Contemporary Authors

• City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English, 1945 to the Present Hong Kong University Press (Hong Kong), 2003
• City Stage: Hong Kong Playwriting in English Hong Kong University Press (Hong Kong), 2005
• Evanescent Isles: From My City-Village Hong Kong University Press (Hong Kong), 2008

Library of Congress Online Catalog 1. City voices : Hong Kong writing in English, 1945 to the present LCCN 2003475436 Type of material Book Main title City voices : Hong Kong writing in English, 1945 to the present / edited by Xu Xi and Mike Ingham ; with a foreword by Louise Ho. Published/Created Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press, c2003. Description xiv, 402 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9622096042 9622096042 9622096050 (pbk.) 9622096050 (PBK.) Shelf Location FLM2014 108652 CALL NUMBER PR9450.85 .H662 2003 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) c.1 Temporarily shelved at Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. City stage : Hong Kong playwriting in English LCCN 2006473436 Type of material Book Main title City stage : Hong Kong playwriting in English / edited by Mike Ingham and Xu Xi. Published/Created Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press ; London : Eurospan [distributor], 2005. Description x, 274 p. ; 25 cm. ISBN 9622097472 (hbk.) 9622097480 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLM2014 115503 CALL NUMBER PR9570.H85 C5 2005 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 3. Evanescent isles : from my city-village LCCN 2008438053 Type of material Book Personal name Xu Xi, 1954- Main title Evanescent isles : from my city-village / Xu Xi. Published/Created Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press, c2008. Description 115 p. 23 cm. ISBN 9789622099463 (pbk.) 9622099467 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLM2014 108443 CALL NUMBER PR9450.9.X8 Z46 2008 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ONLINE CATALOG Library of Congress 101 Independence Ave., SE Washington, DC 20540 Questions? Ask a Librarian: https://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-contactus.html

• The Man in Our Lives - 2016 C&R Press,
• Habit of a Foreign Sky - 2010 Haven,
• Access Thirteen Tales - 2011 Signal 8 Press,

• author's site - http://www.xuxiwriter.com/

  life & times
  All about THAT MAN IN OUR LIVES
  Trespassing. Phoenix, Arizona airfield. Photo by Leslie Lausch.
  These days, Xu roams the universe of her new novel THAT MAN IN OUR LIVES (2016), starring Gordon “Gordie” Ashberry, this most enigmatic fictional character. He followed her around the world through three novels, making his first appearance in HONG KONG ROSE (1997) as a young man in 1970’s Hong Kong who met his Chinese “picture bride.” He then resurfaced in THE UNWALLED CITY (2001), to provide a little comic relief as Hong Kong sped towards its 1997 D-Day return to China. Having met his half sister in that book, he occupied even more space in HABIT OF A FOREIGN SKY (2010) to accompany his sister's transition from Hong Kong to New York in the wake of the 1998 Asian financial crisis.

  What’s a novelist to do in the face of such a peripatetic and persistent character? Ruminate of course, while listening to Ella sing Rodgers & Hart’s tune from “Pal Joey”

  If they asked me / I could write a book / About the way you walk and listen / And look / I could write a preface / On how we met / So the world would never forget . . .

  Which is how Gordie finally got his own book.

  I Could Write A Book
  Hear Ella Fitzgerald sing the Rodgers & Hart tune
  writing life

  Trespassing. North Point, Hong Kong rooftop. Photo by Paul Hilton.
  from the first section of Xu’s new novel THAT MAN IN OUR LIVES

  In the sky over the harbor, a helicopter hangs. Its blades chop, slice, shear the air, as it hovers, insistently loud, as if the city needs more noise, an even louder soundtrack to its story. Perhaps the pilot, too, is tentative—his brain fried like Pete’s—and waits, like some lost bird, for a sign from the severe clear blue.

