Three years later, Dewees moved back to France. On a street in north Marseille, he met student Nicolas Hu from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. Immediately, Dewees felt like old friends, speaking to Hu in Chinese with an obvious Taiwan accent.
Hu then invited him to join his fellow Chinese students to make dumplings during festivals. Gradually, their cultural exchanges deepened, and Hu sent Dewees excerpts from Coiling Dragon translated into French. The story of the protagonist Lin Lei and the mysterious ring, along with the complex family disputes, inspired Dewees's strong curiosity for online Chinese fiction.
Although the characters, settings and context are Western in the novel, it has an Eastern cultural core as it talks about Taoism, the circulation and operation of qi (the flow of energy), and cultivation levels, which Dewees found interesting.
"I gradually found the novel to be very profound, representing the growing process of every individual, a process similar to cultivation — we grow, we make breakthroughs, and we come to another cognitive level," he says, adding that, "it also talks about family, responsibilities, friendship, and love, which are very important."
When Dewees found problems in Hu's translation, he decided to help revise it and then posted the translation on a blog that was discovered by other bloggers who commented that the story was fantastic.
Later, when Battle Through the Heavens by Tiancan Tudou was launched online, Dewees was excited to follow the updates: "I was digging treasure buried deeply underground, and a brand-new world unfolded slowly before my eyes."
As he gradually improved his Chinese, he came to better understand these online novels saturated in Chinese culture and wisdom.
In 2017, Dewees and Hu co-launched the online community Chireads, hoping to build a bridge for French readers and online Chinese writers to communicate.
Now, Chireads is the largest online community in the French-language world for Chinese literature lovers, with nearly 1,000 part-time translators and a monthly traffic of nearly 300,000. Most users were born after 1995 and are from countries such as France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Morocco, and Canada. All the translations are done and provided for free.
