Writing in Chinese and English: My Experience （1）
In Hong Kong, few people choose to write, and fewer do it in both Chinese and English and for a long time.
Besides writing fictions and non-fictions, I am also doing research on two topics: Chinese students doing creative writing in English, and why most Chinese born overseas cannot read and write Chinese even they speak the language.
I wanted to be a bilingual writer since I was a teenager. As a bilingual writer, I have experienced the process of using these two very different languages to speak to readers from different cultures. It is the mental and technical aspects of bilingualism that fascinates me: words from these two very different cultures carry subtexts that get funny in translation. To me, translating Chinese into English is very different from translating another European language into English.
In Hong Kong, it is, to some extent, taken for granted that one is born bilingual. This attitude towards languages might have something to do with Chinese people's cultural tradition: parents always want their kids to stay on the top. In the past, that meant learning English; now, that means learning Chinese as well because of the opportunities China offers.
This makes Hong Kong a good case study of teaching English/Chinese as a second language.
