Chapter 10. A Woman in Esports: Miss

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 十 女电竞人Miss

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 26, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19623766

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Mention Miss, whose real name is Han Yiying, and most esports fans still picture a small, delicate girl with fine features. She always wore the smile of the girl next door when she hosted and cast, and if she were standing beside you, you would feel an urge to protect her.

Honestly, that was my impression too before I interviewed her. After five hours of talking with her, I could not help thinking: this girl is one tough character.

In June 2012, at the seventh StarsWar esports gala at the Super Brand Mall in Shanghai, Miss was voted 2012 StarsWar Best Female Esports Player by 30 members of the esports academy drawn from 26 gaming organisations. She said afterwards that as she collected the award she thought back over all her years of fighting and was overwhelmed.

Many people may not know that besides being a well-known esports caster, Miss was also an active player for the Korean professional team StarTale, and the only foreign woman on that roster. Her tryout came about on the recommendation of Tang Wensheng, the CEO of Zowie, and was overseen personally by StarTale's captain, Rainbow. Afterwards Rainbow was astonished: he had not expected a Chinese woman to play in such a masculine style. StarTale went on to invite her more than once to move to South Korea and build her career there.

Miss is also the eldest child of a large extended family back home, holding the place of both eldest son and eldest daughter, because each of her parents was the eldest in their own family. Baby-faced as she is, she now carries the burden of supporting her parents and her maternal grandparents on her own, and she looks after the jobs and schooling of many younger cousins as well.

Girls from Sichuan can take hardship. Miss was born in Neijiang, Sichuan Province, between Chengdu and Chongqing. Her mother was the head of a kindergarten and loved music, chess, calligraphy and painting; her father was a primary school mathematics teacher with a passion for history. Han is a large and long-established surname in the area, deep-rooted and widely respected. The well-known singer Dao Lang is a first cousin of one of Miss's parents, and he often invites her to family dinners in Beijing. Because her parents stood high in the family's generational order, Miss was always treated as the eldest son and eldest grandson, and at every large family dinner from childhood on she was made to sit at the head table. That may be the root of the man's heart she carries inside her. It also meant that nobody dared bully her, whether she was out playing or at school. Once every flat in her building was burgled except hers. She still cannot explain quite how that happened, but ... we understand.

Growing up in such a "safe" environment, Miss was the leader of the local children, taking a crowd of boys and girls climbing and scrambling over everything in sight, and she was still hitting male classmates with a stool in her final year of junior high. Her school career was strange too. Her mother put her into the first year at the age of four, but she was so small, and she really was only four, and the desks were so high that she had to squat on her chair during lessons. She was still squatting in the sixth year, and when she started junior high a teacher assumed she was clowning around. In fact the teacher simply did not know that squatting had become second nature to her.

Many of the stories left me stunned. Miss talked about her childhood cheerfully enough, but personally I felt they did too much damage to her ladylike image, so ... let us leave them out.

Both her parents were teachers, yet they raised her with a completely free hand. From primary school to junior high, Miss did whatever she liked. There were plenty of books at home and she read whatever she wanted. She played her Xiaobawang console, a Chinese Famicom clone, until nobody around her could beat her, cleared Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, the arcade game Chinese players call Dinosaur Age, on a single coin, and ruled the roller rink. She came third in the whole school at table tennis. Her marks, however, were unremarkable, and as a young child she had no idea what pressure meant. Then in her second year of junior high she suddenly realised that her family was not well off, and that if she could not test her way out she would never see the world beyond. She threw herself into studying, and rather too hard: she shot straight into the top three of her year. At first her teachers suspected her of cheating and stood beside her to invigilate her alone during the monthly exams, and she still held her place in the top three. After the senior high entrance examination she got into the elite stream of the best high school in the area, and once the arts and sciences streams split she stayed around the top ten of her year.

High school changed her enormously. Her sense of self awoke, and she finally noticed that she was not a man, that hitting boys might now be dangerous as well as unbecoming, and that she was not as good at some things as she had assumed. She grew more restrained and quieter, and a good deal more feminine. She became her class's entertainment officer and started writing the sort of world-weary pieces teenagers write, publishing them in the school magazine.

For university, because she loved the sea, she applied to study accounting at Hainan University in Haikou.

Facing the sea, with spring blossoms in bloom.

Miss's university life began. By then she understood perfectly well that she was a girl, but at heart she was still the child leader who would not be outdone by any boy, and she began to show a real talent for competitive games. Two months after taking up nine-ball in her first year, she won a local tournament. She played a great deal of Counter-Strike, and through friends she came to Warcraft III.

Warcraft III, a real-time strategy game, gave Miss a new field in which she could beat boys, and she buried herself in studying tactics. Gradually the number of people around her who could beat her shrank, and she started looking for opponents online through gaming platforms. In that period she met another woman player with a fierce streak and a taste for beating boys: Zhu Li, known as Colagirl. As a friend of theirs put it, they assumed this Miss with the aggressive style was a man playing under a woman's name, until they watched her play in person and discovered she was a girl with the heart of a bloke.

