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This is a most unusual book. For several decades Xi Xi has been widely known for her award-winning poetry and fiction. This time, she has chosen to write about the teddy bears she began making in 2005, after treatment for cancer, in order to improve the mobility of her right hand. She made the bears herself from scratch, choosing some of her favourite characters from history and legend such as the Taoist philosopher Master Zhuang, the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan, and Beauty and the Beast. She also created exquisite items of clothing for them and wove a series of delightfully witty essays around them, giving her readers fascinating insights into Chinese culture, and into the ways in which Chinese clothing and fashion have evolved through the ages.
This is a book for all who love literature and teddy bears.
Xi Xi, pseudonym of Cheung Yin, was born in Shanghai in 1938, and moved to Hong Kong with her family in 1950. In 1957, she studied at the Grantham College of Education, graduating to become a teacher at a government primary school. Increasingly she concentrated on her career as a writer, and her fiction and poetry won her many literary prizes, including the 1983 United Daily Award in Taiwan for her short story ‘A Girl Like Me’, and the 2018 Newman Prize for Chinese literature at the University of Oklahoma. In recent years, she has become very fond of making her own rag dolls and teddy bears.
John Minford is Emeritus Professor of Chinese at The Australian National University and Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Culture and Translation at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong.
Christina Sanderson is a PhD Candidate at the Australian National University, working on the nineteenth-century memoir Tracks in the Snow, by the Manchu official Wanyan Linqing.