Over the past year, I’ve shared four short stories here: “The Name on Pinyin,” “Window No. 7,” “Boxes from the East,” and “Chat Survival Manual.” Each explores what happens when people move between cultures, languages, and identities.
Those four stories are just the beginning.
I’m collecting them, along with several unpublished pieces, into my first book: Between Languages.
The stories you’ve read here were chosen deliberately. Nadya discovering a new self through a new name. Oksana choosing humanity over protocol at her visa window. Irina finding connection through a factory worker’s hidden note. Anya learning that authenticity matters more than performance. These are the lighter pieces, moments of connection and discovery.
But the collection goes deeper. There are stories I haven’t shared. Darker material about immigration trauma, linguistic displacement, the violence of bureaucratic systems, the cost of constant translation between selves. Stories about people who don’t find connection, who get lost between languages rather than found.
I wanted readers to see the hopeful side first. To understand that this collection isn’t just about suffering, it’s about the full spectrum of what happens when you exist between cultures. The published stories were an invitation. The unpublished ones are where the real work lives.
Between Languages explores the spaces between contexts, the moments when you’re translating not just words but entire versions of yourself. When you’re performing one identity whilst carrying another. When you’re caught between who you were and who you’re becoming.
These stories taught me how to write. They gave me permission to trust observation over optimisation, to value emotional truth over market research. My background in business trained me to identify target demographics and optimise for desired outcomes. But the people in these stories refuse to fit into neat segments. They’re messy, contradictory, human in ways that market research can’t capture.
Publishing this feels vulnerable. These aren’t sanitised case studies or polished brand narratives. They’re raw observations about displacement, adaptation, and the constant performance required when you exist between cultures.
The collection will be available in late December. I’ll share publication details as they’re confirmed.
Until then, I’m back to the daily routine. Because whilst these immigrant tales feel complete, I’m noticing different material emerging. The beauty industry clients I work with reveal another kind of performance, another kind of translation between public and private selves.
That’s becoming its own project now. Something longer, more ambitious. But Between Languages comes first.
— Writer Julia Zolotova
