In 1959, the woman who brought me into this world bundled me in a basket and placed me in a Hong Kong stairwell near Sai Yeung Choi Street, a bustling region of the British colony. I was 4 days old. A passerby called the police, who transported me to St. Christopher's Home, the largest non-government-run orphanage on the island.
It wasn't until Whitmarsh had been herded into the main hall that he grasped what he'd signed up for: 'a geopolitical event, not an intellectual one,' as he put it, with hosts including Greece and China's ministries of culture.
The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else's subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else's experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world.
Yiyun Li reads her story 'Calm Sea and Hard Faring,' from the March 9, 2026, issue of the magazine. Li is the author of eight books of fiction, including the novels 'Must I Go' and 'The Book of Goose,' and the story collection 'Wednesday's Child,' which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2024.