July 2025 Updates

Hello! I hope July has been treating you well! My updates for this month are below.

• I’ve been working more on my current adoption-related fictional essay. It’s definitely been taking turns that I haven’t been expecting, and it’s been fun wrestling with the complicated feelings and dynamics that being an adoptee brings.

• I mentioned on my Darcy Hongyue account months ago that I was reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. I finished reading it a little bit ago, but reading it dragged me down a rabbit hole where I listened to a bunch of Wilson’s podcast interviews so I could learn more about her translation process. Now that I've exhausted all the Iliad-focused ones, I’ve been listening to her Odyssey interviews, and I enjoyed hearing what she had to say about translation and ethics in these two episodes. I’ve been learning so much about the complexity of translation and how to grapple with complicated texts from the past.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to share any adoptee-related writing you have been doing or interesting podcasts you’ve been listening to in the comments! This month, I urge you to support USCPR’s Water Is Life Gaza campaign, which is a Palestinian-led project that delivers clean water to families displaced by Israel’s ongoing genocide. I also encourage you to support Refugees in Libya, an organization advocating for refugees throughout North Africa and Europe. Finally, please support the Massachusetts Bail Fund, which is an abolitionist direct service organization that pays bail for those who cannot afford it. For more resources and organizations to support, please look here.