Yi lzzy Yu

In 2011, Yi Izzy Yu left Northern China for the US, with nothing but $500 in her pocket and a love of traditional Chinese stories that she’d inherited from her grandmother. Living in a rented room in the small Pennsylvania town of Indiana, late at night she would comfort her homesickness by eating shrimp chips and reading Ji Yun’s stories in their original Classical Chinese. It was in these moments that the thought first came to her that it would be cool to do a popular-culture English translation of Ji Yun’s work that focused on its contribution to speculative fiction and nonfiction.