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.