Xi Xi, pseudonym of Cheung Yin, was born in Shanghai in 1937, and moved to Hong Kong with her family in1950. 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, the 2019 Newman Prize for Chinese literature at the University of Oklahoma, and the 2019 Cikada Prize. In recent years, she has become very fond of making her own rag dolls and teddy bears.
Christina Sanderson is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University, working on the nineteenthcentury memoir Tracks in the Snow, by the Manchu official Wanyan Linqing.
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.