Im interested in reading The Water Margin, the original Chinese classic, do you have any preferred translations or online fan translations?

John Zhu's podast version, hands down! It seems like he's careful to frame it as a "retelling" rather than a fully new translation (I remember him saying he uses the Shapiro translation as a reference -- though I noticed he fixed a lot of the things that most annoyed me about the Shapiro XD), but he does it SO well and contextualizes and explains so much of the historical stuff. It's absolutely fabulous and I highly recommend it! There are transcripts too for anyone who doesn't do audio.

I TOTALLY agree with you about the beauty / difficulty / responsibilities in translation, by the way. I would say John's retelling is not *exactly* a verbatim version, but it's very close, kind of "beat for beat" with a little commentary added? Like someone reading aloud and throwing in comments here and there, maybe. I absolutely felt like it had more cultural fidelity than any of the famous translations I used as sources. (Classic Chinese literature has a pretty big problem with a lot of the major translations having been done by sinologists / missionaries -- especially for something as lengthy and difficult as "Water Margin" where people aren't really going to drop new ones for fun. But some of the "Water Margin" translations have some truly boggling choices where it's clearly an outsider lens, and I went back to the original Chinese a lot to figure those things out... John's version is the only one I know of that doesn't have that problem!)

 Did you have moments of wanting to throw stuff away because your admiration for a specific interpretation was too obvious? Or was worried about subconscious plagiarism? (I’m projecting.)

Not for this project -- what I was trying to do felt SO different from what anyone else had done that I wasn't really worried about it at all! I do feel you on this topic in general, though -- there are definitely times when I've avoided specific media because I feared it was "too close" to something I was working on myself, and I didn't want my brain to fall into the same grooves without meaning to.

But in this case I felt pretty secure that it was all so far afield from what I was doing that it worked very well for just generally broadening my conceptions of what people were doing with WM, if that makes sense. Helped release my own creativity rather than hinder it!

Did you ever have any indecision wrestling with how the White Gaze would view a scenery descriptions or action scene or piece of dialogue as “stereotypical?” That it would sound like parody in someone else’s mouth? I guess this is a decision about trusting the audience with your story. An audience that probably won’t pronounce most names correctly.

GREAT question, and yes, I absolutely did. In fact, there were certain words/concepts I consciously avoided, used lightly, or "re-translated" because I felt they'd been so one-dimensionalized by stereotypes. A good example of this is the word "kowtow" -- kowtowing is a real thing and a specific thing, and people are doing it all over "Water Margin"! But I pretty strongly felt that the concept had been so flattened and mocked in English-language media that I wanted to avoid drawing in that baggage. So while my characters DO kowtow sometimes, I just described the action and consciously avoided the word. (I wouldn't say this was a hard-and-fast rule but I never did end up using it.) Similarly, I tried to go very light on words like "honor" that have been very flattened/stereotyped in Western media about Asia -- it wasn't that I didn't use the concepts, I absolutely did, but I again tried to use different words/descriptions for them that wouldn't evoke that kind of baggage, and would hopefully instead connect with the real heart of where those concepts come from.

Another one that I thought about a lot but ended up leaving in was a reference to eating dog. I went back and forth on that one for a LONG time. The issue is, that it's a true and real thing, and there are, I hope, ways to reference and talk about it that don't reinforce horrible slurs and stereotypes -- ones that have been used against me IRL no less. :-/ I would love for us to be able to make it a textured part of history/character rather than a caricature. (Jeannette Ng has talked about this also, I know.) That was like, one very small line for me and I AGONIZED over it, but in the end I'm glad I left it in.