Beijing Foreign Studies University Chinese Canadian Library Collection: Difference between revisions

--- “When Professor Wenli Wang first sent an email at the end of September, 2013 to Denise Chong asking for contributions from Chinese Canadian writers for the library at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, Denise immediately contacted every writer she knew. The response was immediate and generous. This endeavour has personal resonance for me. As a child growing up in my father’s hand laundry in Canada, I have a clear memory of listening to him sing arias from Chinese opera and reading poetry that he had written. I never understood his poems; and yet I listened. The language was classical and my spoken Chinese was colloquial. But there was something about the rhythm of his words that captured me. Somehow through this act of sharing his work, my father impressed on me the power of language. It is one of life’s ironies that I too now write, but in English, a language that my father would not have been able to read. When my novel Midnight at the Dragon Cafe was translated into Chinese it felt like the completion of a circle. That my work should now be in a library at a university in Beijing, the centre of learning in China, would be beyond my father’s wildest dreams. Were he alive he would weep tears of joy.”

Judy Fong Bates came to Canada from China as a young child and grew up in several small Ontario towns.