Xi Xi

Hsi Hsi/Sai Sai/Xi Xi (7 October 1937 – 18 December 2022) was the pseudonym of the Hong Kong author and poet Cheung Yin, "Ellen"/.

She was born in Shanghai, and moved to Hong Kong at the age of twelve.

She was formerly a teacher and had been a Hong Kong-based writer.

Her works are also popular in Taiwan and mainland China.

She had become a rather well-known figure to many secondary school students in Hong Kong.

This was due in particular to one of her essays, "Shops" (店鋪), which was adopted as reading material for the Chinese Language paper in the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (HKCEE) by the Hong Kong Examinations Authority of the time.

Hsi Hsi was born in 1937, though her Hong Kong identity card showed her year of birth as 1938.

She thus believed that 1938 was her year of birth over the course of her life, until she consulted family documents following the death of her sister in the 2010's, and found out that she was actually born in 1937.

In 1950, she immigrated to Hong Kong with her parents.

Her father worked at Kowloon Motor Bus Company (KMB) as a ticket checker.

Additionally, he had been a coach for a Division A football club, later becoming a referee since he was in Shanghai, thus Hsi Hsi developed an immense interest in football when she was young.

Hsi Hsi was born as one of five children of her parents, two brothers and two sisters.

Hsi Hsi attended secondary school at Heep Yunn School, where lessons were taught in Cantonese; she started her English-instructed lessons from Form 4.

As a junior secondary school student, she began to write for the local newspapers and magazines.

According to her in A Girl Like Me, the character 西 in her pen name is a pictogram symbolizing a girl playing hopskotch, which was her favourite game during childhood.

Hsi Hsi's first piece of published writing, a fourteen-line modern Chinese poem, was published in Everyone's Literature (人人文學) in the 1950s.

When Hsi Hsi was studying in Form 3, she won the first prize in the senior section of a writing competition organised by Learn-Mates (學友).

It has now become a staple in Hong Kong literature, ranked 51st by the Yazhou Zhoukan as one of the 100 best Chinese novels in the 20th century.

In 1957, she continued her studies at the Grantham College of Education (later merged with other constitute colleges to form the Hong Kong Institute of Education), and became a teacher at Farm Road Government Primary School after graduation.

Besides poetry, novels, essays, fairy tales and translated literature, Hsi Hsi also wrote TV screenplays in the 1960s, like The Dark Green Age (黛綠年華) and The Window (窗), as well as numerous film reviews.

She was a pioneer in the field of experimental film in Hong Kong.

As well as contributing to multiple newspaper and magazine columns, she was the editor of Chinese Students' Weekly poetry section (1960s), as well as Thumb Weekly (大拇指周報) (1975–1977) and Plain Leaf Literature (素葉文學) (1981–1984), which was the 68-volume magazine first published in 1980 by Su Yeh Publications, a publishing company founded by Xi Xi and her friends.

Su Yeh Publications dedicated itself to publishing works by Hong Kong authors.

My City was published in 1979.

Originally a serial on the newspaper Hong Kong Express, she presented the world as seen through young people's eyes.

She also illustrated the serial with her own drawings, attached along with each publication in the newspaper.

While the serial was not an attempt to critique social issues, it nevertheless tackled issues such as overcrowded spaces and overloading academic pressure.

Deer Hunt, published in 1982, was inspired by the history during the Qing Dynasty when Qianlong was emperor.

The novel described a plan of assassinating the emperor, and the remembrance of the emperor to his grandfather Kangxi.

In 1983, United Daily News published Xi Xi's A Woman Like Me (像我這樣的一個女子), a collection of short stories written between 1976 and 1982, and it was the first time her works were introduced to Taiwanese people.

The collection won Xi Xi the Recommended Novella Prize, the highest honour in the United Daily News 8th Novel awards.

Up until 1984, the publishing company had produced books in 22 categories, including A Loafer Who Burnt His Guitar (焚琴的浪子), a collection of Ma Lang's (馬朗) poems; A Tour in Mirrors (鏡遊), a Chinese movie critic's collection by Lin Nian-Tong (林年同); and My Resplendence (我的燦爛), an essay and poem collection by Zhong Ling-Ling (鍾玲玲).

It was reprinted twice in Taiwan, once in 1986 and once in 1999.

Xi Xi enjoyed travelling; she has been to many countries in Eastern Europe, as well as Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and, most frequently, mainland China.

Travelling to these places has done much to inspire her writing.

The publishing company continued its paper-based publishing until 2015.

It also became the inspiration for the 2015 documentary My City directed by Fruit Chan.

In 2019, Hsi Hsi was the recipient of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature.

Hsi Hsi's ancestors came from Chungshan/Hsiangshan/Heungshan, Kwangtung (now Zhongshan, Guangdong).

She was born in Putung, Shanghai, where she would go on to attend primary school.