The Language the Story Lives In
On writing in Chinese first, and what survives the crossing
The book you read is written in English. But every sentence in it has lived twice. First in Chinese, and only then in English.
I write in Chinese first because my writing is a kind of recording. I am setting down what I see and what I hear. The people in this story are almost Chinese, born and raised there, and when they speak to one another, they speak in Mandarin. Husky’s restless inner monologue, wave after wave of it, arrives in Chinese. If I tried to write the first draft directly in English, I could not keep up. I do not have that level of simultaneous interpretation in me. I would lose the real texture of those voices at the very first step. Chinese is the language in which I can catch them faithfully.
I use AI tools to help with the translation. Not one model, but several, working in parallel. I want to be clear about what they do, and what they do not.
They give me options. A more precise verb, a truer noun, the right adjective. Where to break a long sentence and where to let it run. The rhythm between paragraphs, the pauses, the breath of a passage. The exact punctuation. They help me push the appearance of cliché below my own lower limit. They weigh transliteration against meaning-translation, the literal against the felt.
But they cannot make the one decision that matters: which version is right. That judgment is only mine, and it is made one sentence at a time.
Two small examples.
In Chinese, Husky’s inner voice sometimes blurts out “纳尼?” — a piece of internet slang borrowed by sound from the Japanese なに, carrying a sharp, absurd jolt of “what?!” I could have left it as “nani?!” But I was not sure KDP readers would feel it the way I needed them to. What I cared about was whether Husky’s emotion in that instant came through. In the end, it became two lines:
Huh?! WHAT?!
Not a literal match. But it catches the feeling.
Then there is a dish called 黯然销魂饭(àn rán xiāo hún fàn). Translated plainly, it is just barbecue pork and egg over rice. But that name carries something the plain version loses, a sense of being undone, heartbroken, wrecked. Translate the feeling literally and the reader is simply confused. Out of seven or eight candidates, I chose “crushing”. The weight of it was right, and it landed on a second meaning too: the crush of unspoken love. It became soul-crushing rice.
Writing the first draft in Chinese, the words flow. The translation stage is different. That is where the real labor lives. Paragraph by paragraph, a thousand words at a time, like sitting alone under a cold lamp. So I gave myself a rule: a fixed number of words to cross over, every single day.
No one asked me to do this.
But I made an agreement with this story, and I intend to keep it to the end.
Every sentence you read is the one version I chose, after choosing many times. It lived twice before it reached you.
PS:my hand, my laptop, my mouse. :)