The Wild, Wile Web: Ever-Elusive, chinaSMACK founder Fauna

The decidedly low-key and ever-mysterious translator and blogger Fauna has built up chinaSMACK (www.chinasmack.com) into one of the most interesting China-related sites on the web today. With its provocative, humorous and, at times, disturbing translations of Chinese articles and forum posts the site has evolved from a one-woman labor of love into a sophisticated operation involving submitters, web ads and branded merchandise that garners an ever-increasing amount of attention from readers, other bloggers and news organizations alike. We spoke with her recently about her methods and motivations.

You've maintained a level of anonymity since starting your blog, but could you give some insight you’re your background? I do not share too much about myself for many reasons. One reason is because I’m not sure there is anything so interesting about myself that I could share.

I think I’m pretty normal in most ways so is it really interesting to know that I eat, sleep, watch movies, listen to music, brush my teeth, and poop? I don’t think so. I am human! Another reason that is more important is because I do not want people to bother me in my normal life about my website. I don’t think there will be too much trouble but I still prefer to be low-key. Maybe I’ll be more open when I learn to write novels and race cars.

What motivated you to start chinaSMACK? I wanted a personal project to practice and improve my English. Since it is very difficult to express my own thoughts accurately in English, I decided that it would be easier for me to just translate. I read BBS everyday so it was a natural choice to just choose and translate some of the posts and comments that I think are interesting. My English has improved very much since the beginning but I think it is still more interesting to share what other people think through translation.

How do you decide what stories to translate? I usually choose any story that I feel is very popular and has many Chinese people talking. Sometimes I will choose stories that are just very funny or interesting to me. I normally avoid very political subjects. I think there are enough English websites about China that talk about those subjects. It is not so interesting to me and I think most people do not care about those issues so much.

chinaSMACK regularly features provocative or outrageous stories, what is the craziest story you’ve covered? This is difficult to answer. There are so many crazy and shocking stories I think maybe I am a little numb now like many other netizens. If "crazy" is shocking or disgusting, I think our posts like “Kitten Killer Returns” [in which a group of people filmed themselves killing small kittens] and “Death by a Thousand Cuts” [self-explanatory] are the craziest, but that is only because of the horrible pictures.

In 2009, your website timeline mentions that chinaSMACK encountered a DoS attack. What happened? DoS means “Denial of Service” – this means that someone used some method to overwhelm our server so real visitors could not access our site.

Have you encountered any trouble, from people or the authorities, because of the website? I’ve had no trouble from authorities, but I sometimes receive angry emails. Sometimes they are Chinese people who think we should not share certain types of stories with foreigners. Sometimes they are foreigners who are angry that we do not translate or report the news and topics they believe are more important (usually political things).

What types of stories get the most hits? This is very difficult to say also because many of our most popular posts have been very different. In general, I think posts with very interesting pictures get the most hits because they are easy to understand and share with other people. Many times, a post that I think is very interesting or important will not be so popular and I think maybe it’s because you need to know a lot about the Chinese internet and Chinese society to understand it on deeper levels. This is too bad, but I hope that chinaSMACK can gradually help foreigners see more of those deeper levels.

What does the breakdown of your hits look like? Where are your readers located? 32.46% United States; 16.48% China; 6.48% Canada; 5.35% United Kingdom; 3.79% Singapore; 3.52% Australia; 3.22% India; 2.47% Malaysia; 1.96% Hong Kong; 1.78% Germany; 22.49% Other countries.

chinaSMACK has become one of the key ways non-Chinese speakers get an inside look into Chinese psyche. You've also been featured by international media now and other similar concept sites like ChinaHush have popped up. Did you have any idea it was going to get this big? I am very humbled that many people feel our website is useful to them, including the international media. I very much appreciate their interest and sharing chinaSMACK with more people. I'm very flattered by other websites who are doing similar things as we are. I have spent a lot of time and effort to help make chinaSMACK as interesting and fun so it is a big reward that people have given me and my contributors so much attention and recognition.