  Hong Kong is hot and Pete Gordon Haight is muddled. Noon on this Saturday in July, 70% relative humidity, is almost “severe clear.” In pilot speak, such clarity can be blinding. Pete knows; his godfather, G, taught him that years ago, the first time he took Pete up in the Cessna over Block Island Sound and beyond, east towards the Atlantic. He had been eleven, his heart jumping out of his chest as he peered through his glasses at the disappearing isle below, where his father waited nervously and his mother glowed with pride. Hey G, Pete said, it’s like the world’s vanishing. Yeah, Gordie replied, it is P, it is.

  But today, he is trying not to think about Gordon Ashberry for a change, and concentrates instead on Tiara Fung, his sweetie, his fiancée who is never, ever muddled, who always knows why she does what she does and will make sure he knows as well.

  bio

  Chinese name. * Xu Su Xi (P) or Hui So Sai (C).
  XU XI is the author’s pinyin* short form name which is also her byline, but she is most assuredly NOT the following beings with the same pinyin name: a Chinese painter & sculptor; the author of tomes about acupuncture; a nationalist or a dissident-in-exile of any nation-state; a reality TV show host in some special economic zone or on YouTube; an Academic in any Intellectual Discipline, real or imagined, as capitalized by Pooh or some other friendly wild thing. She has however had three legal English names (as well as several best left unnamed of dubious legal quality) and strives assiduously not to acquire any others.

  However, she really is the author of eleven books, including five novels, five collections of short fiction & essays and most recently INTERRUPTIONS, an ekphrastic essay collection in collaboration with photographer David Clarke, released September 13, 2016 by the University Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Hong Kong. She is also editor of four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English. Two new books are forthcoming - a memoir for Penguin Shorts’ series on Hong Kong, AN ELEGY FOR HK (2017); a short fiction collection INSIGNIFICANCE (Signal 8 Press, 2018).

  A former Indonesian national, born and raised in Hong Kong, she eventually morphed into a U.S. citizen at the age of 33, having washed onto that distant shore across from Lady Liberty. These days, she splits time between New York and Hong Kong and mourns the loss of her beloved writing retreat in Seacliff, on the South Island of New Zealand, where she hovered, joyously, for seven years.

  *pinyin = transliteration for Mandarin Chinese or Putonghua (P), the official language of China although Xu is far more fluent in Cantonese (C), that being the people’s language of her birth city, Hong Kong.

  lamwoomedia interview series of Xu Xi
  Interview # 1 "My Dream in Life" - see the rest of the series on YouTube
  interlude

  Writing Life, Interrupted
  From 2010 to 2016, Xu was writer-in-residence at a university in Hong Kong, although that life was annoyingly distressed by the university’s closure of Asia’s first low-residency MFA program, the very one she came back to the city to establish in 2010. Click “Writing Life, Interrupted” to read the saga of this closure. It could have been an episode for Monty Python, this dead parrot we’re all still trying to return for a refund.

  More happily, she managed to exit, stage left in spring of 2016 to be writer-in-residence at Arizona State University’s Piper Writers Center where she bicycled regularly under desert skies.

  books
  Novel
  Habit of a Foreign Sky (2010)
  When life goes into free fall.
  The Unwalled City (2001)
  An insider's Hong Kong
  Hong Kong Rose (1997) 2nd ed (2004)
  Love and lust, unrequited and transformed in two of the world's great cities
  Collection
  Access Thirteen Tales (2011)
  The persistence of wounds that will not heal
  Evanescent Isles (2008)
  Essays: from my 'city-village'
  Overleaf Hong Kong (2004)
  Of the Chinese, Overseas
  History's Fiction (2001 & 2005)
  The City of Hong Kong: Stories
  Compendium
  Chinese Walls (1994) & Daughters of Hui (1996) New ed., 2002
  Chinese sex now
  Anthology
  The Queen of Statue Square (2014)
  In, from and of Hong Kong’s past, present & future
  Fifty-Fifty (2008)
  New Hong Kong Writing
  City Stage (2005)
  Hong Kong Playwriting in English
  CITY VOICES (2003)
  Hong Kong Writing in English 1945 - Present

• wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Xi

  Xu Xi
  Xu Xi
  Xu Xi speaking at explorAsian Festival event in 2009
  Born 1954 (age 63)
  Other names Komala, S; Chako, S
  Occupation Hong Kong New York writer
  This is a Chinese name; the family name is Xu.

