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To Speak Is to Blunder | The New Yorker

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“My brain has banished Chinese. I dream in English. I talk to myself in English. It was a crucial decision to be orphaned from my native language.”

Save this story Save this story Illustration by Jun Cen In a dream the other night, I was back in Beijing, at the entrance of my family’s apartment complex, where a public telephone, a black rotary, had once been guarded by the old women from the neighborhood association. They used to listen without hiding their disdain or curiosity while I was on the phone with friends; when I finished, they would complain about the length of the conversation before logging it in to their book and calculating the charge. In those days, I accumulated many errands before I went to use the telephone, lest my par

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