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A former public-school instructor, she wrote poems about animals and youngsters that had been typically steeped in commentary about wealth disparity and David-and-Goliath energy dynamics. In a single, “Butterflies Are Lightsome Issues,” heartless butterflies flutter freely as kangaroos are weighed down by the concerns and issues collected of their pouches. In one other, “The Butterfly and the Crocodile,” a butterfly defeats a crocodile by sealing its eyes shut with “smooth, sweet-smelling pollen.”
“She’s just like the butterfly,” stated Jennifer Feeley, who translated a few of Xi Xi’s work, together with the poetry collections “Not Written Phrases” (2016) and “Carnival of Animals” (2022). “She’s actually good at exhibiting how issues that folks would possibly dismiss — that appear very gentle, generally female, tender and kooky — are literally crucial and powerful.”
Xi Xi was born Cheung Yin in Shanghai in 1937, to folks of Cantonese descent. Her father, Cheung Lok, was a clerk at a British transport firm, Butterfield & Swire, and her mom, Luk Wah Chun, took care of the couple’s 5 youngsters and their growing old mother and father.
Xi Xi is survived by two brothers, David Cheung Yung and Cheung Yiu.
In 1950 the household moved to Hong Kong, the place Mr. Cheung discovered work as a bus inspector. Cash was scarce, and Cheung Yin was at all times two days late in paying her month-to-month college charges. Whereas nonetheless a pupil, she started promoting poems and essays to newspapers for pocket cash.
She educated as a instructor on the Grantham Faculty of Schooling, now a part of the Schooling College of Hong Kong, from 1957 to 1960, and later taught Chinese language, English and arithmetic in main colleges for greater than 20 years.
She wrote broadly and prolifically whereas educating. She printed a whole bunch of items of movie criticism underneath completely different pen names and, utilizing the pseudonym Hai Lan, wrote scripts for the Hong Kong film studio Shaw Brothers, together with a 1967 adaptation of “Little Women.”
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