作者：Helen Bondarenko
翻译：潘泽彬
校对：Luz、Joanne、James
My name is Helen. I’m 29 years old, and I’m from Ukraine, from a small city named Zaporizhzhia. I have been living in China for more than 6 years and I bake the most delicious cakes!
我叫 Helen，今年29岁，来自乌克兰一座叫扎波罗热的小城市。我在中国生活了 6 年多，我做的蛋糕是世上最美味的！
But it wasn’t always like that. One day there was a turning point that allowed me to see new talents in myself and completely change my career.
但生活并不是一成不变的。一天，我迎来了人生转折点。我发现了自己身上的新天赋，职业生涯因此完全改变。
My mother always cooked very delicious meals, and all of my childhood is associated with memories of holidays, feasts, and weekends, when my mother cooked a lot of very tasty dishes. In the post-Soviet space, it was not possible to buy a cake in a supermarket. After all, there weren’t even any supermarkets. So my mother cooked cakes for every holiday, birthday, New Year, etc., when she wanted to treat us with something delicious. When I was little, I would try to help her, and sometimes I just watched the process! It fascinated me that mom had a lot of signature cakes, but my favorite was meringue cake. My grandmother’s signature desserts were always “cherry house cake” and “Napoleon.”
我母亲做的饭菜非常好吃，童年的记忆充斥着假日、宴会和周末，那时我母亲会做很多美味佳肴。后苏联时代，不可能在超市买到蛋糕，毕竟当时甚至连超市都没有。所以我母亲在每个假日、生日、新年都会做蛋糕，我们大快朵颐。小时候，我会给她打下手，有时只是看着母亲做蛋糕。母亲拿手的蛋糕有很多，但我最爱的还是酥皮蛋糕。我祖母的招牌甜点是“樱桃屋蛋糕”和“拿破仑蛋糕”。
As a teenager, I also became interested in cooking desserts. Using my mother’s cookbook, at the age of 14, I was already preparing my first profiteroles. I really enjoyed the process and the joy of family members trying my desserts. But, unfortunately, the older I got, the less time and energy I had to cook. Over time, priorities changed, and I stopped cooking altogether. School years were replaced by university years, then studying in China, work… In the blink of an eye more than 10 years flew by.
十几岁的时候，我也开始对烘焙感兴趣。我 14 岁的时候，参考母亲的烘焙手册，开始尝试做泡芙。我真的很享受这个过程，也很享受家人品尝我做的甜点时的喜悦。但遗憾的是，长大后我就越没有时间和精力去烘焙。生活中有许多事情比烘焙更重要，我放弃了烘焙，升入大学，然后来中国留学、工作……眨眼间，已过去 10 多年。
I graduated from the Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University, majoring in Chinese Philology, even though I had never been interested in Asian culture or China, and in general I had never planned to study this subject.
我毕业于本查尔·德尼普罗普特罗夫斯克国立大学，汉语言文字学专业，但我当时对亚洲文化和中国并不感兴趣，而且我本来并没打算学习这个专业。
How did I end up there? Pure chance, or even fate.
我怎么会走上这条路呢？纯属机缘巧合，甚至可以说是命运的指引。
At the age of 18, one of the criteria I had for choosing a university was “somewhere, but not in my hometown.” So I went to admissions offices in other cities: Kharkiv, Dnipro, Kyiv. I dreamed of studying journalism or international relations. Back in 2011, there was no way to submit documents online, so I had to personally go and queue for hours (sometimes at 6 o’clock
