Xi Xi, born Zhang Yan in Shanghai's Pudong district on 7 October 1937 to a family from Zhongshan in Guangdong, moved to Hong Kong with her parents in 1950 and settled in To Kwa Wan. Originally named Zhang Yan with a different character, she changed it at her grandmother's wish for better fortune. After secondary school at Heep Yunn School, where she moved from the Chinese to the English stream, she entered Grantham College of Education in 1957 and taught in government primary schools for about twenty years, taking part in the 1970s teachers' rights movement before retiring early in 1979 to write full time. She had already published as a schoolgirl, bringing out a sonnet, 'On the Lake', in 1953, and went on to place fiction, poetry and essays in journals such as Chinese Students' Weekly; in 1965 her short story 'Maria' took first prize in that paper's youth writing competition. She also worked in film criticism and screenwriting, adapting Little Women into the screenplay Dai Luk Nin Wa in 1967 for Shaw Brothers, cutting old newsreel footage into the experimental short The Galaxy in 1969, and helping run the journal Thumb Weekly and the Suyeh Press with friends. Her work ranged across fiction, poetry and essays. From 1975 her novel My City was serialised in the newspaper Express and appeared as a book under Suyeh Press in 1979, describing the daily life of a group of young Hongkongers in a childlike voice; in 2000 Asiaweek listed it among the 100 best Chinese-language novels of the twentieth century. Her 1982 short story 'Like a Girl Like Me' is among her best known, while the novels The Scissors, The Flying Carpet and Mourning a Breast dealt with urban change, family history and her own experience of cancer. Fond of collage and of setting image beside word, she combined playfulness with experiment and often used fairy-tale and magical-realist devices to write about Hong Kong. In later years she wrote My Georgia, built around a Georgian dolls' house, and brought hand-sewn cloth dolls into books such as The Chronicle of Bear Sewing. She wrote to the very end, continuing even through illness. She won the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature in 2019 as the first Hong Kong writer to do so, and Sweden's Cikada Prize the same year, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 16th Hong Kong Arts Development Awards in 2022. Her works have been translated into several languages. She died of heart failure in Hong Kong on 18 December 2022, aged 85.
My City turned 'my city' into a common way for Hongkongers to speak about local identity, and by bringing fairy tale, collage and dialect into fiction she opened an experimental path beyond Hong Kong's realist tradition; through the journal Suyeh she also connected younger local writers for many years.
Achievements
- 1975 · Her novel My City began serialisation in the newspaper Express; it was published as a book by Suyeh Press in 1979.
- 2000 · My City was listed among Asiaweek's 100 best Chinese-language novels of the twentieth century.
- 2019 · Won the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, the first Hong Kong writer to receive it.