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Hsi Hsi/ Sai Sai/ Xi Xi
bit.ly-3hwoGSK was the pseudonym of the Hongkongers author and poet Cheung Yin, "Ellen"/ Zhang Yan (). 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 HKEAA of the time. In 2019, Hsi Hsi was the recipient of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature.
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.
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. 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). The publishing company continued its paper-based publishing until 2015.
Deer Hunt, published in 1982, was inspired by the history during the Qing dynasty when Qianlong Emperor was emperor. The novel described a plan of assassinating the emperor, and the remembrance of the emperor to his grandfather Kangxi Emperor. It was reprinted twice in Taiwan, once in 1986 and once in 1999.
Xi Xi enjoyed travelling; she visited many countries in Eastern Europe, as well as Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and, most frequently, mainland China. Travelling to these places did much to inspire her writing. 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 people. The collection won Xi Xi the Recommended Novella Prize, the highest honour in the United Daily News 8th Novel awards.
The 1992 novel Mourning a Breast (哀悼乳房) was written in order to document her feelings, thoughts, and encounters during her treatment with breast cancer, which she was diagnosed with in 1989. Due to the complications of her cancer surgery, she lost the function of her right hand by 1999 and had to write with her left hand. The novel was nominated by the China Times in 1992 as one of the ten best books of the year. It also provided the inspiration for the 2006 movie 2 Become 1 starring Miriam Yeung.
Flying Carpet (飛氈), a novel inspired by the history of Hong Kong in the past one hundred years, was published in 1999. In the novel, Hong Kong was given the name of Fertillia (肥土鎮), a town at the edge of Dragonland (巨龍國), a projection of China, and the novel described how the town transformed in three generations.
In 2009, Xi Xi published the essay and photograph collection, The Teddy Bear Chronicles (縫熊志). She donated the teddy bears sewn and photographed in the book to the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library in 2018. In 2016, a collection of poems by Xi Xi was published in English under the title Not Written Words, which received the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize in 2017. In 2019, Xi Xi was awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature and the Cikada Prize.
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