My first week in Norwich started with an unwillingness to grapple with the grey weather. It was July afterall, and supposedly bright and sunny. I wanted desperately to ease into the imagined sanctuary I’d pictured myself in, not trapped in a (albeit very nice) cottage by external circumstances. I mostly pottered timidly around the cottage, anxious about how unfamiliar most things were, yet curious about what this month-long clean slate could bring.

I’m a sucker for starting anew, perhaps because I often get distracted and impatient when anything takes too long. I become excited over the idea of a do-over, wiping away none-too-pretty scrawls. Yet, I’m subconsciously very comfortable with familiarity, despite all my curiosity about the unfamiliar. I would go looking for the familiar in the unfamiliar to quell the butterflies in my head (not stomach, for me, everything happens in my overactive mind, that’s where I get all ‘fluttery’).

Despite how effusive Norwich was with its watery emotions that first week (it never stopped raining), I had trouble getting familiar with the story in front of me — of a woman having trouble crying. I wanted to discover how and why she couldn’t cry (I have a habit of translating a story as I read it, and letting my discovery of the plot move my translation along in the first draft). The rain should have been a perfect motivation to put my nose to the grindstone, to delve deep into the writer Sui Ting’s careful unravelling of her characters in her short story collection Fish Birth which I had planned to translate during the month-long residency.

I should also have been familiar with rain, coming from Singapore, a tropical island that is very casual about stormy outbursts. Living in Berlin also got me familiar with the cold. But the rain pounding on the skylight was unfamiliar to me. It was tangled with the yelps of seagulls, turning it into rain that was somewhat remote and romantic.

‘It’s an aesthetic’, my friend remarked when I told her about rainy Norwich. I like that she saw it as some sort of forlorn beauty sliding down window panes. At some point, this unfamiliar aesthetic became very calming every time I was busy feeling anxious about nothing in particular but everything in general.

The second week of July got happier, and intermittently brighter. I was a lot less gloomy finding my way into a female character who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, let go of her heavy emotions. July was, in fact, eventful and celebrative in Norwich: there were the UK general election, THE UEFA Euro 2024 final between Spain and England, and three loud, happy weddings at Dragon Hall. All with various feelings to unload.

I started stepping out of the cottage more. A tiny Dragon Hall trip (Dragon Hall was just a minute away from the cottage I shared with Soje, my fellow translator in residence) to attend the Dragon Hall Social unexpectedly loosened me up. That evening, in a bright, spacious, medieval trading hall with vaulted beams, where spirited dragons now grace its walls in bookish depictions, Soje and I were supposed to talk about what we were working on to a warm literary community gathered there, all very enthusiastic to share their love of words too.

Soje talked about the book they translated — a big, beautiful art book called Toys and Other Memorials — chock-full of toys of all sorts, strategically placed and positioned by the visual artist Yang Seungwook throughout his busy picture compositions to excavate and exhibit his memories and, in Soje’s luminous translation, ‘get ALL OF MY FEELINGS across to each and one of you’. The book was largely unfamiliar to me at that time, but Soje had unveiled it with such verve and sparkle, which cheered me up incredibly.

Other people I met were also full of excited feelings sharing their work-in-progress, and their beautiful City of Stories.

That made me more courageous to get out of the cottage in the following days, rain or shine. Norwich was fluctuating between both almost all the time, to varying degrees. That second week, though, the sun was an amazing ally, coming out at just the right time to aid me in unloading my anxiety through happily getting lost in tangles of unfamiliar streets, my most memorable ‘lost and found’ being my adventure on the day of the UEFA Euro 2024 final.

I went out in the morning, and took a while finding my way from Norwich Market to the Plantation Garden. Being quite hopeless with directions, I felt disproportionately complacent when I found it. It had all the makings of what I’m familiar with: flowers galore, sun-streaked woods, lush greenery. It was not too humid, but there were people sitting around real picnic tables complete with floral tablecloths, joyously letting their mini portable fans blast wind into their faces. It was a quaint English garden, with a few big, unruly plants, pretty snowdrops, and serpentine walkways speckled with purple balloon flowers shaped like stars. There was also a gothic fountain trickling water over blackened flints, steadily, like it was the most natural thing to do. Its burbling sound reminded me of the character in Sui Ting’s short story who yearned to cry, but couldn’t turn on the waterworks. The character that I was slowly trying to understand.

That evening, out of a desire to see England burst into an array of colourful emotions as they vied for the Euro Cup, I went to the pubs with Soje to familiarise myself with the (hopefully not) once in a lifetime England vs Spain final. The streets were surprisingly empty. I had expected hordes of excited people (because that was familiar to me in Germany during any major football match when a German team

was involved) but it was unexpectedly subdued. Like restrained ecstasy that felt self-conscious about letting feelings overflow and inundate those perfect streets.

England didn’t win, and we didn’t stay long. Back in the quiet cottage, something was missing but I didn’t know what.

The last two weeks of the residency flew by. It was a whirl of visiting new restaurants, revisiting old pubs, finishing work, and panicking about what next. The aesthetic was ‘cottage swimming in a magic pool of blue’ rather than ‘forlorn beauty sliding down window panes’. None of which I was absolutely familiar with, but wistfully discovering.

I’d come to the end of the story I was translating, but I still don’t quite know why the character can’t cry. But I saw, after spending four weeks getting to know her, how very hard she was trying not to be sad. All this time, she thought all she wanted was to cry, but she was using every ounce of energy to sabotage herself.

The Norwich sky was many shades of blue the evening before we left. One shade of blue melting into another shade; breaking away—coming together—breaking away—coming together; until they became iridescent layers of blue that deepened into one rich tapestry of indigo, navy, cobalt, sapphire, cerulean. Every blue that I have a name for, and every blue in between whose names I don’t yet know.

Shades of blues in flux, supporting each other until they stabilised into one pulsating constant.

But, what if fluctuations are actually constant? Constancy and fluctuation. Unfamiliar and familiar. Release and restrain. And everything in between. Nothing can always stay familiar or unfamiliar — they move between varying degrees of familiarity and unfamiliarity, and sometimes, branch into other trajectories.

How would the Plantation Garden, draped in the finery of summer light in the short time I knew it, look and feel in winter? I won’t know. Not yet. The delightful thing is I spent some time getting to know it, and next time, when it becomes unfamiliar again, in a wintry context, I could re-familiarize myself with it as the summery garden flushed with shades of hope and radiance that I’ve come to know.

Christina Ng 

Christina Ng is a Singaporean writer and translator based in Berlin. Working between English and Chinese, she has interpreted for film and theatre productions, as well as written and translated essays and features on art, travel and culture. Her Chinese to English literary translations include poetry/fiction by Singaporean poets Liang Wern Fook, Dan Ying and Pan Shou, which have appeared or are forthcoming in adda magazine, Pathlight, Contour:A Lyric Carotography of Singapore and Words Without Borders. Her translation of Liang’s debut short story collection in English,The Joy of a Left Hand, was published by Balestier Press in 2023. She also teaches literary translation classes and leads literary translation workshops internationally. Her residency at National Centre for Writing was supported by the National Arts Council of Singapore.