16 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
Crown Royal whiskey. “My buddy Greg
over there is the most liberal, left-wing
hack,” he said. He pointed to a man
wearing a Tito’s-vodka cap. “We agree
on nothing. But we have a great time.
I like Trump, but I wouldn’t want a whole
string of Trumps. It was a one-time; hit
the reset switch.”
One camp over, Rick Nichols, who
has attended the race for the past nine-
teen years with his brother, John—a for-
mer military contractor who now makes
hotel-room locks—and their seventy-
three-year-old father, talked strategy: “I
maintain a consistent buzz. I have a beer
every twenty minutes.” People traipsed
back and forth between the camps and
the track. “We do naps and shifts,” Nich-
ols said. “We go in later to see the car-
nage,” his brother added.
After midnight, a woman in plaid
pajamas wandered over with a tray of
chocolate-covered-Oreo pudding shots,
and a Florida Christian ministry dis-
pensed coffee and doughnuts. Nichols,
standing on top of a generator, explained
his trick for watching the race. “Keep
your eye on just one car so that you don’t
get speed hypnosis,” he said, drinking a
vodka-and-Fresca.
During hour nineteen, after a Lambor-
ghini caught fire, Tom Klebeck, an in-
ternational consultant and a regular race-
goer, talked about how the race was a
referendum on America’s greatness. “You
have consumer confidence here,” he said.
“I bought a patriotic T-shirt here. Made
in America. This makes me feel good
about America. You didn’t see any violent
activity. Everyone’s having a good time.
There’s a lot of money being spent here.”
—Antonia Hitchens
1
CHENGDUPOSTCARD
CAROFEVER
L
ast summer, when He Yujia was pre-
paring to transition, at least in spirit,
from the Texas Hill Country to the U.S.
Senate, she began to receive anxious mes-
sages on Douban, a Chinese social-net-
working service where readers discuss
books. “I want to know, boss, when you
can translate the next few volumes of the
query. “Perhaps it’s because of an extreme
strictness toward American writers.”
During a recent conversation in the
twenty-sixth-floor apartment that Yujia
shares with her husband in Chengdu, in
southwestern China, she explained that
political pressures are often not stated
openly. “The editor doesn’t tell me any-
thing about why they are holding out
the CIP numbers,” Yujia said, referring
to the Cataloging in Publication num-
ber that the Chinese government re-
quires for any book that is to be pub-
lished. For the past year, the numbers
have not been approved for many Amer-
ican books. Chen Liang, Yujia’s editor at
Beijing Xiron Books, responded politely
but with tactical vagueness to an e-mail
inquiry about the delay. The phrase he
used was “some accidental factors.”
For Chinese in the publishing indus-
try, the freezing of American books seems
anything but accidental. Yujia has three
books in limbo, including “Slouching
Towards Bethlehem” and “What’s Eating
Gilbert Grape.” Lu Jia, a fellow Chengdu-
based translator, has four of her own
awaiting publication. Another of Lu’s
finished books, “Win Bigly,” in which
the Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams an-
alyzes Donald Trump’s persuasive abil-
ities, was cancelled entirely during the
trade war. “Of course, nobody said that
that’s the reason,” Lu noted. “But every-
body knows that that’s the reason.” Such
delays also reflect an over-all crackdown
on media that has been carried out under
President Xi Jinping.
As of yet, there’s no indication that
Trump’s Phase 1 trade deal will free the
backlog of American books. Yujia doesn’t
worry about things she can’t control,
and during the recent visit she was hard
at work on “Master of the Senate,” Ca-
ro’s third volume. Yujia, who has degrees
from Beijing Foreign Studies Univer-
sity and the University of Hong Kong,
has never been to the United States,
but she has grown attached to Caro’s
vision of the harsh Texas Hill Country.
She pointed to a description in the first
book: “Flash floods roared down the
gullies now (men called them ‘gul-
ly-washers’ or ‘stump-jumpers’).” Yujia
rendered the last phrase as zhuangshang-
tiao: “jumping over the stakes.” She ex-
plained that it brings to mind a mar-
tial-arts move called the plum-blossom
stake, in which a master leaps among
He Yujia
Lindeng Yuehanxun biography,” a reader
wrote. Another chimed in: “After half a
year, there’s still no news about ‘Ladder
of Promotion.’ Do you have information
about when it will be published?”
Lindeng Yuehanxun is the translit-
eration of Lyndon Johnson, and “Lad-
der of Promotion”—“Jinjie zhi Ti”—is
the Chinese title of “Means of Ascent,”
the second book of Robert Caro’s pro-
jected five-volume biography of the for-
mer President. In the U.S., some read-
ers fret about the eighty-four-year-old
Caro, whose pace is famously glacial.
(“It’s heartwarming that so many peo-
ple are worried that I won’t finish,” Caro
told Chris Wallace, of Fox News, last
year.) In China, where He Yujia has been
contracted to translate the first four John-
son books, reader concerns have noth-
ing to do with health or speed. Yujia is
an engaging thirty-three-year-old who,
apart from sporadic gigs as an amateur
standup comedian, works seven days a
week for as many as fourteen hours a
day. Words pour out of her like a moun-
tain stream at the sunny end of that
shrinking glacier. She translated Caro’s
first volume in an amazing four months,
and “Ladder of Promotion” went just as
fast. The translation was finished by the
end of 2018, but it still hasn’t been pub-
lished, and Yujia still hasn’t been paid.
That’s why the Chinese version of “When
will Johnson arrive?” is more annoying
than heartwarming. “I don’t know, I’ve
already submitted the manuscript long
ago,” Yujia responded to one Douban
