Prof. Yu Xiaofei was born in Heilongjiang province in northeast China.  She began her career as an announcer in the Chinese broadcasting industry.  After 1990, she was a lecturer of Chinese language at several universities in Japan. Since the 1980s, she has been interested in Hezhen culture and the oral narrative tradition,imakan. She studied the oral literature of North-east Asia at the Graduate School of Chiba University 1999, where she did advanced research on "imakan."  She took her PhD at Chiba University in 2002.

During her academic career, she has visited the Hezhen people in Heilongjiang several times each year, conducting field work on their culture.  She is especially interested in imakan as an oral narrative form and in the vocabulary of the narratives and its relation to Hezhen culture. She has collected imakan narratives and research materials, proposed an alphabetical system to write down the Hezhen language, and has textualized two imakan narratives, namely "Site Mergen" and "Kante Mergen." She is alsointerested in the inter-relations between Hezhen and Ainu cultures.

She has published a book (in Japanese) on theimakan“Site Mergen,” which includes a multi-linear translation; published papers in journals of the Japanese Oral Literature Society; presented papers at Japanese, Chinese, and international conferences.

Prof. Yu is presently a citizen of Japan and an associate professor of Nihon University.