Every time when I hear myself speak in English, I just hate it. It is not my human voice but a mechanically translated one. It is not simply that my ears hate my mouth, or that my mouth tries to irritate my ears. It is because, in the strain of translating a Chinese word into its English equivalent, or vice versa, the spontaneity and natural quality of my speech are lost.

In the toiling process of translation, I try hard to impose my learning, will, and intellect on my spoken English, then turn my speech into an oral facade of my hidden self; Gradually, I have become someone who is forced to drive out his interior language. I feel that I'm falling out of the tightly-knit fabric of emotional vocabularies into the weightless net of linguistic signifiers of a foreign language. As Marlene Nourbese Philip writes in She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks,

                                   language

                                   I/anguish

                                   anguish

                                   a foreign anguish

                                   Is english

Stuck in this dark and chaotic situation, I have become a stranger to myself, who lives on the edge between the world of his own and that of foreigners he has just joined.

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