I can relate with odd bits of this story. I grew up in a rural town during the time when it's Nike missile base was being decommissioned. The base was constructed on penitentiary property and those cold war buildings were taken over by the prison. This was the setting for my boyhood. Endless places for exploring and mischief.
I went back after 2 decades and find the entire area was unrecognizably transformed. The prison moved and most of the area was developed. The town was renamed to distance itself from it's past. Forests were developed into McMansions while some century old fields became forests. The paved road I'd walked thousands of times (connected to our dirt road) was rerouted. It was a super disorienting experience.
Thank you for sharing that. Our hometowns were built as means to an end—political or military missions—rather than places meant to last for people. To us, it was our entire world; to the state, it was just a tool. That’s why our personal memories and that sense of disorientation are never truly valued by the powers that be. We are left to wander the ruins of a history that has already moved on.
I promised a few people yesterday I’d share Part II today.
First, thank you to Tom (Moderator) and this community for the incredible reception of Part I.
My English writing is still limited (IELTS 6.0), so Part II is also a sentence-by-sentence AI translation. This is an extended version. I added a bit more details that weren't in my original Chinese posts.
> When I was a child, there used to be a black bear in the zoo, pacing back and forth in its cage all day long. Then came the accident involving a little girl named Yanzi (meaning ‘Swallow’). She had gotten too close to the railings. The bear licked her leg through the bars. A bear’s tongue is covered in backward-facing barbs. That lick tearing off a chunk of flesh and severing her tendons instantly.Yanzi ended up in a wheelchair, never able to stand again.
Bear tongues don't work like this. While they are rough, much like a cat's or a dog's, they don't have barbs large enough to "tear off a chunk of flesh" or "sever tendons".
If this anecdote is not an embellishment, it must have been the bear biting the girl's leg, which is not at all unheard of from bears in zoos (we had such a case in Argentina in '88, a bear tore off a boy's arm through the cage bars in "Cutini's Zoo". The zoo was shut down as a result. I don't know what happened to the bear, but maybe it was put down like in your story).
WarOnPrivacy|2 months ago
I went back after 2 decades and find the entire area was unrecognizably transformed. The prison moved and most of the area was developed. The town was renamed to distance itself from it's past. Forests were developed into McMansions while some century old fields became forests. The paved road I'd walked thousands of times (connected to our dirt road) was rerouted. It was a super disorienting experience.
Vincent_Yan404|2 months ago
Vincent_Yan404|2 months ago
First, thank you to Tom (Moderator) and this community for the incredible reception of Part I.
My English writing is still limited (IELTS 6.0), so Part II is also a sentence-by-sentence AI translation. This is an extended version. I added a bit more details that weren't in my original Chinese posts.
Here is the original Chinese version I wrote https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111. You can see the raw narrative before it was translated.
Thank you for reading a story from a non-native speaker trying to bridge the gap with tools.
WarOnPrivacy|2 months ago
(for HN: Lop Nor/Nur is China's atomic testing area. The final atmospheric test (by anyone) was conducted there. Oct 1979 if memory serves)
the_af|2 months ago
Bear tongues don't work like this. While they are rough, much like a cat's or a dog's, they don't have barbs large enough to "tear off a chunk of flesh" or "sever tendons".
If this anecdote is not an embellishment, it must have been the bear biting the girl's leg, which is not at all unheard of from bears in zoos (we had such a case in Argentina in '88, a bear tore off a boy's arm through the cage bars in "Cutini's Zoo". The zoo was shut down as a result. I don't know what happened to the bear, but maybe it was put down like in your story).
ChrisArchitect|2 months ago
Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408988
Vincent_Yan404|2 months ago