Listen to Blythe Hunter read Chinatown:
The best times are frail seconds
When the boy on the street sees me as his own
Not asking who I am or where I was
But wondering who I could be to him
Comfort, then, is being tongueless
Void, futuristic, chameleon, a thing projected onto
Not the girl with familiar eyes
That become foreign in syllables
“When I was 10 months old I was adopted from China by a white family for a lot of very complex reasons, one of which is China’s one-child policy. As you can imagine, it’s extremely difficult to grapple with. It’s something that causes me daily identity crises, especially after moving to Toronto when there are so many Chinese people here, unlike where I grew up. It’s these constant reminders of things that I’ve lost.
Walking through Chinatown is something that I really love but it also causes me a lot of pain because I’m seeing reminders and symbols of things I can’t share, futures I can’t have. But the people in the street don’t know that. I don’t share their languages or their history and that sort of limbo where they might think of me as one of their own is something that is bizarrely comforting to me and it’s something that I was thinking about when I wrote Chinatown.”
Blythe Hunter is a Chinese adoptee who loves film, nice clothes, and has daily existential crises.
This work appears in the Winter 2020 edition of the UC Review: Translation.