Last night I started reading a random Chinese longfic through wacky ass Google Translate. It turned out to be the most beautiful piece of art I've ever read on Ao3 before and it absolutely destroyed me emotionally, but also left me deeply moved and contemplating.

I've never tried reading Chinese fanfiction before because... well, machine translation can sometimes be pretty wack for Asian languages. But I was starving for this one particular pairing and decided to give the numerous Chinese fics in my fandom a try.

And... oh god. I really struck gold.

It's been such a long while since I'd been so engrossed in a story. Last night my brilliant mind had decided to start reading random fics at 2AM. I found this pretty early on, then finished somewhen after 6AM. And after that, I was just... sitting there, staring at the wall for half an hour or so, just sunken in thought lmao.

I think the most amazing part is that the fic was still able to convey so many emotions and touch me this deeply, despite the (really) quite confusing translation sometimes. I actually can read a little bit of Chinese and could clear up certain uncertainties, but the pronouns and names were genuinely suffering for the entire time haha.

Nevertheless, with this newfound knowledge, I now know that a fic can still be enjoyable even if the writing (or in this case translation - The original prose is beautiful!) is kinda bad and confusing. I'm excited to check out some of the other Chinese/foreign fics I've always skipped so far, and if you haven't I ask you guys to try out the same - sometimes the story really is worth grinding through a wack translation!