[1] When she was 6, her father Chao-yin Shih (Chinese: 時昭瀛; pinyin: Shí Zhāoyíng) served as a diplomat for the Nationalist government[2] in Canada, and Hsio-yen lived in Ottawa for a time before returning to China.
She attended high school in Shanghai before the Chinese Communist Revolution.
After the Chinese Civil War she attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts, graduating in Art History in 1955.
[1] Her 1961 Ph.D. thesis is titled Early Chinese Pictorial Style: From the Later Han to the Six Dynasties.
[3] From 1961 to 1976, Hsio-yen Shih worked in Toronto, Canada, holding joint appointments at the Far Eastern Department of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the Department of East Asian Studies of the University of Toronto.