At the kind requests of many people who have purchased “Anna Meiyou Banfa”, I’m going ahead with the next, just slightly more difficult, chapter “novel” in Chinese. This one will be called “Patricia Yao Bukao” (“Patricia has to take the college entrance exam over again”) and is set partly in Taiwan and partly in the US.
Although I originally got into doing this sort of writing through arranging to do an adaptation in Chinese of Blaine Ray’s “Pobre Ana”, and had planned to adapt his “Patricia Va a California”, after considerable reflection I’ve decided to simply go ahead and write on my own. I have never read his “Patricia” and I do not plan to do so before completing “Bukao”. There are several reasons for this, but the best-sounding (and still true) is although I am a translator and have been for many years, I prefer to write materials for my students directly in Chinese, rather than running the risk that their structure and voice will be that of a translation. Naturally, as I am by no means a native speaker of Chinese, the books are not going to be Great Works of Chinese Literature, but they do their job as repetitive, pedagogically-sound prose that tell a story and present high-frequency words while doing everything possible to avoid unnecessary words.
I suppose that as my sixth-graders grow up through our program, I’ll have to improve my writing and get them some more complicated stuff, but for now, I think I’m safe for another year or two. Meanwhile, we’ll see how Patricia does on the JCEE next chapter…
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