Leung Ping-kwan, (Chinese: 梁秉鈞, 12 March 1949 – 5 January 2013[1]) whose pen name was Yesi (Chinese: 也斯),[2] was a Hong Kong poet, novelist, essayist, translator, teacher, and scholar who received the Hong Kong Medal of Honor (MH).

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.

[3] 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 1984, Yesi obtained his PhD degree in comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Yesi had achievements across many areas of literature, including poetry, prose, novels, drama, and literary and cultural criticism.

According to Yesi, people usually adopt a pen name that contains meanings, which would give the readers a fixed feeling or impression towards their works before they read them.

Yesi wanted to break out of this, hence, he used the combination of two meaningless words, which usually appear in classical Chinese literary works, as his pen name.

[citation needed] Images of Hong Kong[6] This poem embodies the spirit and concerns of Yesi's work, including tone and recurrent themes.

The novel Paper Cut-outs (剪紙) is composed of two story lines, each about the narrator's interaction with a female friend.

Images of Hong Kong includes many different locations: Guangguang studio in Nathan Road, Star Ferry clock tower, Aberdeen, China Club, and so on.

In the poem On a Road, A Wanderer: I choose my own direction big fish glide in the aquariums food stalls offer whopper fishballs I'm not lured … I don’t have to see so clearly … if by chance the city glare blinds me I glance away, keeping my own pace The above describes how the narrator strolling unaffected by the surroundings.

He observes and sees “big fish glide”, “food stalls”, and so on, yet uses the outer appearance of the city, to search his heart.

Also, the narrator says that history is a “montage of images”, and evaluates if Hong Kong's past is only figures of famous buildings like the Star Ferry.

Yesi is recognized as a Hong Kong poet, not only because he grew up in the city, but more importantly due to his concern for it.

Again, take Paper Cut-outs as an example; the narrator's two female friends actually symbolize Hong Kong people's identity.

For example, Qiáo 喬, a modern women, is a character showing that Hong Kong people do not understand their Chinese origin very well, but on the other hand, are not completely westernized.

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.”[citation needed] In short, Yesi's works are deeply concerned with Hong Kong, no matter what the topic or context.

Your four walls are mottled, the ancient stories have turned into reliefs, in the flickering light and shadow your magnificent and inevitabilities of history.”[6] Very often, there are interactions of “I” and “you” in Yesi's works, but the latter is sometimes an object or a place.

This seems to describe the narrator, or perhaps Yesi himself, trying to walk in “[his] own pace” (Images of Hong Kong) without being distracted by the world, or by mainstream values.

Yesi “was the first to bring in Latin American literary icons such as Gabriel Garcìa Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges and Mario Vargas Llosa before they were widely known”.

In the novel Paper Cut-outs, linkage between the two seemingly separate story lines is imagined and drawn by readers.

For example, his Bittermelon poem praises this plant, which symbolizes virtues stressed in Chinese culture – patience and endurance.

The poem echoes the Chinese literary tradition of praising an object that symbolizes virtue and good people.

For example, the narrator keeps looking for an angle in Images of Hong Kong and in another poem, City of Films[5] is introspective in evaluating the best way to capture Hong Kong like a movie shooting: ...then in the second half, find you're your enemy's sonlife goes on without knowing what’s happenedif reality's too hard, there’s always soft focusthe world's still out there, the PR guy’s at the doorwith new schemes for artful promotionand for the film a new titleYesi was recognized as both a writer and a scholar, received various literary awards, and was invited as visiting scholar to universities across the globe.

The German professor Wolfgang Kubin commented that Yesi was “a rare Hong Kong writer with a global vision”.