The angry professor writes a book

Zhang Jiehai is still angry.

Remember Chinabounder? And Zhang Jiehai, the professor of psychology whose blog launched an Internet manhunt for the philandering foreign teacher last August?

The good professor has published a book about his crusade. I’m Angry (我愤怒) was published in January, but it arrived in our local Xinhua Bookstore just last week.

The book deals with a few of Zhang’s pet issues of the past few years, including his widely-circulated “white paper” on the psyche of Chinese men. But it is the last part of the book — a run-down of his campaign against Chinabounder — that is the probable reason behind its publication.

I’m Angry takes an interesting approach to the problem of turning a blog into a book. Rather than simply printing out his blog posts, Zhang follows each piece with reader reactions: blog comments (mostly supportive) and emails (mostly sympathetic). He also incorporates articles from other sources — an interview with World View magazine, a Southern Metropolis Daily report on the Chinabounder affair, and some of the text of the Chinabounder blog itself interspersed with snarky comments.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work. The separate sections might have been successful as pamphlets, but they aren’t very cohesive as a single volume. The only focal point of the book is the professor himself: I’m Angry turns out to be quite the vanity project. Photos of Zhang looking determined head each section, and stuck in the middle of the book is an insert printed on glossy card-stock that presents him in half-shadow against the question “Who is Zhang Jiehai?”

One thing we can take away from this effort is a lesson about the problems involved in carrying on a debate in two languages, at least if there is no assumption of good faith. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter “The Truth about the ‘immoral foreign teacher’, Part II”:

I mentioned above that at first, whenever I brought up Chinabounder’s words, I would include his original English text at the end. But becuase of length limitations on the blog, I had to delete most of Chinabounder’s original text and only preserve my Chinese translation. Afterward, a blogger called “ESWN” translated my blog into English, and this back-and-forth introduced some unavoidable discrepancies. But when Chinabounder wrote to refute me, he did not use his own original blog text, but used ESWN’s English translation instead to criticize me for misinterpreting his meaning:

“While in general Zhang Jiehai reports what I said accurately, I must take issue with his claim that I wrote Chinese men are ‘incredibly ugly.’ It is possible that he merely misunderstood me – for sure he is no thinker, no reader – but I never said anything remotely similar to this.”

When did I ever say that Chinabounder said that “Chinese men are ‘incredibly ugly'”? [p. 134]

Here, Zhang Jiehai back-translates “incredibly ugly” as 惊人的难看, which appears nowhere in his original text. Instead, what ESWN translated as “incredibly ugly” was 丑陋无比 (lit. “incomparably ugly”), in the sentence “中国男人在他的笔下，除了性能力低下之外，简直就是丑陋无比, which actually appears on page 116 of the book.

This sort of nitpicking is par for the course in online flame wars; the bilingual nature of the argument just makes it easier to backtrack from a position by claiming that you were misunderstood.

We should also note that although Zhang is pretty ticked off at ESWN for failing to apologize for calling him a “dim bulb” in regard to his identification of Le Garçon Chinois as a Japanese restaurant, he has no compuction about using a U.S. Politics Today citation of ESWN’s translation of Zhang’s Southern Weekly article “Cool Reflections on China Fever” as evidence that the American media have republished his works.