Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408988

First, thank you to Tom (Moderator) and this community for the incredible reception of Part I.

My English writing is still limited (IELTS 6.0), so Part II is also a sentence-by-sentence AI translation. This is an extended version. I added a bit more details that weren't in my original Chinese posts.

Here is the original Chinese version I wrote https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111. You can see the raw narrative before it was translated.

Thank you for reading a story from a non-native speaker trying to bridge the gap with tools.

I went back after 2 decades and find the entire area was unrecognizably transformed. The prison moved and most of the area was developed. The town was renamed to distance itself from it's past. Forests were developed into McMansions while some century old fields became forests. The paved road I'd walked thousands of times (connected to our dirt road) was rerouted. It was a super disorienting experience.

Bear tongues don't work like this. While they are rough, much like a cat's or a dog's, they don't have barbs large enough to "tear off a chunk of flesh" or "sever tendons".

If this anecdote is not an embellishment, it must have been the bear biting the girl's leg, which is not at all unheard of from bears in zoos (we had such a case in Argentina in '88, a bear tore off a boy's arm through the cage bars in "Cutini's Zoo". The zoo was shut down as a result. I don't know what happened to the bear, but maybe it was put down like in your story).