Shared by Akkad
I had a horrible time in London translating for Yu Dan, the author of Lunyu xinde, who turned out to be a big bully and monster. She would in front of everyone scold the poor Chinese woman who had come with her to "serve" her. She made a huge fuss about the hotel (one of the most expensive near Hyde Park) being not up to her standard and the hotel manager had to change her rooms three times in three days — staying in one of the very best rooms, she still rang me up in the middle of the night to ask me to complain for her that her room was unsatisfactory. I could only get a couple of hours’ sleep as a result and had to work intensely the next day. I was also told by another Chinese who accompanied her on this trip that she bullied all the 200-odd staff members of Zhonghua shuju, the company that published her book. They could not do anything about her and would simply tremble at the sight of her.
When I was translating for her interviews with English journalists, she spoke at length without stopping for me. When I was trying to give her a signal, she glared at me and scolded: "don’t you ever interrupt when I am talking!" When I wasn’t sure about a certain point and asked her to clarify for me, she would say, "I’ve just said it, why didn’t you listen to me? Why didn’t you write them down?" She knew a few words of English but tried to correct my translation, complaining I didn’t translate this or that. In the course of the interview and in front of the journalist and others, she would suddenly shout at her “servant” (in Chinese) for not filming her properly and I had to explain to the puzzled interviewer that she was talking to the working staff and I wasn’t going to translate….
She has no respect for anyone and treated people (especially Chinese) like slaves… it was beyond the limit of what I could take and I couldn’t do my work at all, not only because she was making things difficult for me and I was much distracted by her monstrous behaviour towards the working staff, more importantly it was because I simply couldn’t help wondering in my mind how unconvincing and hypocritical her words to the interviewer were and I simply couldn’t concentrate. Rather than doing a whole week’s translation for her till Friday as originally planned, I pulled out on Monday and left London…she really disgusted me and I was appalled by her capability of putting on different faces in front of different people: one minute all fierce and furious towards us and another minute all smiling and sunny in front of the camera and journalist. I could never have dreamed that a well-known author on Confucianism would behave in such an unacceptable way. It is so sad that out of 1.4 billion of my country people she was chosen to speak to the western audience the very essence of our culture — how fake this world could get I wonder.
