The life of Zhu Rongji's trusted interpreter
- By Wu Jin
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 18, 2014
Dressed in a traditional Chinese padded jacket and a pair of leather boat shoes in the cold Beijing winter, New York veteran interpreter June Y. Mei looked back on her occasional experience as an interpreter of former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji.
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June Y. Mei |
Born to a Chinese-American family in New York, Mei is one of Zhu Rongji's most trusted interpreters. Under Zhu's authorization, she has been translating "Zhu Rongji on the Record / The Road to Reform (1991-2003)", a two-volume book comprising over 100 speeches, articles and letters of the former premier and reformer.
At the age of eight, Mei's family sent her to Hong Kong simply in hope of relieving her asthma but they never expected that the trip would one day lead her to embark on a career switching between two languages during Sino-US exchanges.
After the publication of the first volume of "Zhu Rongji on the Record," by the Foreign Language Press and Brookings Institution Press in the United States last year, Mei donated all her earnings to Dunhuang Academy, a research organization in charge of the protection of the cultural legacy preserved with precious Buddhist murals, sculptures and scriptures spanning over 1,600 years in China's northwestern Gansu Province.
Her donation will help pay for the cost of the digitalization of Mogao Grottoes for visitors, Mei said.
Since the Mogao Grottoes are vulnerable and cannot cope with overcrowding, the digital project provides an alternative to preserve and protect the precious legacy. "It's a good project, but I just cannot bear to see Ms. Fan Jinshi, a senior researcher in charge of the protection of Mogao Grottoes, who is close to 75 years old, running about raising funds," Mei said.
Upon Mei's graduation from Bryn Mawr College, a women's college in eastern Pennsylvania known for its innovation and independent thinking, she entered Harvard University and received a PhD in East Asian History, after which she worked as a history teacher at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). But she then left for companies and organizations that wanted to establish links with China right after the country started to open up. However, being isolated from each other for almost three decades, both U.S. and Chinese companies found there were too many misunderstandings resulting from interpretation.
"I had to [explain the misunderstandings] so much, so I said never mind, let me do the interpretation for you. So gradually, besides consulting, I started interpreting also," Mei recalled.
Zhu, who at the time was mayor of Shanghai, soon discovered her talent as a quick-minded interpreter when he led Shanghai delegations to the United States in 1990.
Mei met Zhu again in 1999 when he visited the United States as Premier. "There was a day when the delegation was late for a banquet because of a hard negotiation," Mei recalled, "And they needed an interpreter who could speak fast and interpret spontaneously for a question and answer session." Mei was chosen for the job.
In addition to the question and answer session, she also accompanied Zhu during two interviews with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), an American television network, in which PBS broadcast the whole interview. The interviews raised the curtain on the cooperation between China's former premier and Mei, in a cooperative relationship which continues today.
According to Henry A. Kissinger, the book is a significant contribution to the historical record. Mei couldn't agree more. "China's reform is a significant event in the world and it is of great value to record the period," Mei said. "[The book] may trickle down to government officials and scholars in English-speaking communities over the long term."
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