The Three “PANDAS”

       Dear Readers, Let’s me introduce the three venerable (德高望重的) “Pandas” who are well known in Beijing’s English language circle. They got this humorous nickname soon after they had come back to China from England one after another in the early fifties, for they are brothers and sister of a family by the name of Xiong, which means: pandas or bear. Needless to say, they all prefer beloved “pandas” to clumsy (笨拙的) “Bear”, so this pet name has stuck to them to this very day, when they are respectively seventy-one, seventy and sixty-nine years of age.

       The eldest Pandas is Prof. D.L. Xiong, called “Old Sister” by her brothers since their childhood. Her pen name is simple: Deh Lan. She has been training translators and interpreters (解释者、口译人员) for nearly half the century, and has written over a score of English textbooks by now;  the newly published ones are a series of 《德兰实用英语》. Since her retirement twelve years ago, she has been writing Chinese novels for a change, including a successful trilogy (三部曲) named《海外归人》.

The second Pandas is her brother D.W. Xiong , who served (服役) in the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteers during the Korean War, and was awarded quite a number of medals for his brilliant work that had something to do with English. After that he taught English at a military college for many years. Then he became a language polisher （定稿员）for English newspaper china daily, when he retired, he began to do all kinds of translation at leisure, including turning his sister’s Chinese novels into English.

The youngest Panda is old Prof. D.N Xiong of Beijing Foreign Studies University, where he has been teaching since he was a young man, in those old days his colleagues used to call him “Little Pandas”, and his students called him “Small Teacher”, for he was not only young in age, but also small size. Since then he has been the language polisher of countless English textbooks, and he is the only English language consultant (顾问) of the revised (修订) edition of the huge Chinese English Dictionary, as well as the language polisher of this magazine.

You might well ask: how is it that all the three Pandas have become authorities of English? The answer is simple: they have two “mother tongues” – Chinese and English. Their father, S.I. Xiong, was a famous Chinese playwright in the west. Just before the Second World War, he took his three children to England, where they went to school and later to Oxford University. Since their return to the land they belong to, all of them have been doing their best in china’s English language field for over four decades.

With the passing years, the three patriotic (爱国的) Little Pandas of yesterday have gradually (逐渐地) become the three respected Old Pandas of today.