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.
(for HN: Lop Nor/Nur is China's atomic testing area. The final atmospheric test (by anyone) was conducted there. Oct 1979 if memory serves)
It’s famously known as the 'Final Three Cuts.' Because the material was so rare and the stakes so high, he had to complete the final shaping in three extremely delicate stages. He achieved a precision of 0.001mm (often described as 1/80th of a human hair) entirely by hand. This earned him the nickname 'Yuan the Three-Cuts' (Yuan Sandao) in our hometown history
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).
ChrisArchitect•1mo ago
Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408988
Vincent_Yan404•1mo ago
eastbound•1mo ago