Cantonese Subtitles I
What I learned translating Herman Yau's Ebola Syndrome
As an English-speaking child in a classist, anglophilic, anxious Hong Kong, one is encouraged to look down upon those who cannot speak the colonizer’s tongue. Last week, a neighbour reported hearing a grade-schooler on the block tell their grandmother that they were a stupid pig for not speaking English.
It took me a long time to learn to love my mother tongue. Even though I’ve spent most of my life here in Hong Kong, I’ve always lived outside the realm of “local” having only spoken Cantonese within the family until very recently. Of course, my parents did not teach me to swear.
Learning the vernacular as an adult is mesmerizing — to track its etymology is to burrow into an endless system of aquaducts1. In recent years there has been a push to keep the language in circulation in the face of increased use of Mandarin that’s coupled with the herculean task of writing in Cantonese. To write Cantonese is to balance the existing dictionary with one of homophones and references.
The challenge of Ebola Syndrome was a delicious surprise to me. I had heard of how colourful the language was, and knew it was, as Andy Willis put it during the round-table, a film that delivered on the promise of its Category III rating. When Ariel was watching it on television, I had to leave within the first scene — I had no interest or intention of watching it. When I agreed to subtitle it, I ended up watching the film over four days, line by line.
Ebola Syndrome is very funny. So few jokes had previously been made available to its most avid fanbase: Americans. The language in this translation is more punny, referential, homophobic, and racist than previous translations.
But the racism is very particular and I wanted to take the opportunity to think through it a little. Take for instance 黑鬼 or 死黑鬼: literally meaning “dead black ghost.” 死黑鬼 is a modified version of 鬼佬 (gweilo). Though commonly translated to mean White devil, it, at the core, means ‘ghost guy’. A casual term that is both ‘reclaimed’ by some expats who have lived here long enough, and taken to be on the same level as a racist slur by others2. I think the closest word there is to gweilo in American culture is ‘cracker’; the threat (which is to say, White slavers/ White colonizers) is unseen but present, though the spectre is far enough in rear view to take lightly… for now.
Neither Black nor White in freshly post-apartheid South Africa, the Chinese characers in Ebola Syndrome are very aware of their outsider status. Living on a survivor’s ‘who isn’t with us is against us’ mentality, they treat Whites and Blacks with distain and suspicion. But their suspicion towards Afrikaans is an extention of the belief / experience of White men being above the law3, and their distain towards the Black Africans is an extension of a fear of the unknown. The subtitles for the Diskotek release a decade ago went with the N-word. I think that’s a wholly different tradition of racism.
But let’s be straight: folks in Hong Kong are very racist.
This might sound crazy, but Hong Kong’s early understanding of Black people came from American media and the 1980 South African comedy film, The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980).
Hong Kong was crazy about The Gods Must Be Crazy, which starts with a coke bottle falling out of a plane and into the hands of a tribe of bushmen. Having lived always in the plentiful provisions of nature, the coke bottle is the first object to ever be limited. When the tribe begins fighting over the bottle, one of the bushmen, Xi, decides to take it to the edge of the world to dispose of it. His journey crosses with a clumsy biologist, a newly hired school teacher, and a band of guerrilas. We loved it so much that we made three sequels: the first in which a Chinese vampire (僵尸) invades Xi’s tribe, the second in which Xi accidentally ends up in Hong Kong catching diamond thieves, and the third in which Xi goes to Beijing to work as a tracker.
On a practical level, The Gods Must Be Crazy series began collaboration between the Hong Kong film industry with it’s South African counterpart. In addition to Cathay Pacific flying directly from Hong Kong to South African, crews became familiar with South African fixers and English (thank you British overlords) was a common denominator.
And though White people have lived in our midst for over a century, many do not socialize across racial lines4 and White people are seen as perpetual outsiders. That being said, many expatriates maintain their own circles and never learn a word of Cantonese. Many of my non-Chinese classmates here in Hong Kong who were born here don’t speak a lick of Cantonese. The two communities run paralell for the most part, and oogle at the other with curiosity and misconceptions5. The slang for a person being unreasonable is 番鬼佬 (literally, foreign devil guy).