  Xu Xi (born 1954), originally named Xu Su Xi (许素细), is an English language novelist from Hong Kong.[1] Her latest novel, "That Man In Our Lives," is out from C&R Press on September 15, 2016.

  She is also the Hong Kong regional editor of Routledge's Encyclopedia of Post-colonial Literature (second edition, 2005) and the editor or co-editor of the following anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English: Fifty-Fifty: New Hong Kong Writing (2008), City Stage: Hong Kong Playwriting in English (2005), and City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English Prose & Poetry from 1945 to the present. Her work has also been anthologized internationally. Hong Kong magazines such as Muse run her writings from time to time and her fiction and essays have appeared recently in various literary journals such as the Kenyon Review" (Ohio), Ploughshares" (Boston), The Four Quarters Magazine (India), Ninth Letter" (Illinois), Silk Road Review" (Oregon), Toad Suck Review" (Arkansas), Writing & Pedagogy" (Sheffield, UK),Arts & Letters" (Georgia), Wasifiri (London), Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts (Colorado), Hotel Amerika (Chicago), Upstreet (Massachusetts), and Asia Literary Review (Hong Kong).

  Contents

  1 Biography
  2 Honours
  3 Bibliography
  4 References
  5 External links

  Biography

  Xu Xi is an Indonesian Chinese raised in Hong Kong. She speaks English and Chinese, even though those languages are not her parents' native languages. Her father traded manganese ore and her mother was a pharmacist. Xu started writing stories in English when she was a child. As an adult, she maintained a parallel career in international marketing for 18 years, working for several major multinationals, while writing and publishing fiction. She left corporate life in 1998.

  Xu Xi is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Now a U.S. citizen, she was on the low-residency MFA fiction and creative nonfiction faculty at Vermont College in Montpelier from 2002 to 2012; she was elected and served as faculty chair from 2009 to 2012.

  In 2010, she became writer-in-residence at the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong, where she established and directs the first, low-residency Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programme to specialise in Asian writing in English.[2]

  In 2015, the university's decision to close the programme, at a time when freedoms in Hong Kong were felt to be under threat, drew criticism locally and from the international writing establishment.[3]

  Xu Xi is based between Hong Kong, where she works, and New York, where her life partner lives.[4]
  Honours

  The New York Times named her a pioneer English-language writer from Asia[citation needed] and the Voice of America featured her on their Chinese-language TV series "Cultural Odyssey." Her novel Habit of a Foreign Sky was shortlisted for the 2007 inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize. Her short story, Famine, first published in Ploughshares, was selected for the 2006 O. Henry Prize Stories collection and she was a South China Morning Post story contest winner. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship, as well as several writer-in-residence positions at Lingnan University of Hong Kong, Chateau de Lavigny in Lausanne, Switzerland, Kulturhuset USF in Bergen, Norway and the The Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project of Orlando, Inc. In 2004, she received the distinguished alumni award from her undergraduate alma mater, SUNY-Plattsburgh and is the recipient of Ploughshares' 2005 Cohen Award. In 2009, she was the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program and she was the 2010 Distinguished Asian Writer at the Philippines National Writing Workshops at Silliman University, Dumaguete, Philippines.
  Bibliography
  That Man In Our Lives, C&R Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1-936196-50-0
  Access Thirteen Tales, Signal 8 Press, 2011, ISBN 978-988-15161-9-0
  Habit of a Foreign Sky, Haven Books, 2010, ISBN 978-988-18-9672-8
  Evanescent Isles: From My City-Village. Hong Kong University Press. 2008. ISBN 978-962-209-946-3.
  The Unwalled City. Typhoon Media Ltd. 2000. ISBN 978-988-19-5343-8.
  Hong Kong Rose (1997); Asia 2000, ISBN 978-962-7160-55-7; Chameleon Press, 2005, ISBN 978-988-97060-5-0
  Chinese Walls. Typhoon Media Ltd. 1994. ISBN 978-988-19-5344-5.
  Overleaf Hong Kong: stories & essays of the Chinese, Overseas, Chameleon Press, 2005, ISBN 978-988-97060-6-7
  History's fiction: stories from the city of Hong Kong, Chameleon Press, 2001, ISBN 978-1-387-80215-9
  Daughters of Hui. Typhoon Media Ltd. 1996. ISBN 978-988-19-5347-6.
  Chinese Walls. Typhoon Media Ltd. 1994. ISBN 978-988-19-5344-5.

