Mingled Identities and Lives in Translation: China as a Calling

Rarely does anyone today make the assumption that scholarship is disinterested, a pure pursuit of knowledge and truth. A person like myself, who studies Asia without being from Asia, either in my generation or in my ancestry, encounters the hermeneutic of suspicion early and often. After all, in my field a special label – “Sinologist” or hanxuejia 漢學家 – has been adopted to categorize the foreigners, largely Euro-American, who study China and translate from Chinese. Once upon a time a Sinologist was a person who knew China through its literary, historical and metaphysical heritage, that is, through the texts read by studious Chinese people as well. Sinology, accordingly, would be the body of texts and of methods for interpreting them that makes one a scholar of that kind – say a competent reader of the Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑 or the Yantielun 鹽鐵論. During the 1960s, in English-speaking countries the academic rivalry between such traditional scholarship and social-science styles of investigation was voiced as a conflict between “Sinology” and “China studies”: departments and journals were torn by the competition between classical and contemporary, or language-based and survey-based, methods. That moment has passed, to the benefit of the “China studies” side.^[1] And once the term “Sinology” no longer represented a faction in a methodological debate, in English-speaking countries the label has shifted to become a racially connoted one. No contemporary Chinese or Chinese-American scholar of China would today, I think, self-describe or be described as a Sinologist. One might give a Chinese person of an older generation (like the late Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien 錢存訓) the honorific of Sinologist, by way of indicating vast and labyrinthine bibliographical knowledge, but that would be a specialized, idiomatic, and outmoded use of the word. Sinologists are now in most contexts “foreigners who study China.”

Certain influential figures in the field do not leave it at that, but imply that Sinologists’ foreignness – their whiteness, in an unacknowledged category shift – accounts for the failings of their scholarship. Asking “what it means for certain white scholars to expound so freely on Chinese tradition, culture, language, history, women, and so forth in the postcolonial age,” Rey Chow asserted that “an entire theory of ethnicity becomes embedded (without ever being articulated as such) in the putative claims about Chinese poetics and literary studies” made by Sinologists. Chow demands to know “why and how one group of people can continue to pose as the scientific investigators and moral custodians of another culture while the ethnic and racial premises of their own operations remain, as ever, exempt from interrogation. The theorization of Chineseness, in other words, would be incomplete without a concurrent problematization of whiteness within the broad frameworks of China and Asia studies” (Chow 2000, 1–25).

I am not quite clear what Chow means by “problematizing whiteness,” unless she means by that to say that it is problematic for “white people” to study China at all or that being “white” automatically makes their study of China a colonialist enterprise. Perhaps they may be allowed to do it only after making elaborate apologies for their race-fellows in previous centuries? In Chow’s view, it seems, when a “white person” learns a dialect of Chinese, reads a Chinese book, or forms an opinion about some aspect of Chinese culture, he or she does so as an agent of whiteness, as a continuator of the enterprise of colonial conquest. As a curious consequence, the “white” scholar now has no motive to scrutinize his or her writing for traces of “Orientalism,” since that writing, whatever its content, will in any case be, for adherents of Chow’s way of thinking, an exemplar of “whiteness within the broad frameworks of China and Asia studies.” Racial and national agency sets the value of scholarship. In this framework, it is not imaginable that a sensitive reader of Tang and Song poetry like Stephen Owen would simply write an unsympathetic review of a contemporary Chinese poet, bemoaning the fact that the modern writer does not draw on much of the tradition; his review is rather taken as an attack by White Sinology on Chineseness as a whole.^[2]

If this is what is meant by the idea that knowledge is situated and that scholarship is never exempt from real-world interests, I beg to quibble. First, because the account of identity, motivation and interest is so crude. Second, because it is so essentialistic, going from an observation of racial identity to a presumption of political allegiances and intellectual capacities. If we were not barraged daily with stories and practices that take race and ethnicity to be the defining facts about any human being, typologies like Chow’s would have encountered more skepticism rather than coming to inhabit the semantics of the word “Sinology” and others like it.

