Writers from China's diaspora
Just watching animals move fascinates Chris Cheng. 'Look at the ibis,' he says, sitting under a gum tree in a Sydney park. 'The way they're walking around - I love it.'
Cheng's career as a children's author focusing on animals has its roots in Sydney's Taronga Zoo. Between 1988 and 1994, he was involved with its travelling zoo or 'zoo-mobile' - a van that visited schools with possums, fruit bats and pythons, among other creatures. When he produced a diamond python in one classroom, the teachers promptly left the room. 'That was so funny,' Cheng says. 'That was a hoot.'
So too was the day one of his bats started to flap away before realising, too late, that it couldn't fly. It crashed, much to the delight of the children. 'Kids are not built with a fear of animals,' says the former kindergarten teacher. 'They actually learn the fear.'
This meant Cheng could let the children get close to the flying foxes 'and smell them and find out about them'. Was anyone bitten? 'Oh yeah,' he says. 'I used to get bitten, especially with the snakes - I mean, with my python, Monty. And my flying fox would bite me.'
Warming to the theme, Cheng, 45, says his arms were often covered in cuts, scratches and bites. 'It's OK,' he says. 'I'm still alive - none of those injections.' He says the attacks were the result of too much travelling and too many strange smells. The creatures always calmed down when they smelled his hand.
Chen started his writing during this spell of close contact with animals. Publishers would send him books for appraisal - particularly to pick up factual errors. A common error was the phrase 'birds and animals' - a false distinction, he says. Then publishers suggested he try writing himself.