• asian american writers' workshop - http://aaww.org/xu-xi-is-my-name/

  Xu Xi is my name.

  The transnational writer dishes about Law and Order, her favorite drinks, and less-than-romantic writing habits.
  By Ken Chen
  June 27, 2012 | Identity Politics
  Media Gallery

  Xu Xi lives in the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong, and the South Island of New Zealand. The New York Times once named her a “pioneer writer from Asia in English.” She has won an O. Henry Prize Story award and has been shortlisted for the inaugural MAN Asian Literary Award. In 2009, she was the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa’s nonfiction program. She recently read at AAWW’s event, The Misadventures of Anti-Heroes.
  Do you have any guilty pleasures?

  Oh yeah—Law and Order! I like junky TV, I like to watch The Clothes… I learned how to plot when I was young by reading mystery novels. I don’t read them any more. I can’t. I try to but I don’t enjoy them anymore. But I learned how to plot from those. I think what substitutes that now is sort of all these crime dramas because they’re very predictable and there’s usually a formula to it. But you have to understand how to make character arise from that. You have to understand within that framework how to tell the story, how to make the narrative turns and all that.

  That, and I suppose the Martinis, the Martini and the Scotch. I’m an old barfly, so—

  What’s your favorite drink?

  Used to be Scotch. I’ve been drinking more vodka lately. But, uh, I love wines. I drink all kinds of wines. But I’m a bit of a purist. I don’t tend to like these sort of concocted, you know, Sex on the Beach kinds of things, these blue drinks with the pink cherry on the top. I’m not really big on that.

  But are you on a brand list?

  I drink quite a range of vodkas. I can’t say I drink any one only. I like 42 Below at the moment. I discovered it in New Zealand and it’s still cheap here, so that’s another good reason.

  Do you usually write at a certain time of day or always at a computer? What’s your typical process like?

  Well, if you had asked me that about fifty years ago, [I would have said], “Oh, I love to write first thing in the morning, early, just before the sun rises when it’s so quiet.” You know, it’s terribly romanticized. But the truth of the matter is, if you work full time—which a lot of writers do—if you have to have a job and you have to make a living, you have to carve out a space to write. I taught myself to write at any hour of the day. And that was tough, because I hate writing in the afternoon. But I will do it if I have to, especially if I have a deadline.

  I think it’s important for writers not to overly romanticize the idea of the writer—it is an artistic pursuit, yes—but that you don’t spend too much time self-consciously being an artist. It’s a lot about just getting the work done. It’s not that romantic notion or sitting in a garret in Paris, although I have done all these things.

  You’ve used four different names that are not pseudonyms and not pen-names but actually your name. You’re Fujianese, also Indonesian, and you’ve lived in New Zealand. I was wondering if you could talk about your identity as a writer, whether it’s tied to a place, and what happens to it when it’s transnationalized?

  [When I was young] it didn’t occur to me to write in Chinese because my literary and cultural education was more Western. So I wrote in English. It wasn’t until I was older that it suddenly occurred to me that, you know, this is weird. Why am I—who claims to be an Indonesian citizen, who does not even speak Indonesian, who has a Chinese surname that is transliterated Fujianese, but doesn’t speak a word of Fujianese, who speaks Cantonese as my primary Chinese language, whose father carries on in Mandarin because he can’t stand speaking Cantonese, you know—and then we are all learning English so we presume that English is the language we should use.

