With thanks and squashy hugs to my (very) long-suffering family – Michael, Oscar, Leni and Yve – whom I frequently torture with interesting dinners when I’m trying to meet a writing deadline. And a huge vielen dank (nochmal!) to my brother-in-law, Stefan Kachel, and to my sister, Ruth, for keeping Schumacher on the right side of outlandishness.
My gratitude to all my friends and collaborators at Allen & Unwin is boundless and eternal, with especial thanks to Eva Mills, Jodie Webster, Sandra Nobes, Liz Kemp, Maria Tsiakopoulos, Sheralyn Bavinton, Elise Jones, and my friend and editor across many years and books, Hilary Reynolds, for the chats, the dumplings and the shoulders.
Something I feel is very important to acknowledge here is why I started to write the adventures of Qing and Harley in the first place. When I was growing up as a migrant, Chinese-Australian kid I never (and this is not a writerly exaggeration) read any stories that featured anyone remotely like me. I had to imagine myself into all the books I was reading and it’s a big part of why I write fantasy novels today. As a child, I found the fantasy genre more inclusive than anything available in the children’s literature section of any library I found myself in. So the Children of the Dragon books are for the kid I was and my own children, but also for every Chinese-Australian kid who longs to see themselves validated, and recognised, in the stories we publish, supposedly for all humans. These books are also for every marginalised or ‘mainstream’ reader who wants to see a bit more of the spectrum of real people we encounter in life – every single day – in the pages of the books we read.
This is a work of fiction, and of my feverish imagination. All the names, characters, descriptions and events in this book are entirely fictional. Any errors are entirely mine.