https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/05/26/other-words-valedictorian-chow-finds-connection-purpose-language-and-life-princeton

Starting with the decision to attend college halfway around the world from her native Hong Kong, her journey at Princeton has been shaped by purposeful choices that have taken her into unfamiliar spaces to feed her curiosity about the world.

She has mastered new languages; stepped onto the stage to act for the first time — in French; passed through the doors of prisons to tutor inmates; dived into 19th-century archives to research an underappreciated female translator; and forged deep friendships with people from very different backgrounds.

Her studies in Latin, German and Old Irish, as well as literature classes in Chinese and French, have taken the Princeton senior to the top of her class. A comparative literature major, Chow is the valedictorian of the Class of 2017. She will deliver an address at the University’s Commencement ceremony on June 6.

At Princeton, Chow’s passion for language deepened through intensive study — and unexpected coincidence. Last fall, she stumbled on a connection between Old Irish (spoken between the seventh and ninth centuries) and Cantonese in a linguistics course taught by Joshua Katz, the Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and professor of classics. She took the course after having taken Katz’s “Imagined Languages” class — a roller coaster ride through “Star Trek’s” Klingon and more.

“One day we were discussing the Old Irish word for mead (a drink made from fermented honey), which is ‘mid,’” she said. A classmate who is Australian and speaks Cantonese pointed out that “mid” was related to the Tocharian word — spoken in very old northwestern China — for honey, “mit.” Chow noted that in Cantonese, which preserves the oldest pronunciations of Chinese, the usual transliteration of the word for honey is “mat.”

“That one word’s journey — from Proto-Indo-European to the geographically distant languages Old Irish and Tocharian and from there into northwestern China and then Cantonese, which is spoken in southeastern China — was just so cool,” Chow said. “It confirmed that there are moments in esoteric academic study that aren’t so ‘ivory-tower-esque.’ If you’re open-minded enough you can make all these connections with everything else in your life experience.”

A member of Mathey College, Chow was awarded the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence her freshman and sophomore years. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in fall 2016.

After graduating, Chow will pursue a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Stanford University, where she plans to study digital humanities and European-Chinese literary relations. She also will start learning Arabic. “There’s so much to be gained culturally and emotionally from languages and dialects,” she said.

First, this summer, Chow will return to Hong Kong. She plans to design a humanities curriculum for an education center as well as teach at a summer camp that helps Mainland-Chinese immigrant children adapt to the local school environment.
Found in translation: A heroine of her own

Chow’s senior thesis explores “Le livre du jade” (“The Book of Jade”), one of the first 19th-century French translations of seventh- and eighth-century classical Chinese poems. The translator, Judith Gautier, was one of the first female translators of Chinese poetry into French, Chow said. “That book caused a little earthquake in the French poetic scene because her father, Théophile Gautier, was one of the most famous French poets of the 19th century — and she was best friends with Baudelaire, a rumored mistress of Victor Hugo, and she had a fling with Wagner.”

Chow said Gautier was overshadowed by the male translators of the time and her work was criticized for being riddled with errors and not academic. “My thesis tries to clear her name,” she said. “I argue that she’s a poet and not only a translator. She wanted to do a popular translation of Chinese literature so people would have fun with it. She may not have had the Chinese level that’s required to do an accurate translation, but she’s done so much to bring Chinese literature into the French consciousness.”

“I don’t know of any other student who has worked with me over my 50 years in the profession who could have carried out the delicate task she set herself with such good results,” said Peter Brooks, a lecturer with the rank of professor in comparative literature and the University Center for Human Values, who served as co-adviser on Chow’s thesis.

“This was a scholarly adventure of the best possible sort, and as adviser I observed and participated with delight,” said Brooks, who also advised Chow on her junior paper on the French novelist Nathalie Sarraute.

Anna Shields, a professor of East Asian studies, was a co-adviser on Chow’s senior thesis. “It was astonishing to see her agile mind at work on truly complex issues of translation and poetics,” Shields said. “I think her thesis is easily publishable in some form. On top of that, she is just a wonderful person — thoughtful, compassionate and enthusiastic about everything — and that will make her a terrific teacher and scholar.”