When Bo Wang’s son was three years old, he would tell his mother his heart was wounded. The reasons were small: a friend didn’t want to play, a drawing ended up in the recycling bin, the bananas ran out. To the boy, these were serious matters. To Wang, they were funny — until she remembered that in Mandarin, the language they spoke together, the word for “sad” combines the characters for wound and heart. That moment changed how she wrote her novel The Chinese Lady.
Wang grew up in Cincinnati and learned English as her first language. By elementary school, it was the language through which she fell in love with books. When she had her son, she decided to raise him bilingual. She wanted him to speak Mandarin, partly for practical reasons and partly because she felt he would lose a critical link to his heritage. Her parents and extended family all spoke English fluently. She thought in English, wrote in English, and spoke to almost everyone in English.
But she didn’t want to lose the poetry of direct translation. She also didn’t want to mislead readers. She wanted to avoid stereotypes and preserve truth. That tension followed her into her fiction.
Translating Between Wounds and Words
Every time Wang spoke to her son, she translated her English thoughts into Mandarin words. Every time she read to him, she did the same. Children’s books with pinyin — the Romanized transliteration of Mandarin — were hard to find, and her Chinese literacy matched that of a second-grader. Suddenly, she was translating all the time.
She noticed something about the two languages. English builds endless letter combinations, which produces synonyms galore: sad, downcast, unhappy, miserable, melancholy, sorrowful, depressed. Mandarin works differently. It combines Hanzi characters with existing meanings to create new words, making it feel spare and poetically conceptual. You can say your heart is wounded (伤心) or that you’re experiencing a difficult pass (难过).
That difference shaped how she wrote The Chinese Lady. The novel is a historical story told from the perspectives of four characters who think and communicate in English, Cantonese, or both. She wrote almost all their internal and spoken words in English, but she had to decide when to keep the original Chinese and when to translate meaning.
The Faulty Flex of Pinyin
When Wang first started writing the novel a couple years earlier, she had sprinkled passages with pinyin to show off her cultural credentials. It was a mistake. Her characters would have spoken Cantonese, not Mandarin, and the two are distinct languages. With bilingualism on her mind, she began to rethink how and when to include Chinese in the book.
She realized it didn’t make sense to transliterate into Chinese when she could easily translate into English. Instead of calling one protagonist 珍珠, she named her Pearl. But some words resisted that fix.
Caricatures of Motherhood
In college, Wang wrote a short story about a Chinese mother and daughter for a creative writing class. The mother would demand, “Don’t you know I cut back on eating so you can have everything?” Or she would declare, “I’ll beat you to death and then give birth to another!” Her classmates criticized the mother as too melodramatic, a caricature of bipolarism, and a flippancy about an abusive relationship.
In retrospect, Wang saw that she had given her character the words of her own mother whenever she fell short of being a dutiful daughter. Her mother didn’t actually deprive herself for her daughter’s sake (省吃), and she never threatened to beat her to death (打死) and then give birth to another (再生一个). What the mother meant was that she scrimped and saved on Wang’s behalf, and it was Wang’s duty as her offspring to make those sacrifices worthwhile.
They understood that the sacrifices and the duty were part of a long family tradition.
Wang worried that by translating her mother’s speech literally, she had made her character into a caricature — an immigrant martyr mother rather than a person. But if she had the character demand, “Don’t you know how I scrimp and save? It is your responsibility to make my sacrifices worthwhile!” something intangible and true would have been lost.
The Difficulty of Translation
Learning Mandarin — or any language — isn’t just about vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. It’s about learning a different way of thinking and knowing. That’s what Wang’s son showed her. He was making sense of the world using two languages, and she had to do the same in her writing.
She thought about that story as she watched her toddler. She thought about it while she wrote, after he had gone to bed. In writing her Chinese characters, she had to decide when to translate words and when to translate meaning. She didn’t want to lose the poetry of direct translation, but she also didn’t want to lose meanings or misconstrue them. She wanted neither to perpetuate stereotypes nor to erase cultural truths.
The stakes were personal. She was writing about her own family history, and the words mattered. A literal translation preserved authenticity but risked caricature. A polished translation preserved the story but risked erasure.
The Order of Her Decisions
Wang made her decisions about which words to keep and which to change in this order:
- She stopped using pinyin entirely, realizing her characters should speak Cantonese rather than Mandarin.
- She named one protagonist Pearl instead of 珍珠, finding an English equivalent for a name that otherwise required a transliteration.
- She kept some words in their original Chinese form rather than translating them into English.
- She weighed literal translations against polished ones, trying to preserve the truth of what her mother meant even when the literal words sounded exaggerated.
What She Learned
Wang’s son’s heart wounds taught her something about language. They taught her that words carry weight, that translation is not neutral, and that the spaces between languages are where meaning gets lost or found. She wanted to honor both languages in her writing — the spare poetry of Mandarin and the abundance of English.
That balance is hard to hold. It requires constant attention to the context in which words will be read. It requires honesty about what you know and what you don’t.
Wang’s son’s heart wounds were small to her, but they were large to him. That difference — between adult and child, between native and foreigner, between literal and poetic — is the core of her story.
Wang’s son’s heart wounds were a gift. They forced her to think about translation, about heritage, about the words we use to describe ourselves. They made her a better writer and a better parent.
The novel The Chinese Lady is a story about the difficulty of translation — between languages, between generations, between cultures. It’s a story about a writer who had to decide which words to keep and which to change.
That story is what makes the novel worth reading. It’s what makes the story worth telling.