My Screening Room

My Screening Room is a collection of essays by the Hong Kong writer Yi Shu, gathering short pieces she wrote for newspaper and magazine columns. The book was first published in 1975 by Hong Kong's Xiaocao Publishing House, reissued in 1986 by Cosmos Books Ltd. in the "Yi Shu Works Series" (series no. 061), with further editions including one in 1989. "Screening room" was originally a film-industry term for a small projection room where rushes are shown; Yi Shu borrowed it as a column name, and readers may see it as her sending fragments of life, observations, and reflections onto the screen for self-examination. The subjects stay close to daily life: the joys and trials of writing and the writing trade, films and stars, the pleasures of living, city dwellings, family and children, the small business of friends' comings and goings, and even observations from her time in England—queuing, posting letters, corresponding with relatives and friends. Pieces run from a few hundred to at most one or two thousand characters, brisk and sharp in tone, fond of short sentences and plain description, often self-mocking and pointed. Written around the time Yi Shu was rising to fame, these pieces present the daily state of a young writer who treats writing as "a way of making change," teaching or working while filing copy, and they leave several sidelights on 1970s Hong Kong. For readers familiar with Yi Shu's fiction, this book is an important entry point to her essay style and temperament.