By Dr. Mark A. Rafter, Editorial Director
In all my travels as a Modern-Day Marco Polo, I have met few people who make the word “impossible” sound like a clerical error. Yuan Yuan Rebecca Xu is one of them. She is a graphic designer, a fashion designer, an architectural model maker, a miniature-food artist, a writer of a 5,000-page family chronicle, and possibly a future screenwriter. She collects beginnings, not titles.
I met Rebecca through a connection that felt less like coincidence and more like an appointment we had both kept without knowing it. “I believe that people come into our lives for a reason,” she told me. “It’s all part of God’s plan. If things feel right and go smoothly, I just keep going.” She has spent her whole life stepping forward without waiting to see the entire road.
That road started with the rhythmic sound of her mother’s vintage sewing machine. Rebecca grew up in a close family in China — an educator father, a mother she adored, a younger brother — and her mother carried a quiet wish: that one day, if she had a daughter, she would sew beautiful clothes for her by hand — an ordinary family dream that turned out to be a prophecy.
A company in China recognized Rebecca’s potential and supported her through design school. She graduated from Shantou University in Graphic Design — her alma mater now collects her works — and after immigrating to Canada in 2001 as an Art Director, she built graphic design companies across China, Canada, and the United States. She later served as Design Director for Reader’s magazine in North America, handling advertising, logos, and fashion-show music and videos. More than once she was a one-woman team doing the work of an entire department.
Over thirty years, her craft kept spilling into new territory. Graphic design fed fashion design. Design thinking wandered into architecture and model making, where she turned house designs into real homes with no formal architecture degree — she learned by doing, as she always has. Her philosophy: fashion should be authentic and wearable, not a display piece; design thinking belongs in fashion craft; and sustainability should be daily practice, not a slogan — thoughtful pattern cutting, repurposed fabrics, mindful choices.
Her newest Chaoyuanmeng collection may be the truest expression of who she is. It is built on hand-painted Chinese ink paintings by her own daughter, Angela. Rebecca transferred Angela’s flowing landscapes onto silk and satin, turning the artwork into Cheongsam-inspired pieces — a conversation between East and West, and between two generations. A mother wearing her daughter’s art. The dream that started at her mother’s sewing machine has become a family relay.
Heritage runs through her other work too. She produced a Suzhou hand-embroidered silk piece, “Treasured Steeds,” inspired by the imperial horse-painting tradition of the Qing Dynasty’s Qianlong period — the kind of court art associated with Giuseppe Castiglione, known in China as Lang Shining, whose work fused Western realism with Chinese technique. Rendered in fine natural mulberry silk thread, the piece carries the horse’s old meanings in Chinese culture: strength, courage, success, prosperity, forward motion.
Much of Rebecca’s creativity lives far from any runway. Her miniature-food art was a passion she passed down to Angela. And during roughly a decade devoted mainly to wifehood and motherhood, Rebecca wrote in Chinese an extraordinary record of her children’s early years: about 5,000 pages across 24 books, with photographs and illustrations, meant to preserve the years before age five that children cannot remember for themselves. She plans to compile those volumes into two books. She creates to hold onto a moment, a relationship, a memory — not only for exhibitions and awards.
The recognition has followed anyway. Rebecca was named one of Canada’s Top 10 Outstanding Women in 2019 and received the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal. She has been honored by Member of Parliament Peter S. Julian and Canadian Senator Victor Oh, and she and Angela received an award from Guy P. Djoken — the Executive Director, CEO and President of the UNESCO Center for Peace.
And the journey keeps opening doors. A Hong Kong film producer approached her about acting; after reading the script, she decided to write her own — a story following a fashion designer that weaves together artificial intelligence and fashion, two subjects she loves. The director responded positively, and plans called for him to travel to Vancouver to discuss developing the project. Screenwriter may soon join the list.
Rebecca lives by a simple line: “As long as you have a dream to chase, success or failure does not have to determine whether you take that first step. What matters is that you dared to move forward.”
After years of traveling the world in search of treasure — my grandfather gave me his Marco Polo Treasure Map when I was young — I have learned that treasure is not always gold or silver. Sometimes it is the journey, sometimes a friendship. And sometimes, when you least expect it, the treasure is another person entirely.
In this chapter of my Modern-Day Marco Polo journey, that person was Yuan Yuan Rebecca Xu. We have agreed to join our creativity on future writing and artistic projects, bringing the next generation along through Angela’s remarkable talent. But Rebecca would tell you the most important thing is that we have taken the first step. Readers can explore her work at Yuandream.com.
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