About the creators

Writer

Anne Giles, M.A., M.S., L.P.C., is a Licensed Professional Counselor in the Commonwealth of Virginia, U.S.A., and a student of Mandarin Chinese. She holds master’s degrees in curriculum and instruction and mental health counseling, and a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) certificate. She attended the virtual National Chinese Language Conference in 2021 and 2022. She has taught English at the middle school, high school, and college levels. She served as a support person for two visiting scholars from China to Virginia Tech, 1982-1983 and enjoys co-housing with international visiting scholars, 2020 to the present.

Anne’s articles, essays, reviews and poems have appeared in The Sun, Press,  Tampa Review, CrossCurrents and others. She is listed in A Directory of American Poets & Fiction Writers from Poets & Writers.

Anne’s approach to creative writing is summarized here, her approach to thinking about individual lives is here, and her thinking about handling hardship is here. She was mentored as a writer by poet Peter Meinke. Since childhood, Anne has turned to novels to see how authors and characters handle what happens and how they work things out. In writing 枝丫, she is attempting to do the same. Since 2020, she has preferred fantasy novels to other genres.

With the editing assistance of Hóu Huìyǐng, Anne wrote How Counseling Works: A Plain Language Summary in Simplified Chinese Characters and English. She does extensive literature reviews of the research on the learning of Mandarin Chinese by adults and updates her findings here: If I Were to Begin Learning Mandarin Chinese Today.

Editor

侯慧颖 Hóu Huìyǐng “Mary” is a graduate of Inner Mongolia University for Nationalities, majoring in Chinese Language and Literature, and a graduate of Beijing Language and Culture University, with a major in English. She has taught in-person and online language courses for adults around the globe, both individually and in group classes, since 2019. She designs curricula for teachers of Mandarin Chinese and offers teacher training workshops. Her specialties include spoken Chinese, business Chinese, medical Chinese, HSK preparation, and Chinese characters.

Illustrators

Derek Zheng, Chapters 1-19

Lear, Chapters 20+

Videos

Jiayi, Chinese with Jiayi

Podcast

Frank, Chapters 1-14

Benfang Wang, Chinese with Ben, Dashu Mandarin, italki instructor, Chapters 15+