with loved ones in the summer heat, calling mum overseas, taking conscious pauses.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

I think it would always be a struggle for me to negotiate the duality of my Chinese and Australian identities. I came to Australia after university, so it is almost like adult learning for me to embrace and explore this newfound Asian-Australianness. The past thirteen years has been the most formative period of my life, so I consider being Asian-Australian an integral part of my being.