Xiaxue

Xiaxue
Xiaxue at the National Library in September 2005
Born	Cheng Yan Yan (1984-04-28) April 28, 1984 (age 32) Teban Gardens, Singapore
Residence	Lorong Ah Soo, Singapore
Citizenship	Singaporean
Education	Xingnan Primary School River Valley High School Singapore Polytechnic
Occupation	Blogger online television personality
Years active	2003–present
Spouse(s)	Mike Sayre (m. 2010)
Children	Dashiel Sayre
Website	xiaxue.blogspot.com

Cheng Yan Yan Wendy (born Cheng Yan Yan; 28 April 1984), better known by her pseudonym Xiaxue, is a Singaporean blogger and online television personality who writes about her life, fashion and local issues in a provocative style. Her main blog, which attracts about 50,000 readers daily, has won prestigious blog awards and earned her sponsorship deals, as well as stints as a columnist and TV show host, but some of her posts have sparked national controversies. She is married to American engineer Mike Sayre and they have one child.

Born in Singapore on 28 April 1984, Xiaxue studied at River Valley High School and graduated from Singapore Polytechnic with a diploma in mass media, then briefly worked as a project coordinator. Her father, an antique dealer, and her mother, a property agent, are divorced; she also has a younger brother. For a year, she maintained a paper diary, which her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend threw away during a Chinese New Year spring cleaning. Wanting to air her thoughts in a space that nobody could throw away, she started blogging in April 2003. She underwent plastic surgery, sponsored by MediaCorp TV, to "correct her bulbous nose" in 2006. In 2010, she married American engineer Mike Sayre, whom she met online and had dated for three years, and in March 2013, she gave birth to a boy named Dashiel.

Xiaxue has ten blogs, including her untitled main blog (usually known as xiaxue.blogspot.com), a geeky blog, her media centre and several private blogs. Although she writes in the English language, she selected her pseudonym, which means "snowing" in Mandarin Chinese, because it "had that tinge of mysterious, beautiful girl thing about it". On her main blog, which attracts about 50,000 readers daily, she provides updates about her personal life, posts photographs, writes about topics such as fashion, discusses local issues such as "nasty taxi drivers", and posts paid advertorials. She often uses profanity in her posts and her success has been attributed to her provocative writing style. According to a survey she conducted, which attracted 6000 responses, her readers are mainly Singaporean, female, young adults interested in fashion and "looking for an alternative voice". Awards that her main blog has won include the 2004 and 2005 Wizbang Weblog Awards Best Asian Blog and the 2005 Bloggies Best Asian Weblog. In July 2005, a hacker defaced the blog, but she managed to restore its contents. Her main blog, the first from Singapore to enter the Technorati Global Top 100 Blogs List, was selected for the National Library Board archive in 2008.