The habit of thinking about humanistic scholarship as being motivated by racial, national, or religious belonging is not new. Edward Said’s influential Orientalism reinforced the habit of suspicion and inscribed race into the use of a word that had previously denoted a methodological approach or disciplinary subfield. I have no desire to defend prejudicial scholarship or colonial designs, but neither do I think it is helpful to reduce people to their nationalities. Interesting writers and scholars are not so simple. They tend, in my experience, to have complex loyalties, many affiliations, and fine-grained opinions that don’t lend themselves to summarizing with a “Yes” or “No.” I would rather shift the discussion of Sinology away from the racial categorization that it has become and toward the hybridity that always, to a greater or lesser degree, attends the effort to learn about cultural or linguistic Others.

The strong form of what I would like to argue is this: that the person who comes to China, spends time engaging with it, adopts its language, reads its books, sympathizes with living or dead Chinese, converses with people in China about China, and thinks about Chinese matters day and night is no longer simply the foreigner he or she started out as being. Let that person be French, Turkish, American, what have you – after a certain number of years, I would think that such a person has become in some measure hard for his or her prior self to recognize – has become Other. (I am not thinking of assimilation.) And this result is not an alienation but an enrichment. A new sort of human being has emerged.

It is not my purpose to indulge in autobiography, but let me point to some of the ways that we become other by learning the ways of others. To learn a language is to internalize a system of sounds and mental objects that one shares with other speakers of that language. One may find oneself thinking thoughts that one would never have thought without taking on these new systems of meanings. Moreover, as one learns a new language one has to find a way of being oneself in that language. This is less a matter of language than of behavior, or of language as a subset of behavior. Who is the Chinese, or quasi-Chinese, person who corresponds to my way of being in the world? Where is my sense of humor, my response to stimuli, my capacity for friendship, when I am in a foreign country surrounded by foreign people? I cannot simply reproduce my American-English behaviors in Chinese, any more than I can reproduce my American-English sentences in Chinese, without adjusting them for circumstances. Through trial and error, misunderstanding and frustration, I construct a self for myself who can function reasonably well in China and not be a monster. This is language-learning as a “way of life,” to borrow a phrase from the later Wittgenstein, who progressively abandoned his interest in what people had to say and replaced it with an interest in what they did by speaking. This way of life includes such behaviors as bilingualism, code-switching, ambiguity, and new types of misunderstanding.

Let us now take this set of concerns and project them imaginatively onto the first European Sinologists, the Jesuit missionaries who began to live, study, and teach in China in the last quarter of the Ming Dynasty. What shall we say about them? They were certainly acquiring knowledge about China, using it for their own purposes – to live their daily lives, to try to become accepted by Chinese, and eventually to try to teach and make converts to Catholic Christianity. At the same time, they were transmitting knowledge about Europe that was for the Chinese of the time new and exciting, as was the knowledge of China that they sent back to Europe. The transfer of knowledge had effects on both sides. Neither they nor the Chinese they spoke with were entirely the same people before and after. The awareness that there was on the other side of the world a vast and complex empire with a history older than those of Greece and Rome, a hitherto unknown writing system, a different set of religions and philosophies, different ways of life, modified the way Europeans thought about themselves and their place in the world. The reception-history of major works of Chinese history in European languages (often summaries of the Zizhi tongjian and other commonly-studied works) has been told by others. Similarly, the Analects, Mencius, Daxue, Zhongyong, and other books, when rendered into Latin, gave glimpses of a coherent ethical system that owed little to Plato, Moses, or Jesus, and yet had been sufficient to underpin a vast, stable, and wealthy empire. This gave Europeans a lot to think about, though the thinking often happened in indirect ways and was voiced by people who were in some ways on the margins – people like Isaac Vossius, Baruch Spinoza, Athanasius Kircher, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Giambattista Vico.

What about the inner life of the missionary, Matteo Ricci for example? We may think we know what he believed. We have plenty of testimony about what he was supposed to believe – you can consult the copious publications of the Catholic Church around that time, when very little in matters of dogma was left up to chance, and you can consult the reports Ricci sent back to his superiors in Rome, where he gave an account of China and his activities there. But if you try to imagine his thinking as he translated back and forth, it might best be seen as a series of problems in expression. Given a certain content (let’s say, the known facts about the life of Saint Stephen, the first martyr), how should it be expressed using words and concepts in the Chinese language of Ricci’s time? There were certainly concepts available relevant to the project – concepts of heroism, resistance, of dying as a witness to a truth not accepted by those around one. In order to tell this story, Ricci would have to acquire expressive competence in Chinese sufficient to evoke the right responses in his hearers and avoid inappropriate ones (for example, responses that showed Stephen as foolish, imprudent, misinformed, or rebellious – the subject of a meaningless death). At other times, Ricci would have to call on his knowledge about Europe in order to find words to explain to his fellows what Confucius and his disciples were talking about, how emperors rewarded and punished their subjects, and why Buddhist monks were looked down upon. We would, I think, essentially misrepresent this activity as a matter of locating correspondences between the two cultures. Even or especially where there are similarities, the differences can trip us up: the words for such notions as crime, conscience, the soul, choice, and so forth are full of implications that might fail to carry the connotations that a European Christian speaker would take for granted while discussing these subjects. Keeping hybridity always in mind will help us not act as if equivalence and correspondence is the motor of translation. Rather, what is going on is the construction of new meanings and stories, using materials that already exist in the other language. “Translation as citation,” as I have called it elsewhere (Saussy 2017).

