lost in translation

 lost in translation

Between "I" (one stroke, standing alone) 
and "我" (five strokes, balanced together) 
lies the untranslatable territory of self. 

"Finding yourself" becomes "寻找自我" 
but this carries collective discovery 
not individual excavation. 

Shanghai advertisements promise "自信" 
through products fixing problems 
I never knew existed 
until I learned their names. 

Authentic feelings birth grammatical errors: 

Emotional subjunctive absent 

In Chinese's pragmatic clarity, 

In English's subject-verb certainty. 

Language-switching mid-sentence creates 
meanings no monolingual would recognize, 
yet expresses precisely half my intention. 

Family conversations become simultaneous translations: 

"孝" condensed to "respect your elders" loses ancestral weight; 
"individuality" expanded still fails to convey American uniqueness. 

Dictionary definitions: mere approximations. 

Ambition (野心): negative here, positive there. 

Cultural concepts resist equivalence: 

"Independence" celebrated in Western narrative 

Becomes "self-sufficient" (自立) 

But lacks context of healthy separation in China. 
 

In Chinese, I shift 15 degrees toward collective harmony. 
In English, I shift 15 degrees toward individual expression. 
Between them: 30-degree gap where authenticity might exist 
if rendered in some hypothetical third language. 

Childhood emotions carry different bodies: 

"Homesick" hollows my chest, 

“思乡" tightens my throat. 

The self exists as perpetual mistranslation, 
meaning forever lost between tongues, 
a dictionary entry with no precise equivalent