Xi Xi 西西 (also known as Sai Sai), pseudonym of Cheung Yin, was one of Hong Kong’s most beloved and prolific authors. Born in Shanghai in 1937, she moved to Hong Kong in 1950 and is among the first generation of writers to have grown up in the territory.
She began writing during the late 1950s and is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, as well as numerous newspaper and magazine columns and screenplays. After she won Taiwan’s prestigious United Daily fiction prize in 1983 for her short story “A Woman Like Me,” her fame catapulted throughout the Sinophone world, where she has continued to cultivate an enthusiastic readership. Asia Weekly praised her novel My City as one of the one hundred best Chinese-language novels of the twentieth century, and the China Times selected her semi-autobiographical novel Mourning a Breast as one of the best ten books of 1992. She was named Writer of the Year for the 2011 Hong Kong Book Fair and was the recipient of Taiwan’s 2014 Hsing Yun Global Chinese Literary Award, among many other distinctions, and her work has become part of Hong Kong’s official high school curriculum in Chinese literature. Her recent books include the novel My Georgia and the award-winning essay and photograph collections The Teddy Bear Chronicles and Chronicles of Apes and Monkeys. Her literary career is the subject of Fruit Chan’s 2015 documentary film My City. Her books available in English translation include A Girl Like Me and Other Stories (edited by Eva Hung, with numerous translators), Marvels of a Floating City and Other Stories (edited by Eva Hung; translated by Eva Hung, John Dent-Young, and Esther Dent-Young), My City: A Hongkong Story (translated by Eva Hung), Flying Carpet: A Tale of Fertillia (translated by Diana Yue), and Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi (translated by Jennifer Feeley and winner of the 2017 Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Award in Literature and Fiction). She died in December 2022.
