Malinda Lo

Earlier this week my interview with out Taiwanese director Zero Chou was published on AfterEllen.com.

This was something of a challenge for me to do, because Chou doesn’t speak English, and my Chinese isn’t exactly at the “fluent” level. I was born in China, moved to the U.S. when I was 3, and grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, but whenever my parents spoke to me in Chinese, I responded in English. I think this is pretty common for a lot of Chinese Americans, but it’s definitely not a guilt-free cultural existence.

In college, I took Chinese classes and even majored in Chinese Studies. I studied abroad in Beijing the summer after my sophomore year, and after a few weeks in China my original fluency returned. By the time I returned home at the end of the summer, I had developed a Beijing accent. This is actually a pretty funny thing for someone whose family does not speak with a Beijing accent; my family is from Wuhan, so they speak with a Hubei accent. It’s as if you were an American and came back from a semester in England sporting a British accent.

However, since I didn’t speak Chinese regularly once I returned to the U.S., I lost that fluency again. Even though I struggled through even more Chinese language classes in grad school. Suffice it to say: Chinese is really hard.

Anyway, Chou hasn’t done very many interviews with English-speaking press, and since she’s the only out lesbian director in Taiwan (she made Spider Lilies and the upcoming Drifting Flowers), I really wanted to get her on AfterEllen.com. Since I wasn’t exactly confident in my ability to understand her, I recruited the best translator I knew — my aunt! Yes, it was a family affair.

Hey, it brought me and my aunt closer together. I got to explain to her the Chinese word for gay, which is tongzhi, a word that actually means “comrade” and has been used in the PRC for decades to identify a Communist comrade. It’s really quite subversive. I also researched a bit about lesbian culture in Taiwan, and learned that what we Americans would identify as a “butch/femme” culture is alive and well there, except it’s known as T/po. The “T” stands for the English word tomboy, and po is the Chinese word for “wife.”

I know that there are lots of nuances about the T/po culture that I’m probably not understanding, but it was really cool to talk to my aunt about this and also to have her help me interview Zero Chou. Hats off to my aunt for being so progressive and supportive, and to Zero Chou for being out, period.