Judy Merrill Larsen was doing laundry and planning meals early in the summer last year when she received an email from her agent, who broke the shocker to her. The Chinese translation of her first novel All the Numbers was published in Taiwan the week before, debuting at No. 23 on the chart, with “no extra zero left off,” she posted on her blog.
The translation, titled Too Late for Size-8 Shoes in traditional Chinese, eventually peaked at No. 7, hovering 20 weeks on the chart, where Larsen jostled positions in the Top 30 with Khaled Hosseini and Jodi Picoult, among a dozen other foreigners. A Google search of “Too Late for Size-8 Shoes” turned up 14,500 results, while “All the Numbers” along with her full name yielded only 2,000. The novel failed to crack any chart in the U.S. Blogging from St. Louis, Missouri, the 48-year-old mother of five crowned herself “an international bestselling author.”
All the Numbers tells a maudlin tale of revenge and redemption, about a mother who loses her son in a jet-ski accident. Its Chinese edition struck a chord on the other side of the globe. “As a mom of two, I feel like crying whenever I hear news stories like this,” wrote one Taiwanese blogger. “This book kept me turning pages, eager to find out how she coped.”
Often neglected for its geographical size, Taiwan is teeming with 23 million ethnic Chinese and offers a preview of what the middle class in China will resemble. A de facto nation known for its computer chips and fist-fighting parliament, the island publishes about 40,000 titles a year, a quarter of which are translations, easily dominating half of the bestseller chart. Upscale bookstore franchise Eslite tallies translation books separately to avoid marginalizing local talents.
China too publishes about 10,000 foreign titles a year. Although translations do not dictate China’s market the way they do in Taiwan, mainland publishers monitor Taiwan’s book sales closely. Metropolitan areas like Shanghai and Beijing lag behind Taiwan just a year or two, a duration dwindling quickly as the giant opens up to the world. Publishers hesitant about making forays into China frown upon its rampant piracy. One recent example is the Harry Potter fans in the Middle Kingdom engaged in a translation relay before the official simplified Chinese version was released. It remains to be seen if China can catch up with Taiwan in copyright protection.
In additional to piracy concerns, the translation market in China is actually not much larger than Taiwan. Besides, what works on the island doesn’t necessarily sail across the Taiwan Strait. Mainlanders speak roughly the same dialect as most Taiwanese do, but the latter write in the traditional, complex form while the former use simplified characters. Though all it takes is one click to convert one to the other, further copy-editing is required to tweak the nuances and slang—a result of 40 years of separation due to cold war from 1949, when the Nationalists led by General Chiang Kai-shek withdrew to Taiwan.
Translators are assigned the original texts by editors, and paid per Chinese character in both China and Taiwan. Li Jihong, mainland translator of the The Kite Runner, made less than US$2,000, even though over 600,000 copies of his translation have been sold in China. “What I got was 0.16% (of the publisher’s profit),” he wrote to me via email. Li’s Taiwanese counterpart Jing-yi Lee fared a bit better, making about twice that figure. To cut costs, more and more Taiwanese publishers purchase quality translations from China and less so the other way around. Taiwan’s translations, if ending up on China’s market, inevitably suffer serious censorship. When the Taiwan version of Close Range, Annie Proulx’s short stories collection which includes Brokeback Mountain, was published in China, its sexual content was purged. If mainland readers want to find out what happens inside that pup tent, they have to turn to the Internet, where the uncut versions flourish. Some American authors, such as Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth and management guru Ken Blanchard, go as far as hiring native Chinese speakers to check on the translation for accuracy before publication.
Translation costs and censorship aside, there are other differences. The mainland market generally favors fiction, prose, and history penned by local authors. Taiwan, on the other hand, embraces Japanese authors and works in English, so much so that Taiwanese authors feel neglected. “Nurturing local authors is the only way Taiwan can expand its book market,” said Ruolan Wang, editor in chief of Ecus Publishing.
Mark Twain once said, “Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered, either by themselves or by others.” How do you know if you are marketable across the Pacific? Taiwanese literary agent Gray Tan of the Grayhawk Agency seems to know the magic answer these days. His Midas touch has gilded 18 bestsellers last year. His blog (blog.roodo.com/grayhawk) is where zealous editors in Taiwan hunt for the next big book. Instead of translating from the blurbs of the original books like major agencies do, Tan actually digests the books and composes reviews in Chinese, peppered with witty anecdotes of his interactions with foreign authors and agents. A globetrotter, Tan considers it “a formidable task to attend all the international book fairs, big and small,” but he does it anyway. Within just five years of agenting, Tan dwarfs major players in Taiwan. And he’s only 28.
The American Institute in Taiwan, the equivalent of the US Embassy in the absence of formal diplomatic ties, took up some of the agenting role in recent years. At the 2009 Taipei International Book Exhibition, the Institute worked as the middleman hooking up American small presses with new Taiwanese publishing houses, as part of the Buy USA campaign. Among the 500 small press titles, some made their first appearance outside the United States at the exhibition.
Among the most coveted foreign titles, personal finance and health are two of the perennial bestselling genres in the nonfiction territory. As for fiction, barred from novels that result in blockbuster movies, the hottest cake now is tear-jerking stories of love and betrayal, failure and triumph, such as Larsen’s All the Numbers and The Kite Runner, with the latter ushering in a slew of similar foreign literature. “A middle-aged reader told me that she hadn’t picked up a novel since college,” Ruolan Wang of Ecus said. “But after reading The Kite Runner, she’s a fan again.”
Mystery is another segment with growth potential. Mainlanders prefer local authors to foreigners, with grave plundering thrillers being the subject du jour. While still considered a niche in Taiwan, there are more than 200 mystery titles hitting the shelf each year. Although Taiwanese readers are drawn to Japanese mysteries for cultural affinity, Americans who tag along Jeffery Deaver are carving out a piece of the pie. Leading the pack last year was Logic Class Out of Control — the Taiwan version of Will Lavender’s Obedience, a puzzle-oriented mystery set in rural Indiana.
The Kentucky native admitted he didn’t write the book with an international audience in mind. In fact, “I wasn’t even thinking about publication in the US,” Lavender said. Obedience has been sold in 12 countries, but nowhere else has it become a highflyer. Lavender attributed the unexpected grand slam to rights agent Tan and Faces Publishing in Taiwan, for being behind his debut novel “in ways that are unusual in the dog-eat-dog publishing world.”
As Confucius said, having a friend visiting from afar is immense joy. The book market in greater China seems small compared with Japan, but the rare appearance of a Western author is a sure way to garner media attention. On his Asia-Pacific book tour in 2007, Irish author John Connolly of The Book of Lost Things stopped by Taiwan on his own money to sign a few copies. “As a point of principle,” he said, “I will always pay for any airline ticket in order to support translations of my books.” What greeted him was a bustling crowd of young adult readers, some with an English copy in hand. Those lining up holding the traditional Chinese edition are the first non-English speakers in the world to read his book. As for the Taiwanese staff, “I can’t ever remember being treated better, or with more solicitude,” said the 40-year-old author of 10 novels. The signing alone lasted over an hour. “These are experiences that aren’t easily quantifiable in monetary terms,” Connolly said, “but are immensely enriching, and will sustain me in my old age.”
Judy Larsen, upon viewing photographs of Connolly’s warm reception in Taiwan, mused about such a self-paid trip with benefit. She used to Google her novel and saw a myriad of websites in Chinese, but she was “never absolutely sure what was being said. It was all a little surreal.” The real jaw-dropper for Larsen is--her Size-8 Shoes has crossed over to mainland China in February 2009, nudging out The Kite Runner in Shanghai to take the top spot.