Description About the Author & Translator Translated from the Chinese by Sylvia Li-chun Lin Look inside the book I Get the E-book A chain-smoking student with a violent past. A girl with a weakness for rare turtles. A boy who sees a raging fire each time he opens his exam booklet. In this collection of funny and heartwarming stories by You Jin, a teacher finds herself confronted with misfits and loners, rebellious dropouts and overbearing, even abusive parents. Yet she remains determined to reach out to her students. Combining an assured style with sensitive portrayals, Teaching Cats to Jump Hoops is the first translation into English of a popular voice in Chinese literature. The Cultural Medallion is Singapore’s highest cultural award, given to those who have achieved artistic excellence in the areas of literature, dance, music, theatre and art. It was instituted in 1979 to recognise individuals whose artistic excellence and commitment to the arts have enriched and made a distinction to Singapore’s arts and cultural landscape. Epigram Books’ Cultural Medallion series seeks to translate the works of Cultural Medallion winners writing in Tamil, Malay and Chinese into English. Matching writers with some of the best translators working in the field today, these books are being made available to an English-language audience for the first time. You Jin has published more than 150 books in Chinese in Singapore, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Malaysia. These include novels, short story collections, travelogues and essays. She is the first recipient of both the Singapore Chinese Literary Award and the Montblanc-NUS Centre for the Arts Literary Award. She received the Zhong Shan Literary Award in 2010 and Singapore’s Cultural Medallion in 2009. Sylvia Li–chun Lin teaches modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film and culture at the University of Notre Dame. A winner of the Liang Shih–chiu Literary Translation Prize, she is the co–translator of Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man, which won the 1999 Translation of the Year Prize given by the American Literary Translators Association, as well as co-translator of Bi Feiyu’s Three Sisters, which won the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize.