About the translation of Echo Chen's book

By C.W

The first time when I read Echo Chen’s novel, I was about thirteen years old in secondary school in Hong Kong. I chose her book ‘The stories of the Sahara’ from the selection on offer in the classroom for my Chinese reading report study; after I read this book I become an avid reader or her work. I was very much in love with her stories as well as her down to earth way of writing.

As the years have come and gone, I never lost my love of her books and no matter where I lived in the world, her books would come with me and settle on my bookshelf.

I am not a professional translator and my English is not excellent, but I really want more people to be able read her books world-wide; for this reason and a passion for the love of her books, I decided to translate them into English with Andy my partner’s help for revision. I tried to translate her writing word by word as originally as I can, based on her pure heart to heart simple method of writing and intentionally not using difficult words. At the end I hope I haven’t lost the meaning and spirit from her books as I found some words in Chinese are substantially different from English.  

For the hard copy, I have only made a limited number of editions by hand, that means if you are holding a copy in your hand, it is completely hand made with the printing and binding completed by myself.

I like travel and I travel a lot, I intend to leave my hard copies in different places all over the world. It depends on where I visit. If something’s meant to happen with my hard copies, it will happen as I believe that is their fate.

That also means their fate is completely in your hands. If you have got one  pass it on or keep it, the choice is entirely up to you - Fate. But do read it.

I hope you will enjoy this book and please do pardon me for my amateur translation.

Finally, if time allows I will try to translate the other books by Echo Chen into English, as she has more books worthy of translation; meanwhile I do hope that sooner or later, a proper translation of her books into English will be published.

(Please note that this translation of this work is not for any commercial purposes or any financial gain but purely to spread knowledge of the work of Echo Chen.) 

Chi Wong

13th December 2018