Chinese GL

There's a deceptively simple phrase in Chinese that I've always thought would be very tricky to translate well (I think this of quite a number of Chinese phrases, but let's just focus on this one for now). The phrase is 我的人 (pinyin: wo de ren), very literally 'my person'. Google Translate renders this as 'my person', and so does DeepL. DeepL also offers 'my man' as an alternative. Neither of these is a particularly good all-round translation, especially 'my person', for the reasons set out below. In fact there is probably no good all-round translation for the term.

The context in which 我的人 is most frequently seen is this. Someone in a position of relative power sees (or hears of) someone else, to whom they stand in a superior+protective position, being mistreated by a third party. This can be a senior police officer seeing a subordinate/apprentice being roughed up by thugs; a mob boss seeing a henchman getting beaten up by members of a rival gang; possibly a CEO seeing one of their staff being bullied by a business competitor. In such cases, the person in the position of relative power typically exclaims, 'How dare they touch 我的人!' before proceeding to rain down the appropriate form of hell on the transgressor (or at least, attempt to). It can also be used in a possessive-romantic context, such as when a CEO goes into a bar and sees their attractive new PA (whom they're trying very hard not to crush on) being harassed by some lowlife. In this case, the CEO yells 'How dare you harass 我的人!' and sends the lowlife packing, thus progressing the romance to the next stage.

In these examples, you'd translate 我的人 contextually: most of the time, 'one of my men' (or perhaps even 'one of my boys/bros') would do for the police/gangster scenario, or 'one of my staff' for the police/CEO scenarios (maybe even the gangster scenario, if you're dealing with very professionalised gangsters). In the CEO-in-a-bar scenario, 'my woman' would make sense in a male CEO/female PA context; same-gender couples or a female CEO/male PA combo does, I admit, make it trickier, because of how gendered both the scenario (as typically presented in literature) is and how gendered (in both directions — both the speaker and the subject) the terms 'my woman'/'my man' are. I could see 'my woman' also working in a f/f scenario, and I could see 'my man' working in a female CEO/male PA scenario, but somehow only if the harasser is a woman. To me, 'my man' vibes weirdly in a m/m scenario, but maybe that's because I don't spend a lot of time thinking about how these things work in m/m romances (my perennial blind spot). But anyway, these are the valences one could play around with, when thinking about how to translate the term in these contexts. (Also these are just my gut instincts; I'd be interested in what other people think)

However, and this is where it gets particularly tricky, 我的人 is also capable of ambiguity, and quite a lot of the time, the frisson in a romance novel (especially during the early stages of the relationship) trades on this. Take, for example, a scenario where an intrepid young officer has gone undercover in a gang. She accidentally crosses paths with members of a rival gang, they start harassing her, and suddenly the leader of her own gang (with whom she's had a few maybe-flirtatious interactions) turns up and yells: 'How dare you touch 我的人.' Our intrepid young officer's heart skips a beat: does our stoic yet unbelievably hot gang leader jiejie mean 我的人 as in 'my minon/henchperson'? Or does she mean 我的人 as in 'my woman'? Both are possibilities!

I managed to avoid this particular translation problem for several years, until I ran headlong into it while translating the wuxia baihe short story 'Jianghu'. Here, the unnamed narrator and her childhood friend/nemesis/love interest Lu Shangzhi have offended a major jianghu sect, whose disciples have attacked each of them at different times. While they're discussing the matter, Lu Shangzhi says, 'They [meaning the sect] hurt 我的人, and they still expect me to help them??' Our unnamed narrator finds her heart leaping queerly (see what I did there) at the words 我的人. The term is capable of a romantic meaning, hence our narrator's reaction, but Lu Shangzhi could also mean it in the possessive-quasi familial sense, the two of them having grown up together, or both. So I wanted a translation that preserved the ambiguity. I couldn't have Lu Shangzhi say 'my woman/my love' here, because otherwise the unnamed narrator's reaction would be a lot bigger, and Lu Shangzhi also doesn't display any of the self-consciousness that she does later, when she makes a clearer declaration of love.* But equally, I couldn't have Lu Shangzhi saying 'my friend/my neighbour', because that wouldn't set the narrator's heart leaping like that.

After the traditional ritual of wailing, gnashing my teeth, bemoaning my life choices and pacing morosely around my flat, I settled upon translating the term as 'me and mine', which I thought kept the ambiguity while having enough of a possessive-romantic connotation. I had to change the 'hurt' to 'attack', because the sect only managed to physically hurt the unnamed narrator, though it attacked both her and Lu Shangzhi. This is obviously taking a liberty with the literal text, but to my mind, well worth it to preserve what's most important about the story — the emotional/romantic aspect. Also, someone on Tumblr singled that line out as one they liked, so I guess it can still work even if you don't know the complicated mental and emotional gymnastics behind it.

*This is one of the stories where no one says 'I love you' even though it's obvious, and I really enjoy that, having written one myself (I also have another one planned, which is an unholy mashup of wuxia and the Taiwanese movie Cafe. Waiting. Love, which I really should force myself to sit down and write at some point).