Luke loves Mae. Mae loves Mark. Mark loves Theresa. Theresa loves cookies. Mark bakes cookies for Theresa. Mae eats Mark's cookies. Luke asks Mae: Do you know Zhou Yingqi? She's my new girlfriend. Mae doesn't believe him.
Mark loves Theresa. Theresa loves Luke. Luke loves Mae. Mae loves cookies. Luke buys cookies for Mae. Theresa sells Luke's cookies. Mark asks Theresa: Do you know Vivian Hsu? She's my new girlfriend. She makes the best black cookies. Theresa doesn't care.
Theresa falls in love with Mark. Mark falls in love with Mae. Mae falls in love with Luke. Luke falls in love with Theresa. Mae says: Luke, please have some tea. Mark gives his regards to Mae. Theresa tells Mark: Let me introduce you--this is Gubo, my new boyfriend. Mark asks Gubo: What country are you from?
Luke loves cookies. Mae loves cookies. Mark loves cookies. Theresa loves cookies. They are all very happy.
This story was originally written in Chinese. Haiying Huang transliterated the names of the characters, and Kyoko Leo helped with the particularly difficult Mae. All of these came out really well. "Cookie" turned out to be surprisingly difficult to translate, and after discussions with Haiying, Helena Yan and Ashley Tan we settled on "bing3gan1", which is more like a biscuit or cracker but is the right kind of generic word I wanted. Thanks to everyone for their help.
I specifically didn't ask for any help when writing the story itself, as I wanted to capture the awkwardness of someone who doesn't really know the language. After it was written Haiying took a look at it and said there were a few awkward parts but nothing too bad. She did suggest I change what was a period after "Wo jieshao yixiar" to a comma, which I have done. I also independently changed what was originally "Ni renshi Xu Ruoxuan ma?" to "Ni renshi bu renshi Xu Ruoxuan?" which is better in the context of the story.
Although it's not perfect, I'm really happy with the way this story came out and it's my favorite of the cookie stories so far. Writing it in Chinese allowed me to make it very minimal and dense, which is exactly what I wanted to do.