Rock Coat 岩衣
Camille is sitting at her computer in her apartment in Chicago, the sun is rising. An audience is gathered in Wenzhou, China. Yezhou sits among them, prepared to read the script he translated aloud in the room as the performance unfolds on the projected screen.
Good morning / 晚上好
There is an ocean between us / 我们之间隔着一片海洋。
I have only encountered Wenzhou through the screen, so it makes some sense that you meet me here too / 我只是在屏幕上遇见了温州，所以你在这里遇见我也算合理。
By the time they reach my eyes, the jelly dishes of Wenzhou have been further filtered, coming to me through a screen that somehow compresses both distance and translation.
传到我眼前时，温州的胶冻菜肴已经被进一步过滤，通过屏幕传来，这个屏幕不知怎地压缩了距离，也压缩了翻译。
I have tried many different ways to understand something about these jelly dishes that I may never taste.
我尝试了许多不同的方法去理解这些我可能永远无法品尝的胶冻菜系。
At first I thought I could make fish jelly.
起初，我以为我可以做鱼胶冻。
ACT 1: FISH JELLY FAIL
第一幕：鱼冻失败
Google told me I could buy any white fish to make fish jelly.
谷歌告诉我，我可以买任何白鱼来做鱼冻。
I don't think I had ever held a fish before; I’ve never been fishing.
我不觉得我真正用手拿过鱼，我也从来没有去钓过鱼。
It feels like how saying something scary can sometimes flop onto the floor.
这种感觉就像说出来的某些可怕的话会“砰”地掉到地上一样。
Especially if you wait too long.
尤其是你等待了太久才说出来。
I boiled the fish for a few hours.
我把鱼煮了几个小时。
It never congealed.
但是汤汁完全没有凝固。
ACT 2: ROCK COAT
I like the private theater of words.
我喜欢文字的私人剧场。
How they call upon your life.
它们如何呼应你的生命。
In my long distance study of Wenzhou jelly cuisine, I have collected a few translated words.
在我对温州胶冻菜肴的远程研究中，我收集了一些翻译过的词语。
Such as rockcoat, from the Rockcoat Jelly of Shuitan Village.
例如，Rockcoat，来自水潭村岩衣胶冻的岩衣。
A few pages into a google search of Wenzhou, I found these tee shirts.
在谷歌上搜索温州翻了几页之后，我发现了这些 T 恤。
I changed the shirt color to red, nearly the same red as the heart, making the shirt appear to read “I Wenzhou.”
我把 T 恤的颜色改成了红色，几乎与爱心的红色相同，让它看起来像是在说 “I 温州”。
I marveled at the gimmick, of an expedited belonging and becoming, from collecting souvenirs of a place to being a place.
我惊叹于这种小手段——一种被加速的归属与成形的过程，从收集某地的纪念品，到成为那片地方本身。
We can tend toward armoring ourselves in our collections too, like the caddisfly larvae.
我们也能像石蛾幼虫一样，用我们的收藏的东西为自己披上盔甲。
I work in a place that processes the excesses of this habit. My office is in the attic among the mountains of stuff, my own island.
我在一个处理这种习惯所产生过剩之物的地方工作。我的办公室在阁楼上，堆满了各种东西，它们成了我自己的小岛。
On my island, I have encountered things like this
在我的小岛上，我遇到过像这样的东西
and this
和这样的东西
but these objects are hardly bridges.
但这些物品并不能算是桥梁。
my island has its own jelly dishes.
我的岛上有自己的胶冻菜系。
they were popularized by our third president.
它们是由我们的第三任总统推广的。
enter thomas jefferson, third president of the united states.
美国第三任总统托马斯·杰斐逊登场。