How did “A Record of Lost Time” originate? What inspirations did you draw on?

I have been thinking about time a lot. How people define it differently in different places and eras. How temporality varies for different people. What is time essentially? And then the Chinese title of the story came to my mind—陨时, which literally means the collapse/fall of time and a homonym of meteorite. I love story titles that sound familiar but actually mean something different and unusual. (And I equally love the English title that Rebecca came up with!) So the story grew from there.

I guess I am not the only one who feels that time flows faster and faster nowadays. The pace of life in the twenty-first century is much faster than that in the twentieth or before. We all try to do more things with the same amount of time and achieve more. If there is a product that can make you more efficient in a time unit, definitely some people will be willing to use it. What if there is a cost of the product that you don’t know? What if people still want to use it, even if they know the cost, simply because it’s beneficial? It’s like fossil fuel and climate change. You know there’s a cost but you simply cannot stop using it. And it is not you alone. In the end, the result will be disastrous.

Where are you in this story?

I am probably the writer in the story, who tries to take down some notes of what she sees and feels, to record the lost time. She wants to do something, but she doesn’t know how, except for writing. She is not even sure whether writing is of any use, but she feels the responsibility. She has to make a record, of this era, now.

What led you into writing genre fiction?

I have been a science fiction and fantasy fan since primary school. Those story worlds that are different from our reality in one way or another always attracted me more. When I grew up, I joined the university SF club, and co-founded SF AppleCore, an association of university SF clubs in Shanghai. We organized a lot of events and invited many writers, which was a lot of fun. I loved SFF and fandom so much, so I wanted to do SF research for my masters, but ended up in creative writing. Thus, I started to write fiction, and I had to write what I like, which is genre fiction. Now I have been writing fiction for almost ten years, and I am finally doing SF research. That is fate, I guess.

Is there anything you want to make sure readers noticed?

When I wrote this story, I was thinking of all the narrators as women or nonbinary characters. It’s not clearly stated, but that’s what I have in mind. It is inspired by Gu Shi’s amazing story “Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition” (translated by Emily Xueni Jin), which features all-women characters.

Also, I want to re-emphasize that this story is a translation from Chinese to English, which is done by Rebecca F. Kuang, and she is equally important to what you have read here. A great many thanks to all translators who have been working hard to bring stories to the readers in other languages!

What are you reading lately? What writers inspire you?

I have been reading lots of works by women and nonbinary writers in China in the past three years for my PhD project. There are so many names that I can drop here: Gu Shi, Xia Jia, Chi Hui, Xiu Xinyu, Nian Yu, Chen Qian, Zhang Jing, Li Shuangyin, Congyun “Muming” Gu, Shuang Chimu, and many more. For a simple summary, my article on a brief “herstory” of Chinese science fiction might be interesting: bit.ly/45ftGxF.

What are you working on lately? Where else can fans look for your work?

I am mostly working on my PhD dissertation now! It is about contemporary Chinese SF, especially from the gender and environmental perspective. For fiction, the English version of my Hugo-nominated short story “Zhurong on Mars” (translated by S. Qiouyi Lu) should come out in this month as well in Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (edited by Benjamin H. Bratton, Anna Greenspan, and Bogna Konior). There is a list of previous publications in my bio, which I don’t want to repeat here, but I do want to highlight the two anthologies that I co-edited, The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories and New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction, which I am very proud of.