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Comment by Koekje | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be the original story in Chinese, from 2016: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111

Now I’m confused

I posted this in Chinese first.And use AI translated.

Why did it take you 8 years to repost it in English? It's not because of AI, because other translations existed before LLMs and were more than adequate.

+1 The long gap between 2016 when the original article was written in Chinese and 2025, the fact that the Substack article does not cite the original Zhihu article (until someone other than OP linked it in this thread), not linking previously English translations of this article, and the financial incentive of the LLM-translated article being on Substack make OP's claim of authorship of the Chinese article very sus.

The first comment can answer your question, go and check whether I am OP https://www.zhihu.com/people/yan-mou-ren-63/posts

Thanks for the info! I don't have a Zhihu account to check myself, but I believe you.

I think it would be helpful to dispel any confusion if you added somewhere on the Substack post (e.g. at the bottom) the above message you are the author of the Zhihu post.

You can see 553 条评论，And click “最新”

Cause I've never thought it before, and now I'm in Canada,I want to try whether this can be related in western country.

Oh, I can help you with that concern: anything related to China, mysterious towns, and secret projects will be lapped up by readers from Western countries. You'd have a harder time if you were trying to portray a more positive life experience in China.

I loved the article, the translation is pretty good, too. Can you share a link to the full Chinese text with me, please? My wife is also from the Gobi desert and I think she would love to read the original version.

edit: I just found 我在404长大 [1] on douban, it seems the be the original version

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1: https://www.douban.com/note/858264779/

Yes，it is.

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