Canto Cutie - Volume 2

Afterword
from the editor
I invited myself to be part of the Canto Cutie editing team a!er
being featured as an artist for the first volume. At the time, I
believed it would be beneficial to the zine to have someone who can
read Chinese and is fluent in Cantonese helping Katherine with
sorting through submissions and conducting artist interviews.
Around the same time I got involved with the first volume, I had
also just reconnected with G, my secondary school classmate from
Hong Kong, a!er not having been in touch for over a decade since I
moved to Texas. I showed G the dra! for the first volume, she read
the entire zine in one night, and soon expressed interest in
translating for future volumes.
The wide range of experiences represented by those who submit to
the zine fascinates me, and it was precious to work alongside an
old friend in providing the support needed to showcase this.
Without the range of skills in our combined language abilities,
certain editing tasks simply could not be accomplished by one of us
alone. When editing Ruo Wei’s haunting sci-fi allegory, Fish Eye
(p.54), G and I debated back and forth over whether we should
rewrite certain sentences that had Cantonese influence. My initial
instinct as a Texan was to leave the majority of the piece alone, as I
am used to people making the English language their own all
around me every day. As a translator, G was not as cavalier when it
came to the matter of using the right words to convey the right
meaning. In the end, along with Ruo, we decided it was more
important for the reader to understand the language clearly so
they may visualize the imagery Ruo wanted to present. Though we
did not succeed in finding the perfect English-Cantonese hybrid
language for Fish Eye, it was gratifying for us to put our bilingual
skills to use and help bring this sci-fi allegory of the 2019 Hong
Kong protests to life.