AustLit

'Over the Australian summer, I visited Beijing with Kezhen. She's the one the Bible is talking about when it says that "there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother" (Proverbs 18:24b). She was making her yearly trip to Beijing to visit her parents and invited me to come along. I'd heard a lot about her parents who she said were Famous Artists living in Beijing. Her dad is an art critic and the editor of a well-regarded contemporary Chinese art journal. Her mum is one of twenty to thirty poets in China who practise an ancient form of Chinese poetry called Ci, with prescriptions for the rhythm and tone of each syllable, dating back to the eighth century. The technique for singing these lyrics has long since been lost. (Apart from the rigour of the form, the language used is incomprehensible for the modern Chinese speaker, being the upper-class speech of ancient China.) Her mum is also a painter who fuses traditional Chinese fine art techniques together with modern Western ones.' (Introduction)