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Looking Back on 2022: A Year in Review

Published December 31, 2022

It’s New Year’s Eve today.

I’m writing this at my desk by the window, looking out onto an empty suburban street full of bare trees. It definitely still feels like the middle of winter here in Vancouver, but the days are slowing getting longer, and it’s a surprisingly sunny day, as if the sun is trying to cheer us up at the end of the year.

The past year has been a rollercoaster ride full of ups and downs for me, with lots of personal challenges like moving to a new apartment, recovering from COVID-19, and cutting ties with some toxic family members. I am also still mourning the death of my late Waigong, my grandpa who used to tell me many stories as a child and inspired my love of literature in the first place.

I want to take this time to look back and think about how far I have come this past year. I’m also really looking forward to turning a new page and ringing in 2023 tonight!

Here is a picture of the print publications that featured my writing and literary translations this past year: Thank you so much to Flame Tree Press, CV2, The Puritan, Speculative Fiction Poetry Association (Rhysling Award), The Festival of Literary Diversity, and the League of Canadian Poets for publishing my original fiction, poetry, and nonfiction in 2022. Thank you also to POETRY, Room Magazine, Guernica, The Common, The Ex-Puritan, and TorDotCom Publishing for featuring my literary translations from Chinese and essays on translation.

Here are some of my favourite pieces of writing that I would love folks to check out:

Also some highlights from my translations published this year:

  • Translations of Xiao Xi‘s and Fei Ming‘s poetry for the February 2022 issue of POETRY Magazine
  • Translations of Gu Shi’s and Ling Chen’s fiction for The Way Spring Arrives anthology

Some other things I’m taking the time to remember and celebrate as this year comes to a close:

  • I was a finalist for the Aurora Award and nominated for the Rhysling Award for the first time ever in 2022.
  • I won the Foster Poetry Prize with a very personal poem about moving, home, and belonging that I wrote in a very difficult time, which allowed me to experience a bit of a happy ending after a traumatic relocation.
  • I signed a book contract as the editor and literary translator for my first book of translated modern and contemporary Chinese poetry. I’m so delighted and honored to be working with Invisible Publishing.
  • I got to take part in a number of engaging literary events, festivals, and conferences this year, including speaking on a panel on Chinese literature at Beijing University’s Yenching Symposium and being a first-time moderator with AugurCon.
  • After a hiatus during the last few years, I finally returned to magazine publishing as an editor again, joining the wonderful Tales & Feathers team as a co-editor-in-chief. I’m also super delighted to be guest editing an upcoming Wuxia/Xianxia Special Issue for Strange Horizons in 2023.

And finally, I want to take the time to honor my personal creative milestones this year:

  • I was finally able to take a month off at the end of the year for a personally writing retreat, which allowed me to finally reach the half-way mark of the first draft of my poetry collection. It’s so nice to be able to find creative flow again.
  • Thanks to a generous grant from the BC Arts Council, I was able to complete a year-long mentorship with author Larissa Lai and literary translator Gigi Chang, which gave me access to incredible mentorship from and community with other women of color that I never had access to during my MFA.
  • Ever since my grandpa passed away, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about my childhood years with him, my relationship with literature, and why I write. I don’t have all the answers but I have been listening to the 10 hours of voice recordings I did with him interviewing him about his life, and it’s helping me remember why I got into writing and translation in the first place as well as rediscover my passion.
  • In the past few months, I have been dedicating more time to independently studying and working to improve my skills in reading Classical Chinese. I launched a personal project to learn and memorize the #TangPoetry300, an anthology of roughly 300 Tang dynasty poems, which I hope will inspire my writing and translation work in the years to come.

Overall, this has been a very busy and fulfilling year, and I’m really looking forward to 2023. Thank you friends and readers for all your support, and I wish you a happy new year!

 

Published in News