Leung Ping-kwan

In 2010, Yesi stated publicly that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He died on 5 January 2013.

Books a1n9d8 5C iti《《書與城市》(Books and Cities). Hong Kong: Xiangang; reprint: OUP,2002, 299pp.

Yesi returned to Hong Kong after earning his doctorate. He taught at the Department of English Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. In 1998 he obtained a position as a professor in comparative literature in the Chinese Department at Lingnan University. Later on, he also became director of the Research Institute for the Humanities. He specialized in teaching literature and film, comparative literature, the literature of Hong Kong, modern literary criticism, and Chinese literary writing.

After graduating from Hong Kong Baptist College, now Hong Kong Baptist University, with a bachelor's degree in English (BA in English Language and Literature), Yesi got a job first as a secondary school teacher, then as the editor of the arts supplement of the South China Morning Post (SCMP). In 1978, he went to America for further studies. In 1984, Yesi obtained his PhD degree in comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego. His thesis was entitled "Aesthetics of Opposition: A Study of the Modernist Generation of Chinese Poets, 1936-1949".

He began writing in the 1960s and quickly became known as a translator of foreign-language literature and for his editorial work on a number of literary publications targeted at young Chinese readers in both Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Leung Ping-kwan, ( Chinese: 梁秉鈞, 12 March 1949 – 5 January 2013) whose pen name was Yesi (Chinese: 也斯), was a Hong Kong poet, novelist, essayist, translator, teacher, and scholar who received the Hong Kong Medal of Honor (MH). He was an important long-time cultural figure in Hong Kong.

Yesi was born in Xinhui District in Guangdong during 1949. The same year, his family settled in Hong Kong, and he was raised there. His father died when he was four.

Even in the most seemingly unlikely sphere to be associated with Hong Kong, Yesi shows his concern for the city. For him, travelling has a lot to do with home. The book Leung Ping Kwan (1949 – 2013), A Retrospective 回看.也斯, says that “[e]very foreign place he visited invoked in him even deeper thoughts about Hong Kong. He wrote copiously about his cross-border experiences, in prose and in poetry, from eastern culture to western culture, from literature and art to cultural observations, from old ideas to new concepts, posing questions that would not have been formulated if he had not left Hong Kong, and trying to portray, to a Hong Kong wallowing in old habits, new sets of emotion and knowledge in hope of a change.”