“Adrift in the South” 深圳南流記 by Xiao Hai 小海

Literary translation of a short memoir. Published in Granta, Issue 169, November 2024

I walk the alleyways of an urban village in Beijing, gloomy in a late-afternoon thunderstorm. My skin is sticky in the moist air. I recently turned thirty-two, and I’ve been drifting around the country for sixteen years, sixteen dreamlike years that began in China’s land of milk and honey in the early 2000s, the southern border city of Shenzhen. A growing city where tropical steam would evaporate from the asphalt roads and fill my trouser legs, soaking me through to my skin. The heat would snatch at every strand of my hair, and remembering it now pulls me against the current of time, hauls me back to the roaring years of Shenzhen, to my coming of age, the summer I turned fifteen.