“There are many corners and back alleys to be discovered in this tiny city. We who walk only on the busiest thoroughfares and elbow our way through the impatient crowds everyday find only faces as pale as our own. So people begin to talk about travels in Paris and Rome. But we ought to wonder if we have been too contemptuous of our own city.”
Hong Kong native Xi Xi began to write in the 1950s. Her body of work includes poems, movie critiques, screenplays, novels and an experimental pictorial encyclopedia. Tireless and prolific, Xi Xi has remained an unrestrained writer whose writing boasts of innocence and insightfulness sixty years after she embarked on her literary career.

Director Fruit Chan takes the audience into Xi Xi’s world by visiting and documenting the places and sights depicted in the writer’s works. They include the home where she grew up in To Kwa Wan, the neighborhood she used to stroll, the flower market from her childhood, the pier of Ma Tau Kok, Mei Li Mansion, the racks for drying laundry and electricity cables on the terrace, as well as disappearing photo studios and traditional restaurants. Chan liberally draws on a myriad of cinematographic techniques to represent the various forms and structures of Xi Xi’s diverse literary oeuvre. The result is a multilayered visual narration that recounts Xi Xi’s frank, nuanced observations and insights about Hong Kong.