Do you understand? When I am done telling you these stories, when you’re done listening to these stories, I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. In this afternoon we briefly merged into one. After this, you will always carry a bit of me, and I will always carry a bit of you, even if we both forget this conversation.
—Hao Jingfang, ‘Invisible Planets,’ in Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, tr. & ed. Ken Liu
Do you understand? When I am done telling you these stories, when you’re done listening to these stories, I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. In this afternoon we briefly merged into one. After this, you will always carry a bit of me, and I will always carry a bit of you, even if we both forget this conversation.
—Hao Jingfang, ‘Invisible Planets,’ in Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, tr. & ed. Ken Liu
[Text ID: Because the story of our life / becomes our life // Because each of us tells / the same story / but tells it differently // and none of us tells it / the same way twice]