And when Ricci wrote home about Chinese matters, the hybridity was just as much active. For every word he wrote about China in Italian or Latin was an accommodation, a bending of an existing word to make it take on new meanings. Here’s an example from his outline of Chinese cultural life where he paints in very broad strokes the “three schools” of thought and belief, as he calls them: the sects of the Magicians, of the Idols, and of the Literati. In other words, the Daoists, the Buddhists, and the Confucians. He deals with the beliefs of Daoists and Buddhists in just a few words, reserving most of his energy for the Confucians who will be the closest equivalent to his own position, or the position he desired for himself, in China: civilians, dedicated to learning, with a particular moral code and some sense of a transcendent dimension. But despite wide areas of compatibility, Ricci sees many zones of assumption and belief that he will have to revise from the ground up if he is to make proper Christian converts. One zone has to do with basic ontology, the question of what is in the world and how the parts of the world relate to one another. The Confucians profess an ontology that Ricci finds unpropitious for his own ambitions:

But the opinion most current at the present time seems to me to have been appropriated from the sect of the idols [i.e. the Buddhists] about five hundred years ago, is that this entire world consists of a single substance [una sola sustantia], and that the creator of this world together with heaven and earth, people and animals, trees and grasses and the four elements, all form one continuous body [un corpo continuo], and all are members [membri] of this body; and from this unity of substance they draw the kindness [carità] that we should all have toward one another; thanks to which all men can be similar to God through the fact that we are of the same substance as him. - Which belief we are able to confute not only with reasons, but also with the authority of their own ancient authors, who quite clearly taught a different doctrine (Ricci 1942, 116).

Pasquale d’Elia, the learned annotator of Ricci’s journals, says in a footnote that this teaching derives from Zhu Xi 朱熹. I think people in the Ming Dynasty would be shocked to hear that. The formulations that Ricci has just summarized are far too close to famous statements by Wang Yangming 王陽明, the great Ming thinker who was often at variance with the officially accepted Zhu Xi.

大人者, 以天地萬物為一體者也, 其視天下猶一家, 中國猶一人焉。若夫間形骸而分爾我者, 小人矣。大人之能以天地萬物為一體也, 非意之也, 其心之仁本若是, 其與天地萬物而為一也。豈惟大人, 雖小人之心亦莫不然, 彼顧自小之耳 (Chinese Text Project, n.d.).

The great man regards Heaven and Earth and the myriad things as one body. He regards the world as one family and the country as one person. As to those who make a cleavage between objects and distinguish between the self and others, they are small men. That the great man can regard Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things as one body is not because he deliberately wants to do so, but because it is natural to the humane nature of his mind that he do so. Forming one body with Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things is not only true of the great man. Even the mind of the small man is no different. Only he himself makes it small (Chan 1963, 659).

As translator, Ricci is making himself into Wang Yangming’s interlocutor. He is choosing to participate in a particular conversation (among the millions of conversations taking place in late-Ming China) and to influence it in a particular way. We know that he was in personal communication with the heterodox thinker Li Zhi 李贄, whose intellectual affiliations were with the Taizhou School 泰州學派 of the Daoxue movement. I suppose that Ricci had been debating ethics and ontology with Li and other Chinese associates of his, that some of them had quoted Wang Yangming on the Da xue as an impeccable authority, and that Ricci had determined that this was the thinker he needed to dethrone.

