Keeping the Hustle Going After All These Years

The first time I moved my translation business was in 1992, during the pre-Internet era. Most people, including myself, did not really understand what this humbug about this thing call Internet was all about. I thought it was useful only for email. You could not even send large files though the thin copper wires of telephone lines, so what good was it?

But I did know that raising two small kids, they were 1 and 3 back then, in a two-bedroom San Francisco apartment in the Richmond district, cozy, convenient and close to all kinds of Asian restaurants as it was for us when we had no children, would drive us crazy. San Francisco has probably never been a good place to raise children. So we packed our possessions and moved across the Golden Gate Bridge into the heart of North Californian suburbia to a pretty small town called Petaluma, just 40 minutes north of the foggy city where all of our friends and many of my customers lived.

At that point we had been living in San Francisco already for 10 years. That was the place where we both arrived at the same time in 1982. Before Internet, where you lived was very important because your location determined not only access to friends that your felt good with, but also access to information that was indispensable to your business.

I used to have a lot of friends who were also Japanese translators when I lived in San Francisco, and through the grapevine from these friends and acquaintances I would often find out about nice translation projects in and around the City, especially in Silicon Valley, not far from us.

I remember, for example, how once when I owed a lot of money for last year’s income taxes, I found out through a friend of mine about a lawsuit involving translation of thousands of pages of handwritten research reports in Japanese. I called the law firm located in downtown San Francisco and next day I had in my office a whole box filled with pages for translation. It took me three weeks to translate all those pages, but after barely three weeks, my problem with back income taxes was gone.

Incidentally, no translation agency was involved in this particular project, there was just one paralegal at the law firm’s offices, a pretty young Japanese girl who looked like she was eighteen. She looked like a beautiful Japanese porcelain doll. This is how big translation projects were handled in the pre-Internet era, which to me confirms the fact that for most projects, translation agencies are not necessary.

It was difficult to keep the hustle going, which is to say to keep business flowing in at a nice clip, after I moved from San Francisco, because in the pre-Internet era, you lost access to friends who were in the same business and had information on where the work is. I remember that I had almost no work for several months after I moved to Petaluma, until I drummed up new business from new sources. I tried not to worry about it too much, busy as I was discovering the wineries of the wine country, walking trails and an old lighthouse in the Marin County, the Valley of the Moon drive among the wineries in Sonoma County, the beach in Bodega Bay that I saw for the first time when I was about 15 in a Hitchcock movie.

Now let’s fast-forward from early nineties to the fall of 2018. The wife, now ex-wife, has gone back to Japan, the kids are gone too, one lives in California and one in Michigan, and I am moving my senior ass after more than 35 years in the States from Virginia to my native Southern Bohemia. I am a recently retired, happy recipient of two retirement incomes, one a decent one from US Social Security, after paying into it for 36 years, and the other one, small but welcome too, including monthly payments of my Czech healthcare system premiums made for me by the Czech equivalent of Social Security, into which I also paid for 10 years.

All of my earthly possessions that I was bringing with me from the Norfolk airport were in two pieces of luggage, which contained mostly underwear, shirts and pants and such. Oh, there were two Japanese-English and one German-English dictionaries in there two. I just could not part with those, even though so far, I have not really needed them.

More important than our earthly possessions, generally speaking, are streams of income that we can either generate or count on until we drop dead, and I was not in a bad position in that respect. In fact, from that point on, I clearly did not need to work anymore, while I could live modestly but quite comfortably in my new/old country.

But it would be incorrect to say that my possession were what I was schlepping with me through the Newark and Prague airports in my two pieces of luggage. My most valuable possession was information that was more or less safely stored in my head and on my laptop – the business connections to customers who needed the kind of services that I have been providing to them for more than three decades and the knowledge how to get the work done, either by myself, or through other translators working for me.

In a way, it’s not that I have to try to keep the hustle going, the hustle will not let go of me, regardless of how old I am and where I live now, as long as I continue saying yes to customers.

And why would I say no? It gives me something to do and I enjoy both the work and the money.