Hui was born in the year 1966 in British Hong Kong (Now Hong Kong, China). In 1974, at the age of eight years old, she immigrated to Canada where she was raised from then on in Vancouver, British Columbia. Hui's college education began at the University of British Columbia, where she earned her undergraduate degree in piano performance. For her graduate studies, Hui pursued and earned both her master's and doctoral degrees in Composition from the California Institute of the Arts and Yale University, respectively. Mentors to Hui during her collegiate studies in composition are noted as Jacob Druckman, Mel Powell, Martin Bresnick, Earl Kim, and Morton Subotnick.
In 1993, Hui worked with a small group of composers in collaboration with an eleven-member instrumental ensemble to found the Common Sense Composer's Collective. This organization was founded with a common interest in challenging the way music had been created and shared up until that point in time. Its founding members went on to collaborate with ten more ensembles between their first project and the year 2017. From 1994 to 2004, Hui served as a faculty member at Stanford University before moving back to Canada. In 2010, Hui joined the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Quebec as Associate Professor of Composition, where she has remained employed to this day.
Aside from her extensive list of chamber music compositions, Hui has also written a number of orchestral and choral works for larger ensembles. Notable orchestral works include Between You (1992), Common Ground (1993), and Aljira (1995) commissioned by the Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Oregon Symphonies, respectively. Among some of Hui's few larger-scale choral pieces are San Rocco (1991), Night on Earth (2001), and the more recent Pax (2019), all of which include non-vocal instrumental parts in addition to the foundational SATB parts in their scoring.

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