Evidence continues to mount supporting the theory that White Wolf game studios was in truth an elaborate false flag psy-op by the Georgia GOP to develop a way to trick goths into saying the n-word. And if it seems to you that I'm coming in a little too hot here, well let me tell you, I don't think I'm coming in hot enough because Killing Streets (Michael Butler and Guy-Francis Vella) literally tries to trick you into saying the n-word.
Or, at least, the Chinese equivalent. The word you would use if you were translating a Tarantino film into Chinese. I looked it up. There's a glossary of "Chinese Slang and Triad Terms" and one of the entries is "an insulting term for a black person" (lack of capitalization in the original) and already, by this point, 16 pages into the book, my danger sense was going off. "Oh, the guys who said, in the first paragraph of the introduction, 'In Asia, with its tyrants and poverty, criminal activity can reach depths rarely seen in the complacent and wealthy West' are now suggesting I 'spice up the dialogue' of my characters. Gee, I wonder whether this 'insulting term' is actually an unforgiveable racial slur."
And maybe it's wrong of me to act so shocked here. Like, what exactly was I expecting to find when I googled the term? What else could it have been? But that just raises the question - if the only thing it could have been was a racial slur, why the fuck is it here? You know, in the list of words we Kindred of the East players might borrow from Chinese to make our crime drama dialogue more immersive.
Now, it does not seem implausible to me that Chinese gangsters frequently use racial slurs in casual speech. It's not as if organized crime has an HR department. You can't sue them for discrimination. And, of course, cruelty to others is part of the macho mystique. But we aren't making a movie or writing a novel, we are playing a tabletop roleplaying game. How did they imagine this was going to play out? What were they thinking would happen at the table, in the story, to make "an insulting term for black people" an essential bit of information? Is there going to be a Black NPC and then all of our fictional Asian gangster vampires are going to be racist towards them? Is that an eventuality you wanted us to be prepared for when you wrote the glossary?
My most generous guess, based on the fact that they included Pulp Fiction in the bibliography, alongside a bunch of Chow Yun Fat movies, is that they wanted us to be able to authentically create a translated version of Tarantino's cameo. I think the likelier explanation is that they just weren't fucking thinking.
Because if we're talking about racist tropes in media, a big one is just the existence of the glossary as a whole. The thing they're imagining is an rpg session predominantly in English, but peppered with polyglot slang. But that's just the ttrpg version of a common exoticising translation convention. You've got a story set in China, but it's being told in English and two characters are talking. The dialogue written on the page (or shown on the screen, etc) is in English, but the characters are speaking Chinese. Easy enough concept to get one's brain around. But some words are left untranslated. A character will say, "can you get me a Sháozǐ from the drawer" and the audience will be like "whoa, what is that," but it's just a spoon. They could have just said "spoon." To not use the word for "spoon" implies there's a reason not to call it a "spoon." Like there's a notable difference between a "Sháozǐ" and a "spoon." China is such an exotic foreign land that they don't even use spoons over there. They use Sháozǐ instead.
Now, granted, this is a delicate line to walk, especially when talking about sub rosa subculture, or just jargon in general (for example the thing I just did, using "sub rosa" to mean "hidden" - a perfectly valid English usage, more common in literary criticism than in the vernacular, of a borrowed Latin phrase meaning "under the rose" which I imagine would be pretty hard to translate into Chinese, because its literal meaning, its figurative meaning, and the cultural nuance of using it instead of a more straightforward term are all different - btw google renders it "secretly; privately" when translated and translated back).
So if you've got a jargon or slang term that has a literal meaning that could be translated, but is experienced in its native context as only and specifically referring to a particular thing, then maybe a direct translation won't work, and if you want to preserve the jargon-ness of its original context, that's when you consider using the untranslated term directly.
We actually experienced a very good example of this phenomenon on this very blog, when talking about the Feira da Ladra in Lisbon, Portugal.
The direct, literal translation of those words is "thieves' market," but you'd only use that translation if you were willing to be sneaky and let people mislead themselves into thinking it's a cool, shadowy underworld event (as Shadowrun does in the book Shadows of Europe, and I would do if I ever went on vacation in Lisbon).
If you want people to have an accurate picture of the event, you'd translate it as "flea market" because that's the closest English term in meaning, and indeed it's so established as an idiomatic expression that I'm led to believe native Portuguese speakers don't even parse it as a "thieves' market" at all.
And if you want people to find it on a map, you leave it as it, because "Feira da Ladra" also does duty as a proper and noun and that's what it's going to say on the signs.
(What you would never do is falsely claim that, actually, a "Ladra" is a kind of bug, so that the "flea market" translation is both idiomatic and literal, like those rat bastards in the Lisbon tourism department, and note to future translators - I am not referring to rodents born out of wedlock).
If you really want to capture the feel of specifically Hong Kong crime drama, as Killing Streets claims to want to do, you're going to need a mixture of all three approaches. Using the term "public toilet" to refer to someone whose loyalty can be easily bought should probably be translated directly instead of being left in its original Japanese. It's an evocative bit of slang that's easy to understand. Using "the 49s" to refer to "the rank-and-file criminals making up the bulk of Triad membership" should probably be translated idiomatically, because it's clearly something with cultural meaning, but it's unclear what it might be. And "shan chu" can probably be used as-is because it's the Triad bosses' traditional title and basically a proper noun.
