Born and raised in Hong Kong, Elsie graduated from HKU, majoring in English, and taught at King’s College, Hong Kong, before leaving for her master’s programme at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her husband’s studies and work took them to Columbus, Ohio, then Chicago where she acquired a master’s degree in library science. Raising their three sons in Chicago, Elsie balanced her role as homemaker with a career as a librarian. In 1987, the family moved back to Toronto where Elsie worked with the Toronto Public Library. At the same time, she took creative writing courses at Toronto’s Humber School for Writers. Her first novel Hui Gui, about China and Hong Kong in the 20th century, was nominated for ForeWord Magazine’s Best Fiction Award, 2005.
Elsie’s extensive travels with her husband for his work have taken her to exotic places. These she used as locations for her subsequent novels. Heart of the Buddha, set in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, was published by Greenleaf Publishing, Texas, in 2009, and nominated for ForeWord Magazine’s Best Multicultural Fiction Award. Elsie won the inaugural Saphira Prize for her manuscript “Ghost Cave: a novel of Sarawak”, published by WiPS in 2014. All three published novels are distributed worldwide.
Since 2015, Elsie and her husband have made California their home. Her latest novel, “Sea Fever”, a mystery thriller set in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, is the product of much travel and research in that post-Soviet republic. It is looking for a publisher at this time.