The House of Yan by Lan Yan

Author:Lan Yan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

42

Curse the pagoda tree by showing the mulberry tree. Curse the dog by showing the pig.

—Chinese saying

Almost as soon as she had finished her degree in interpretation and translation, Wu Keliang was informed that her excellent results had instantly opened the doors to the Central Committee. More specifically, she was assigned to the foreign liaison department, which reported directly to the party, not the Foreign Ministry. But given her bourgeois origins, this “privilege” involved a sacrifice: joining the administration of the Central Committee meant drawing a line over her past, breaking—physically and emotionally—with her family.

This department was in charge of relations with opposition parties in other countries, particularly communist parties: not an easy task in the Cold War era that had followed the Yalta Conference.

Keliang’s responsibilities were toward the French and Italian representatives. My mother had never learned Italian, but she had studied Latin. All she had to do was procure a few books by searching through the shelves of Liulichang, the street of antiquarians in Beijing. In fact, she managed to find an old and very thick Italian-Latin-Chinese dictionary written by a missionary. She decided to make this book her primary teacher. Because, when learning a language, Mama had a method. This was how she explained it to me: “It’s very simple, Lan. Listen carefully: every day, you must learn twenty new words by heart. To remember them, you must repeat them at least a hundred times each. After that, believe me, you won’t be able to forget them.”

She went on to explain to me her theory behind this method: “Imagine that the words are bricks, Lan. Before you start thinking about building anything, you are going to need a lot of bricks. Next comes the grammar, otherwise known as the technology. You should learn grammar exactly as you learn any other technique . . .”

The only ingredient in this homemade recipe that Mama did not mention was perseverance. That was because she had so much of it that she never even suspected that not everybody else was the same. Luck played a part, too: while accomplishing her tasks as an interpreter, she met an Italian expert whom she had to accompany on his projects in China. His wife was a teacher, and she offered her services to my mother for the next two years. My mother always claimed that her mastery of the language of Dante was far from perfect, but nonetheless she somehow succeeded in becoming the first interpreter of Italian for Mao Zedong in the New China.

In 1955, Keliang and Mingfu decided to marry. They had already set the date and prepared all the necessary documents when they were told about a working trip that Keliang could not get out of: an international meeting in Moscow, and then in Vienna, to which the Association of Chinese Lawyers was invited. Each lawyer had to be accompanied by two interpreters, one for Russian, the other for French.

Once she returned, Mingfu had to travel to Yugoslavia . . .

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