Overview

After her celebrated The Teddy Bear Chronicles, Xi Xi turns her creative vision towards the world of the primate kingdom. At the age of 73, Xi Xi traveled extensively across Asia, from tropical forests to conservation centers, immersing herself in the natural world of apes and monkeys. Xi Xi then documented 51 endearing ape and monkey puppets that she had sewn, weaving them into a series of insightful dialogues with her friend, the Hong Kong writer Ho Fuk Yan. These discussions cover the depiction of apes and monkeys in Chinese and Western literature, painting, drama, and film, as well as the close relationship between humans and their primate relatives. Xi Xi's own words, imbued with a profound empathy, reveal the heart of her work: ""If there is a common theme to our conversation, it is to respect life and speak for those lives that have been discriminated against in the history of human development, and apes are the starting point for this.""

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Xi Xi (1937–2022), pseudonym of Cheung Yin, was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong with her family in 1950. In 1957, she graduated from Grantham College of Education and became a teacher at a government primary school. She increasingly focused on her writing career, and her fiction and poetry earned her numerous literary awards, including the 1983 United Daily Award in Taiwan for her short story ‘A Girl Like Me’, the 2019 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature at the University of Oklahoma, and the Cikada Prize awarded by the Swedish Institute in the same year. She also received the Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s 16th Life Achievement Award in 2022. Xi Xi’s literary works spanned across novels, essays, modern poetry, and literary criticism. She published over 45 books, including My City, Not Written Words, The Teddy Bear Chronicles, Carnival of Animals: Xi Xi’s Animal Poems, and many more. Jasmine Tong Man is now a visiting lecturer specialising in literary translation at various tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. She earned her PhD in Translation Studies in 2001. Her translation work includes Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (Book One) and Amiri Baraka’s poetry into Chinese. In collaboration with David Morgan, she has translated Leung Ping-kwan’s poems and short stories, as well as Wei Ya’s children’s poetry, into English. Recently, she has been crafting bilingual stories about life in Hong Kong, featuring her own watercolour illustrations. David Morgan has collaborated with Jasmine Tong Man on various translations from Chinese to English for almost twenty years. He has also made a number of extended translations from Spanish to English and of short stories from French to English by the Palestinian novelist Mahmoud Shahin. John Minford is Emeritus Professor of Chinese at The Australian National University.

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