She was a three-time winner of the National Award for Outstanding Reportage Literature, for "The Flight of the Wild-Geese", "Mandarin Oranges", and "The Wooden Cabin".

Her father Huang Cengming was an engineer who studied in Japan, and her mother Chen Cong was a well-educated housewife.

In response, she wrote an essay entitled "Under a Big Tree", which was published in the weekly magazine Huangjin Shidai, edited by her brother.

[3] Soon after their marriage in 1948, Huang and Zhao both joined the Kunlun Film Studio, run by the underground Chinese Communist Party.

[6] After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Huang switched to writing as her main career, which was also her childhood passion.

Under Mao Zedong's directive that "the arts must serve the workers, peasants and soldiers", Chinese films became dominated by stereotypical proletarian "heroes" with few roles suitable for her.

[7] During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Mao's wife Jiang Qing, who had been an actress in the 1930s, launched a campaign to persecute former Shanghai colleagues who were familiar with her past.

Many of Huang and Zhao's friends in the film and drama industry were driven to death, including Zheng Junli, Cai Chusheng, and Wang Ying.

Instead of the famous and the successful, she chose her subjects mainly among the common people, especially intellectuals who quietly struggled for their ideals but were belittled and denounced by society.

[8] In 1977, she published her work Heart in the journal People's Literature commemorating her colleague and friend Shangguan Yunzhu, who had been persecuted to death during the Cultural Revolution.

[9] Huang often applied scriptwriting techniques, such as switches and flashbacks, to her reportage, and enriched her writing with poetic lyricism.

[10] She won the National Award for Outstanding Reportage Literature three times, for her works "The Flight of the Wild-Geese", "Mandarin Oranges", and "The Wooden Cabin".

In November 1986, however, Zhou Wei sued Huang for his mother's inheritance worth about 120,000 yuan, which was a huge sum in 1980s China.

According to Huang's court statements, she had kept Zhou Xuan's property in safe custody and did not distribute it to the brothers because of the dispute between them.

[26] In 2006, Peng Xiaolian directed the film Shanghai Rumba which is loosely based on the love story of Huang Zongying and Zhao Dan, starring Yuan Quan and Xia Yu.