49 words I wish I could write in my family’s language

🛶🕊🌊

“Look at your words in a mirror. Translate, translate! Did you? Do it again, do it!” - Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony

Inspired by my circumstances of knowing how to speak my family’s native language (Cantonese) but not knowing how to write in it, I gathered a group of writers to think about the concept of translation. We have written and translated pieces into a chosen language. For each of us, language and translation means something different. Specific, dangerous, beautiful, hopeful, or de/constructive. In the crossing, we hoped to find something. A multilingual reading leaning into the things we wish we could say.

The project culminated in a reading on October 27th, 2022 at Hugo House (Seattle) and an edition of a zine of ~50 copies released in July 2023.

what is a border?
and is translation the literary version of a crossing/migration?
this is the best I can do with the language and mouth I have right now
how can translation address a gap we feel due to language?

research/prompt doc!
viewable/downloadable pdf of the zine on internet archive!

This project was co-sponsored by the City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and was supported, in part, by a grant from 4Culture.

The artists and their respective languages they chose to work in were Naa Akua (Ga) with translation support by World Translation Center, Jordan Alam (Bengali) with translations by Sanzida Afrin, Anis (Tagalog) with translations by Victoria Gardner, Jéhan Òsanyìn (Spanish & Jamaican Patwa), Bel-Quiaoit Quarless (Tagalog) with translations by Jadenne Radoc Cabahug, Arianne True (Chickashanompa'), and Brian Dang (Cantonese). Our relationships to language differed based on history and contexts.