At the same time as he is dialoguing with Wang Yangming and his later disciples, Ricci is presenting their thought through European words and symbols that would have seemed strange if not incomprehensible to his Chinese friends, if they had overheard his address to the Roman consistory. In his Italian-language report he is basing himself on a system of equivalences that has not yet had time to solidify, and reaching for topoi and references that will more or less explain to the readers in the Vatican what Wang Yangming is about. But to the critical eye, Ricci is dealing in hasty fictions. God is not visibly a concern in Wang’s ethics; what brings Him into Ricci’s summary? The “four elements” are quickly fetched out of the Aristotelian prop box; as one knows, the analogous list in China contains five phases or forces. Yiti 一體 is not at all the same thing as “una sola sostanzia,” nor does the phrase send the same message: to be “one body with all things” is not a matter of physics, but of moral empathy. But all the same, Ricci compensates for the lack of precisely corresponding terms by furnishing the connecting arguments: it is because, Ricci says, that we are all continuous with one another and with inanimate nature that, in Wang Yangming’s thinking, we should exhibit “charity” [carità] towards all things – “charity” being, despite its excessively specific Christian connotations, another nonce equivalent for a Chinese phrase such as qi xin zhi ren 其心之仁 (“the benevolence of his mind”) that would show us how to aspire to the status of “great man” (da ren 大人). I think that despite the many inevitable failures in translation, Ricci does get across what was inspiring and majestic about Wang Yangming’s philosophy, and shows what a task he will have if he is to overcome it with both reasons and sources. Those forthcoming reasons, presumably, will have to do with the animate Creator about whom the Jesuits liked to teach, and the sources will involve an appeal to a pre-Buddhist past of Chinese thought, which Ricci would argue is purer and closer to the spirit of universal revelation – or depending on the audience, perhaps also to the spirit of authentic Chineseness.

If Ricci had been successful in securing assent for his version of the relations among God, mankind, and the visible universe, he would have changed the way Chinese people think about their own tradition. Perhaps they would have come to think of Wang Yangming as a precursor of Matteo Ricci. Ricci is dreaming of exactly such a possible future. In that future, by reworking elements of the Chinese tradition that he found compatible with the Christian ideas he wanted to import, he would have hybridized Confucianism and made it more hospitable to the teachings he was bringing in from the outside. In the short passage I have reproduced from his journals we can see some of that work of cross-breeding going on.

What happened in the actually realized future, however, was something of the inverse. Chinese thought trickled into Europe through Ricci’s reports, through the chronicles of the Chinese empire written by later Jesuits and through polemical writings aimed against Ricci’s assimilation program. Spinoza was thought at the time to be trafficking in a materialism learned somehow from the Chinese (Weststeijn 2007, 537–561). In any case, Ricci was able to frame the supposed belief-system of the Ming-dynasty Chinese in plausible form, and thus to win it an audience in Europe, although he rejected it.

We usually think of Ricci as a missionary – as a person who picks up a doctrine from culture A and carries it to culture B. My reading of Ricci’s bilingual corpus (writings in Italian or Latin on the one hand, in Chinese on the other) leads me rather to ask the question, what about Ricci as a person who lived in the channel or medium he was creating between A and B?

There is an important difference between these two understandings of a bicultural person like Ricci. If we see him as a pure missionary, a bearer of a message, our assumption is that he and we know what Culture A and Culture B are, and that the translation is merely a technical stage in transmission. But if we see him as a creative thinker, as someone engaged with his languages in an other than instrumental way, we are enabled to think of his writing as containing an original mixture of A-derived and B-derived motifs, existing in new combinations. In other words, it might be possible (though admittedly scandalous) to think of Matteo Ricci no longer as a missionary, but as the prophet of a new syncretic religion – not as assimilating Confucianism to Christianity, but as assimilating both of them to each other. In previous writings I’ve attempted to take seriously Ricci’s combinations of references, allusions, and ideas, as evidence of hybridity. Here let me draw out some of the implications.^[3]

