Teaching Cats to Jump Hoops

Cultural Medallion #4

by You Jin, Sylvia Li-Chun Lin (Translator)

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.

Tham Yew Chin has published more than 150 books in Chinese in Singapore, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Malaysia under the pen name, You Jin. 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 has been a schoolteacher for nearly thirty years and received Singapore’s Cultural Medallion in 2009. This is her first book to be translated into English.

Sylvia Li-chun Lin is co-translator of the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize-winning novel, Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu. Her co-translation of Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man won the American Literary Translators Association’s 2000 National Translation Award. She is also a winner of the Liang Shih–chiu Literary Translation Prize.

Genres: Fiction

168 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2012

About the author

Tham Yew Chin, better known by her pen name You Jin, is the author of over 150 books, and is a prolific writer of travelogues, essays, opinion pieces, short stories and novels. Known for her heartwarming and sensitive observations of everyday life, she has been recognised in Singapore and China. The inaugural recipient of the Singapore Chinese Literary Award and the Montblanc-NUS Centre of the Arts Literary Award, she was honoured with the establishment of the You Jin Research Centre in Chongqing University in 2000. In 2009, Tham received the Cultural Medallion for her contributions to literature in Singapore.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is probably the worst book I've ever read and I have no idea how this title made it into the Cultural Medallion Series. For starters, the text was translated from Chinese albeit too literally. Anyone who is bilingual will find the text peppered with one too many awkwardly translated Chinese proverbs.

The stories are also essentially one and the same. Madam Tham (presumably You Jin) is a teacher who helps delinquent students that other teachers have given up on. She faces the wrath of students' parents and fellow teachers but in the end, the student turns over a new leaf and becomes a wonderful person. The end.

I am not sure if it's because of the way the book is translated or whether it was the author's original intention but the whole thing read like a neverending spiel of self-praise.

If you're looking for local (Singapore) fiction, you're better off picking any title published by Math Paper Press or anything by Wena Poon or Catherine Lim.

[Zulzafry Zulkifly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically, the stories in this book is about Madam Tham, a Chinese teacher at some secondary school in Singapore facing her students with their trouble in life. Their troubles mostly related to family problem and self confidence. The first story gives me a good impression. I thought that this will be a good book for me, English-teacher-to-be (hope so) that can teach me on the behaviour of students at young age and teachers in school. Some fact that i caught in those short stories is that not every teacher in the world have the ability to educate, most of them are merely a teacher without any skill to educate a person. Sure they can teach students maths and so on, but they can't educate student to be a well-mannered human. However, there must be some teachers like Madam Tham who see things beyond their image. She will seek the truth behind the problems that the students made in school. However, those short stories is repetitive. One student will show a problem in class, then Madam Tham will meet their parents to seek for reasons behind things the students did and then she will make a way to solve it. Most of the problematic students will end up being good. It is a good story, however the repetition and similar among the short stories shows to creativity.

Other than that, i think that this book is a great book, fulled with moral and advice for teacher-to-be and whoever who seeks for morality in a story without minding its repetitive storyline.

[Desilu Anne Nair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mediocre.

[Siti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Inspiring yet at some point most of the stories have similar plot and ending

[Katdakoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️

[Caleb Liu · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of autobiographical short stories based on You Jin or Tham Yew Chin's personal experiences as a Chinese language teacher for over 30 years (she umambiguously identifies the teacher in all the stories as Mdm Tham). More readers may feel view these strories of redemption; of students overcoming difficulties (overbearing parents, unrequited love, broken families, poverty) as fundamentally cliched and overly sentimental; the most cynical would view the self-portrait of the caring, understanding and selfless teacher as self-serving. But only the most hardened of hearts will be left unmoved by these touching stories.

A caveat: I am an educator myself, so I could