In May 2007, at Colagirl's invitation, Miss joined the Beijing women's team First. That summer she bought a train ticket and sat through the 37-hour journey from Haikou to Beijing in a hard seat, and with that she formally entered the esports scene. Throughout the Warcraft III era, though, however she played, she could never surpass Colagirl, who was both her friend and the rival she could not beat.

In an age when women's tournaments were few, Miss often entered major men's events to make herself stronger, under enormous pressure. In a hall full of men she drew a great deal of attention and a good deal of contempt as well, and opponents she had never met would often mock her before a match. She was tense at first but got used to it, and after several occasions when male opponents smashed keyboards or cried after losing to her, she became more determined than ever to win some respect for women's esports.

Finally, at a Suning men's event in 2010, Miss beat a long line of male players to take her first title as the top woman in a men's tournament. At the star-studded Shenzhen Esports Open that same year she beat several male players to become the only woman to come through the group stage. Who says women cannot match men?

The more people thought Miss could not do something, the more determined she was to do it well. That refusal to accept defeat ran through her entire esports career.

During the summer of 2007, while training in Beijing, she ran out of money, and she was too shy to ask anyone for a loan. She went two days without eating. When she went to First to collect her wages, her bus card had one yuan on it, so she spent four mao on the bus and walked a long way for the rest. Once she had the money she found a small restaurant, bought a bottle of Minute Maid and a plate of rice topped with shredded pork and potato, and poured the lot down in one go, oblivious to the astonished looks from the middle-aged men around her.

So Miss went from the First women's team to Taiwan's UMX and then to Level99, chasing her dream while she was still studying.

What is hard to believe is that up to 2010, a girl in the flower of her youth like Miss had bought hardly any clothes. Because she played so many men's events, she was usually in a size-180 team jersey that hung on her like a bathrobe. She did not know how to do her hair or her make-up and could not even tell face wash from sunscreen. Yet by the time she had just graduated, when women her age were still looking for work, Miss had been supporting herself for several years on tournament winnings and her job as a professional player.

For a girl to fight her way through a man's world alone costs more than it costs a man.

Miss's move from professional player to caster was pure accident. In August 2010 she took part in the ECL stop in Xi'an, where the organiser Wu Gang invited her to cast Warcraft III for the first time, and the crowd responded warmly. At the end of 2010, He Peng, then head of the peripherals maker Steelseries in China, introduced her to Teng Linji, the operations director of GTV in Beijing, who was deputy general manager of GamesTV at the time of writing. That was how she joined GTV as a professional television caster. GTV here means the GTV esports channel run by Liaoning Television.

Miss had assumed she would cast Warcraft III at GTV, but the golden age of Warcraft III was long past and Dota was at its peak, so she was assigned to Dota, and later to StarCraft II and other games. Over those two years of presenting, Miss went from knowing nothing about Dota or StarCraft II to being an all-round caster and professional player. Everyone could see how hard she worked over those two years.

The road from player to television presenter was not smooth. She was thin-skinned, her Mandarin was not yet standard, and she had no professional television training at all, so she was questioned from every direction at the start.

That lit her fighting spirit again. She began absorbing every style of casting she could: tactical prediction from Lao Yang and DC, presenting from BBC, humour from her colleague 7hao, control of the atmosphere in the hall from Guangmo and others, and make-up and dress sense from Teng Linji's wife, whom she calls Sister Hu. Through a whole series of imitations and experiments she eventually found her own line, professional but relaxed and cheerful. Miss wants people to feel the passion and the joy of esports through her casting.

In 2011 Miss was invited by the production team of CCTV's military affairs programme Fangwu Xin Guancha to record an episode with Rear Admiral Zhang Zhaozhong comparing esports tactics with real military tactics. Her small face and strong features turned out to be a rare advantage on camera, and her fresh, likeable presence left a deep impression on the CCTV directors.

Today Miss is not only a television presenter with a large following but still a professional esports player. Between 2007 and 2012 she won a great many professional esports titles. At the 2010 IP Cup, an international women's online open across China, Russia and Europe with 64 players, she fought through the night, came back from the losers' bracket into the winners' bracket and took the championship. And in 2012, before the DIVINA China StarCraft II Queen tournament that Zowie set up and to which only genuinely strong women players were invited, Miss practised furiously on four hours of sleep a night, beat several international players in the tournament and finally, in the final, defeated Colagirl, her nightmare of so many years, to be crowned queen.

Miss has won a great many titles, but she has not stopped there. She recently moved from Beijing to Shanghai and joined GamesTV as a caster, yet she still regards herself as a player with plenty of fight left, and she has picked out several of the best women players in the world as her next targets.

Miss says: I enjoy the feeling of winning after a great deal of hardship. I think that is one of the greatest attractions of esports.

Who says women cannot match men? Miss, a woman in esports.