In a book that gave me a lot to think about when I was starting my career in Chinese studies, Jacques Gernet argued that because of the specific grammar and meanings of the Chinese language, it was impossible for Ricci to have made a single convert. Tian 天, tianzhu 天主, jing tian 敬天, shen 神, zui 罪, and so forth, did not and could not ever, for Gernet, mean the same things to a Chinese as were meant by the words “heaven,” “God,” “worshiping Heaven,” “spirit,” “sin,” and so on to the speakers of Western languages (Gernet 1982). Moreover, Ricci, in his public preaching, kept to general moral verities of a Stoic or Aristotelian cast, because he knew that Chinese would snort at such bizarre Christian doctrines as the Virgin Birth, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. Gernet wonders whether a Chinese Catholic who had not been instructed in the Passion of Christ would really count as a Catholic. As a consequence of Gernet’s linguistic relativism, it would seem that even if Ricci had persuaded a Chinese interlocutor of the truth of the Christian doctrine, heard his confession and his profession of faith, and baptized him, it would have been a false conversion based on systematic misunderstandings. This conclusion I found so provocative that it led me to spend a long time reflecting on the relation between behavior and belief, as if I were going to solve the mind-body problem or the problem of other minds. What is the sufficient material proof that a person has or lacks a certain belief, after all? Even their most forthright affirmations can be called into doubt if, as the song says, “they don’t know the meaning of the word” (Allison 1968).

My conclusion, not very philosophical perhaps and certainly not terribly theological, was that we need not assume that Ricci himself had a complete and final understanding of “spirit,” “soul,” “God” and other controversial terms in his own languages; nor would it be necessary to prove that a Chinese convert had to understand those terms in the proper Roman way in order to be received into the company of the faithful. To make the assumption Gernet was making, we have to put all the authority over the meaning of terms in the hands of the Roman clerical apparatus. But to my mind, Ricci was performing actions in a Chinese context that, although unusual, made some sense to his Chinese interlocutors and were seen as sufficiently meaningful to elicit responses from them (including, in some cases, a desire for conversion). The question for me is not whether Ricci’s actions in China were identical to actions performed by, let’s say, Saint Francis in Italy, but what kind of sense and resonance they had on the ground where they took place. If we don’t assume we know the content of Catholicism, we make room for Ricci’s writing, teaching and preaching to have a content of its own, which is (perhaps) yet to be defined.

This conclusion might not have been acceptable to Ricci, but it comports with my understanding of intercultural activity. I accept translation as imperfect, pragmatic, empirical, compromised, and unpredictable. This acceptance opens the door to hybridity and syncretic innovation. Of course, hybridity and syncretism make some people nervous, and such people are apt to frame intercultural negotiation in a static way as a matter of correspondence (or failure of correspondence) between pre-existing categories. I suspect that those who cling to this way of thinking are overt or covert dogmatists, nationalists, and racial essentialists for whom things in general are simply not up for renegotiation. A monolingual, superstitious, defensive refusal of translation is a typical reaction to an activity that threatens the power over language and meaning that existing authorities like to claim.

The imperfect matching and inextricable mingling of two systems of thought causes them to break down as “systems” – an excellent result in my view. That is the interest of the translation activity of the Jesuits in China. It is a test case for distinguishing those who see race, nationality, and religion as primary, non-negotiable categories, and those who see them as malleable and secondary to other projects of discovery of human meaning and solidarity.

So to label Sinology, or missionary sinology, or the translation efforts of the past, as a colonial enterprise means excluding a point of view that might be hybrid and not entirely compatible with any given cultural identity (certainly incompatible with most versions of colonialism as well). In my experience it has always been the confused and confusing identity that leads to new discoveries. Learning about China causes one to question one’s inherited frameworks, and the availability of different frameworks derived from intercultural dialogue makes it possible for Chinese people to dissent from tradition and authority in new ways.

If I may conclude with a fable, imagine the following scenario. Another sixteenth-century Jesuit, not Matteo Ricci but someone very like him, spends his life expressing Christian doctrine and Aristotelian philosophy in the Chinese language, cobbling together equivalents for thoughts and thought-processes that do not have a precedent in Chinese, and adopting those phrases and quotations already existing in Chinese that seem to fit his purpose. Only, unlike Ricci, our imaginary missionary goes to live deep in the middle of the country, with no other speakers or Italian or Portuguese to remind him of his old languages. He forgets them, speaking only Chinese. The only language he has to speak about Christianity with is Chinese. Now some features of the Christianity he is teaching are eagerly embraced by his Chinese interlocutors; others leave them indifferent or even horrified (as Ricci seems to have discovered with the Crucifixion). With the passage of time, this missionary comes to believe that the parts of Christianity that are best accepted by the Chinese are the parts most worth keeping in any case – that the parts that came across, should have come across, and the parts that didn’t, should not have. Has he betrayed his religion or improved it? I would lean toward the latter. It would be a practice of translation that freed itself from the authority of originals.