When screened at The Spectacle in New York in 2014, Ebola was listed with the trigger warning of rape, cannibalism, torture, racism, gore, borderline necrophilia. There’s no doubt that Ebola Syndrome is offensive, and it’s a murky line of whether only the characters were racist, misogynistic, violent, and vile, or if the filmmakers were as well.
I’d like to report that our language is alive and well:
Last week, in a resort-esque suburb mainly inhabited by upper-middle class expatriates and pilots, five White maskless6 men stood loosely in the middle of the road, as my cab prepared to turn. They had crossed diagonally and so were waiting for us to go (straight) so they could cross. But since we were about to turn, we had to wait for them to pass. Having inherited my grandmother’s tendency to comment on road conditions, I said,
“Who would cross the road like that?”
And the driver said,
正一仆街冚家鏟，
恰鳩你，
呢D鬼佬都系屎胐鬼
Meaning:
Really pūk gāai (falling on the road) ham gaa caan (whole family dead),
haap gau li (gonna bust your balls)…
these gweilo (White devils) are all si fat gwai (asshole devils / buggers)
I had written this originally much closer to Vinegar Syndrome’s release of Ebola Syndrome… so like 8 months ago, but finally finished fine-tuning it. If you have any questions or thoughts on the new translation of Ebola Syndrome, please leave me a comment! I’d love to hear your thoughts and input!
If you enjoy this, I also contributed to VS’s July release Righting Wrongs, where I wrote about the discos, gyms, studios and of 1980s Hong Kong 🕺 (alongside translating new subs). Our own latest release is Tremble All You Want.
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See the Wikipedia page on Cantonese Profanity, quoted here as an example,
“The word hai can also mean total failure as in the phrase hai1 saai3 (閪晒). The Chinese character 晒, one of whose meanings is similar to the English "bask", functions in Cantonese as the verbal particle for the perfective aspect.[8] To further stress the failure, sometimes the phrase hai1 gau1 saai3 is used (the word gau that means penis is put in between the original phrase). Since this phrase is highly offensive (it consists two of the five vulgar words), a euphemism or xiehouyu, a kind of Chinese "proverb", is sometimes used. As in a normal xiehouyu, it consists of two elements: the former segment presents a scenario while the latter provides the rationale thereof. One would often only state the first part, expecting the listener to know the second. The first part is "a man and a woman having a sunbath (naked)" (男女日光浴). Since the penis and vagina are both exposed to the sun, the second part is hai1 gau1 saai3 (閪𨳊晒)—a pun for total failure.[8] Therefore, if one wants to say that something is a total failure, he only has to say 男女日光浴, and the listener will understand the intended meaning.”
The Standard. “British Specialist Decries Discrimination after He Was Called ‘Gweilo’ and Fired from Tunnel Project.” The Standard, 8 Nov. 2021, https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/4/182605/HK-court-heard-British-blasting-specialist-called-.
To showcase the ‘above the law’ character of British colonizers in Hong Kong, my father would tell me about Peter Godber. In 1973, Peter Godber was a chief superintendent of the Royal Hong Kong Police preparing to retire on the 4.4million HKD he had saved up from bribes (5million USD today). When the anti-corruption branch gave him a no-fly order, he went ahead to the airport, flashed his Civil Aviation Department badge, and flew back to London. The money has not be recovered (with the exception of 25000HKD) and he now, alledgedy, lives well in Spain.
Even after immigrating, many Hong Kong people remain in Cantonese alcoves and speak little English after decades. I myself did not speak English until I started school though I had lived my entire little life in Calgary, Alberta.
For instance, in the debate of whether or not to get vaccinated, some expats posted on the Hong Kong Mom’s Facebook group about how all the locals were refusing to get shots, but everyone else had. There was a lot of resistance to vaccination in Hong Kong due to a mix of distrust in the government and city-wide hypochondria.
Masks remain mandatory in Hong Kong. My own personal theory is that Hong Kongers would much prefer everyone wear a mask more than we prefer to not wear one. Which is to say, community trust is very low.
Fascinating—all of it! I just heard Ariel mention your revelations while doing subtitle work on "They Live by Film", and talking about this one in particular. Dare I finally watch it??
Thanks for all the context!