Although, of course, that's just my intuition as a book critic. A professional Chinese interpreter would probably have a more informed take on the matter, and it's certainly possible to assemble a list of slang/jargon that is most respectfully left untranslated. That's just not what White Wolf did in this case. And do you know how I know?
It's because they put a fucking racial slur in the glossary.
Also, their romanizations are really weird and I had a hard time using google translate to verify the words meant what they said they meant. I'm really just taking their word for it, even if I'm about 75% sure that they translated "gaki" wrong (the glossary says it means "shorty" and is a crude reference to genital length, the internet says it's derived from "hungry" and refers to a bratty kid . . . is this a case of poor research on WW's part, semantic drift over the course of two decades, the internet being unreliable, or just crossed wires in romanization causing confusion between two similar-sounding words. . . fuck if I know).
Anyway, that's 1300 words about the glossary section of the Introduction, now it's time to talk about the rest of the book!
Sigh. I don't want to. It mellows out about halfway through, modulo some really disgusting sexual assault stuff in the NPC chapter, but the first chapter is rough. I should tell you all about it, because it's rough in an interesting way, but the thought of experiencing it all again, even in the form of a critical blog post . . . it's a lot.
So I'm going to quote something extremely offensive. Like, you are not ready for how shocking this is. And if you want to understand the roughness of Killing Streets' first chapter, all you need to do is come to grips with the fact that this offensive quote is coming from a section labelled "Telling Story From Reality" and the purpose of the section is to act as a gentle reminder to prospective Kindred of the East players to not indulge in harmful racial stereotypes.
Okay, here it is, the quote urging players not to be racist:
"One of the best ways to handle this is to turn the typical view of a character that first comes to mind on its head, so a white slaver may be a suit-wearing European yuppie and not the cliched greasy Arab."
Holy shit. Normally, it's a bit fatuous to be all like "anti-racist education taught me about more racial stereotypes than racists ever did," but . . . wow, you really just had that in the chamber, didn't you? I'm definitely sure they meant to be anti-racist, because they were urging us not to do that, but also they're using the term "white slavery" without any hint of irony or self-awareness and they're like, weirdly confident that they can predict the precise horrible place peoples' minds are going to go.
(Also, since when were Arabs part of "the Middle Kingdom?")
And it's not an isolated incident. European colonialism is portrayed as this almost-supernatural form of evil, but also the Asians are "backwards" (literally, that exact word is used) and "modernization" is associated with European ideas. Drug addiction is an imported European vice, and so is democracy. At one point it refers to modern Asian governments as "the aping of Western political forms."
Look, there's a complex history here of imperialist overreach displacing indigenous power structures and imposing foreign traditions that are an ill-fit for the local culture, but you can't say that non-white people are "aping" something white people are doing. You just fucking can't.
Sometimes, it feels like the book is trying to have it both ways, implying that Oriental Despotism is the natural state of these people, but it was only when the wicked Europeans came along that these practices became dysfunctional.
"Among the poor, the concept of selling children is neither alien nor the horror that it may appear . . . Modernization and Western-style lusts turned this traditional practice into a living hell . . ."
Oh, god, I don't think I have the rhetorical deftness to do this subject justice. . . So people everywhere, in every time, we're all made of the same stuff. And one of the tools of imperial oppression is to deny this, by focusing on aspects of an oppressed culture that seem, on first glance to be dangerous or foolish or even odious and to deny the humanity of their victims on the pretext that they themselves are dangerous, foolish, or odious, as a matter of their fundamental nature. The only counter to this propaganda is to focus on our shared humanity, to take every culture on its own terms, and seek to understand the context to the practices that make us uncomfortable.
And we may find that something we initially found incomprehensible actually makes a lot of sense when we consider the context, but we might also find that the practices we found odious from the outside are also odious on the culture's own terms. We are made of the same stuff, and so we all yearn for justice. We are all made of the same stuff, and so we all tolerate invidious practices that endure out of cultural inertia. We are all made of the same stuff, so we all have reformers, abolitionists, and revolutionaries. We are all made of the same stuff, so we all have to deal with powerful conservatives who think nothing should ever change.
The practical upshot being that the people of Asia were not just waiting for Europeans to come along and save them from themselves. There have always rebels and philosophers and holy figures who tried their best to appeal to better natures of their societies, to end harmful practices. So there's no need for us to imagine some kind of edenic pre-colonial tradition of child selling. Those "scholars, ministers, and generals of humble background who came through such servitude to power and promise" that's just propaganda. Horatio Alger bullshit the rich use to placate the poor.
And look, I don't envy anyone the task of threading the needle - treating a foreign culture's self-justifications with the proper amount of skepticism while avoiding the easy moralizing of the colonialist gaze. . .
Which is why it's maybe a bad idea to base an entire roleplaying game on the most egregious sort of cultural appropriation imaginable. Bad Kindred of the East! Bad! Stop existing this very instant!
Sigh. I am both a fool and a monster for having bought this book. Reading it was my justly-deserved punishment.
Ukss Contribution: I can't with this one. I just can't. I didn't say half of what I needed to say, and I'm already so tired. Just no.
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