Rock Coat 岩衣
Chicago 6:00 AM / Wenzhou 8:00 PM
Camille is sitting at her computer in her apartment in Chicago, the sun is rising. An audience is gathered in Wenzhou, China where it is evening. Yezhou sits among the audience, 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。
I thought about the caddisfly larvae, in the streams where I grew up.
我想到了我成长的溪流里，那些石蛾幼虫。
New character enters – the caddisfly larvae.
新角色登场——疣蝽幼虫。
The caddisfly larva crawls along rocky riverbeds and shores, collecting rocks and building a shell around its body, protecting itself within its coat of rocks.
石蛾幼虫爬行在多石的河床和岸边，收集石头，在身体周围筑起外壳，将自己保护在这件“岩衣”之中。