Forgetting about Myself In the Midst of Translating Between Cultures

When fans of the same thing speak different languages, and a bilingual bystander’s longing to see members of the two separate languages communicate with each other.

When the news was revealed that Nagini would be played by Claudia Kim, the reaction tweets appeared like snowfall. One or two tweets in Korean at first, then several at once, all either being authored by Korean-speakers I was following or retweeted by them. Many of the tweets authored in English were very matter-of-fact about it, but many of the tweets authored in Korean expressed confusion, and displeasure.

My experience on Twitter has always been like oil and water — The English speaking, predominantly white American crowd from noon to a little past midnight, and then the Korean speaking, predominantly East Asian crowd, starting a little past midnight until almost noon the next day.

As a Korean American, this is a familiar order, where everything at home and at Korean church was very Korean, while everything at school and in stores was very white American. As a bilingual immigrant from Asia who has lived in NY for the past 19 years, this is my typical universe.

Seldom do the two crowds overlap or interact with the same content, but occasionally both the English-speaking crowd and the Korean-speaking crowd tweet about the same thing. Sometimes it’s news about North Korea, but to my relief, this time it was about a movie called “Fantastic Beasts 2"

I liked the first few Harry Potter movies, but after the third one I had found new shows and movies to be excited about. When Fantastic Beasts was announced, I was dubious as to if a monolingual author could handle Native American myths, South American myths, or Asian myths properly when a lot of the research I expect the author to do to be thorough was unavailable in English. There was other people who were excited for this movie series, but it was not for me.

The English-speaking Harry Potter fandom was eager to praise Fantastic Beasts for being diverse, but that type of praise is like praising a pickpocket for not stealing any wallets that week. Nobody should be stealing other people’s wallets to begin with. If the English-speaking Harry Potter fandom could hear Korean tweets, I had a feeling they’d be less inclined to sing praises in the timeline with praises for the Harry Potter World for appearing to be inclusive.

I was like a translator house-elf growing up in my household, so I often tell myself I do not need to translate everything, and that it’s not my fault that something isn’t translated. But just this once, I thought I would make an exception, and I began to translate the tweets from Korean into English on twitter.

My feeling as a person bilingual in English and Korean, is that when a message is translated from Korean to English, it becomes 30 times louder than if it had stayed available only in Korean, because 30 times more people can hear the message and understand it when it’s in English. If the fans of Fantastic Beasts are going to praise themselves for including a South Korean actress, then they should access how South Koreans feel about Fantastic Beasts 2.

Translating Korean to English is almost a mechanical process for me — I have been functioning as a bridge between English speakers and Korean speakers for two decades at this point. I’m used to putting myself aside to digest and regurgitate the ideas and opinions of others into languages they can’t use themselves. After a while of translating from Korean to English, it gets hard to keep track of which thoughts are my own thoughts, and which thoughts were thoughts I had to have to translate another person’s thoughts, which is why I try to keep the amount of translating work I do to a minimum.

The more I translate, the less I hear myself and form my own opinions at my own pace, on my own terms.

At the end of it, I think I did come as close as I could to have English-speaking Fantastic Beasts fans hear Korean-speaking Fantastic Beasts fans, but I hadn’t stopped to really consider how I felt about Nagini being portrayed by an actress from South Korea as an Asian American. It might have been that I was not intending to have any opinion on it in the first place, because I considered Fantastic Beasts is not for me, because it had demonstrated little evidence that it was interested in having Asians, Native Americans, or people of color in general in their fan base. I considered it’s not super different from how some people enjoy pineapple on pizza, and the people who do not can simply choose to not eat that particular pizza.

What opinions I could have are applicable to a variety of movies made by white people that feature people of color:

• Why did they choose an actress that’s Korean from Korea instead of an East Asian actress that lives in Britain? Are they using her because they trust she doesn’t have the social awareness & verbal capacity to argue back about being treated as a token minority?
• Why can’t the main character or one of his sidekicks be played by an Asian actor? Do we have to be the enemy so frequently?
• Why do so many Asian & POC characters in white movies have a tragic past? It’s unncessary to be so cruel to us, even in fiction. I wish she had a family and friends instead of a cursed mother.
• Why are East Asian women frequently presented as sexy accessories to white men in movies made by white people?
• Why are East Asian women presented as being evil so frequently in movies made by men and white people?
• Why are women of color frequently presented as servants or slaves to white men in movies made by white people? I wish Nagini was written in as the head boss in charge.
• What woman of color has 9 movies made from her novels being played in as many cinemas as the Fantastic Beasts movie? When do we get to tell stories where a white woman is an evil cursed snake and the villain’s right hand, as loudly as a white woman author has?
• Why can’t we get Korean movies in cinemas in the US with subtitles instead of this? Americans seem very keen on having the choice to experience Train to Busan in cinemas here.

Going back to the analogy of pineapple pizza, the problem right now is that going to the movies in the US as a person of color is like going to a pizza parlor that stubbornly puts pineapple on every pizza it serves. For folks who enjoy pineapple pizza, this is paradise, but for everyone else, our options are to never eat pizza from there, or to tolerate the disruptive pineapple flavor as a part of the default pizza experience. All while being full aware that an hour away, there’s a pizza parlor that serves plain cheese pizza, pepperoni pizza, and mushroom pizza. But just in the town you’re in, everyone thinks pizza is supposed to have pineapple on it, or it’s not really pizza.

I’m fine with Fantastic Beasts being a thing, but it’s a problem when that’s the only movie making a statement about Asians in a cinema because the films made by Asians aren’t making it to our cinemas to prove how ridiculous the portrayal of Asians is in Fantastic Beasts. Everyone will hear about Fantastic Beasts and be exposed to its warped presentation of what it claims Asian women can be like. But few people will hear about or see films written and directed by Asian women where we attempt to restore our humanity and our goodness.

One easy solution to this is to pull Fantastic Beasts from US cinemas and to release it only on netflix or another on-demand platform where users can easily choose between seeing Fantastic Beasts or a film made by Asians. The other harder solution is for Fantastic Beasts to pave the way so that a film written and directed by Asian women can play in all the cinemas it’s going to show in, so that its viewers can choose to see both.

For every film my white friends invited me to see made by a predominantly white production crew, I want the option to invite them to see a movie made by a predominantly Asian crew.

I’m tired of only having the one option to share their culture — I want to have the choice to share something of mine back. It’s not cultural exchange if only one side gets to choose what will be shared every time. We should both have the power to choose what is shared and how it is shared for a true multicultural experience.