Xi Xi (also known as Sai Sai), penname of Cheung Yin, was born in Shanghai in 1937. In 1950, she moved to Hong Kong. After graduating from the Grantham College of Education, she worked as a primary school teacher for several years before retiring to focus on writing full-time. Her fiction and poetry have won numerous awards throughout the world, including the Creative Writing Award for the 1st Hong Kong Arts Development Council Awards for Literature in 1997; Sin Chew Daily's Hua Zong Literary Award in 2005; Author of the Year at the Hong Kong Book Fair in 2011; the Commitment Award of the 4th Hsing Yun Global Chinese Literary Award in 2014; and the Newman Prize in Chinese Literature (Poetry) at the University of Oklahoma in the United States and the Cikada Prize in Sweden in 2019.