The winner of the Chinese Writing Contest is …

Chinese Writing Contest 2022 is coming to an end. It has been fantastic to read so many high quality entries that really blew me away!

Thank everyone for your support, all the contestants, sponsors, collaborators, voters, evangelists, and all the readers. Without you, this event wouldn’t have had a chance. And you made it exciting and interesting. Thank you all very much.

It’s time for the final result.

Sometimes I wonder, if Dr. Seuss could write in Chinese, would he be able to writer better than these contestants? Because his ability of writing within a limited number of words was famous. In 1960, he wrote Green Eggs and Ham using only 50 English words. This book has been one of the best selling children’s books of all time. Although I couldn’t possibly invite Dr. Seuss to participate in this Chinese Writing Contest, I still thank him for giving us a good example of how embracing constraints leads to explosion of creativities. 

This Contest gives quite a bit constraint on the number of Chinese characters that are allowed. The idea is not to check how many characters students have learned. It is how they can use characters to create meanings that resonate with readers. 

Therefore, rote memory goes out, and creativity comes in. Although technologies are doing loads of things for us today, creativity is still something we have to come up from within.

This is fun. 

This is play. 

Since the initial launch in 2021, this Chinese Writing Contest has entered into its second year. I am super glad that it has offered an alternative outlet for creative writings in Chinese, particularly for Chinese language learners, and perhaps also, dare I say it, helps discover the best selling authors in the future. 

Let me thank two outstanding Chinese language learners in particular, Demonic-Duck and Betty, two marvellous software engineers. They created character checkers, which make it easy to catch those characters that are not included in the required character’s list.

Now to the result.

This year, 58 submissions from nine countries were received. 27 were qualified and published online. The selection process was conducted on Twitter. People were invited to vote for the best four.

Public voting like this makes the selection process transparent. People see everything, including those votes that only vote for one particular number and those that look like they have not done any reading. Overall, transparency is good. And the more people participate, the better it gets.

So, after counting all the acceptable votes, I’m delighted to announce:

• The winner is Germaine Di Pey Qi (Candidate #11):

Germaine is a thirteen year old student from Malaysia. Her winning entry is a super sweet poem, 《儿时的问号》. 

• The first runner-up is Eliza Cuihua (Candidate #2):

A poet, songwriter, AI painter and also an E-sports referee, Eliza is from Henan, China. Her winning entry is a beautiful poem in Chinese classical style,《四时华夏行》.

• The second runner-up is Jasmine Wang (Candidate #27):

Jasmine is a high school student from the United States. Her winning entry is a nice story,《为什么做小事?》.

Great job!

Please join me to congratulate them for their exceptional creativity and splendid writing skills.

Best entries will be published as a book. 

Stay tuned for that. 

P.S.

Chinese Writing Contest’s previous winner:

2021: Toh Jun Tian (Malaysia)

P.P.S.

Contact me if you’d like to sponsor the next Chinese Writing Contest or become a collaborator.