  After my first book, I was using my American name at the time, which is Shuko. It was a made-up name between my ex-husband and myself to try to combine names and not hyphenate, because we both had long names. It sounded Indian. And of course my first book was totally Chinese and Hong Kong. And everybody want[ed] to know, “Why is this Indian person writing about these Chinese families?”

  It never occurred to me that this should be an issue. In America, I published under this name—it was just kind of a name. In Hong Kong though, it was kind of like, “Who the heck is she?” And suddenly the authenticity of who I was came into question. So my American publisher at that time, who spoke fluent Mandarin, said “Why don’t you use your Chinese name?” And I loved my pin-yin name so I used that.

• pif magazine - http://www.pifmagazine.com/2003/05/xu-xi/

  Xu Xi
  interviewed by Derek Alger
  Published in Issue No. 72 ~ May, 2003

  Xu Xi (pronounced “Shoe-See”), one of Asia’s leading English language novelists, is the author of three novels and two short fiction collections. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, Xu Xi’s most recent novel is The Unwalled City (2001), set in 1995 as Hong Kong rushes toward its inevitable hand over to China.

  Her other novels are Hong Kong Rose (1997) and Chinese Walls (1994), and the short story collection History’s Fiction: Stories from the City of Hong Kong (2001) and Daughters of Hui (1996), a novella and collection of stories which was named a “best book” of 1996 by Asiaweek magazine

  A graduate of the MFA program from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
  Xu Xi’s awards include a NYFA fiction fellowship, writer-in-residence at Kulturhset USF of Bergen, Norway, and the Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando, Florida. Her other published writings include essays, op-eds and book reviews. Her work is taught and has been anthologized internationally.

  A self-described Hong Kong astronaut, Xu Xi left an 18-year career in international marketing and management at the end of 1997. She currently alternates between living in New York City and Hong Kong, with stopovers on the South Island of New Zealand.
  Photo by Joan Klatchko

  Derek Alger: You have said your home is somewhere between New York and Hong Kong. Could you explain what you mean?

  Xu Xi: I seem to be most at home in transit. Living = transitioning, at least, that’s the way my life has always felt like, even as a child. By spending time in the air and in both cities –and recently, extended stopovers in New Zealand as well — multiple spaces seem familiar, seem almost like home.

  The idea of home is supposed to encompass sweetness, comfort, privacy, where the heart is, etc, etc., so with multiple homes, perhaps, I’ll be able to pull enough bits together of the idea and forge the feeling of “Home.”

  DA: A recent review about The Unwalled City praised you for explaining the paradox that is Hong Kong.

  XX: Do I explain it? A working title for the book was “The Duration of Loneliness.” Hong Kong endures somehow, despite its ambivalent relationship with both its former and current political masters. So maybe it’s the paradox I addressed, or maybe the ambivalence. I’m not quite sure.

  DA: What do you mean by time and place do not define Hong Kong, although moments of history do?

  XX: Hong Kong’s’ a movable beast. It doesn’t slouch towards anywhere; it pirouettes in circles around itself. First we were this “barren rock,” and then an island way station, after which we expanded our territory by “borrowing” more land from China, and then a joint declaration decided we were going to be “handed back” (Britain’s perspective) to a China which never thought we were gone. We don’t have “history” as a nation, yet our little urban world is a kind of mock nation with its two distinct cultures, languages (yes, plural, we are nothing if not multicultural). It was brilling, except we’re neither dreaming nor in a looking glass, I don’t think.

  DA: You have been singled out as a pioneer writer in Asia to establish a voice in English. What is the significance of being one of Asia’s leading English language novelists?

  XX: If I’m a “pioneer” does it mean I can look forward to a fate of insignificance? Perhaps a hundred years from now, some bored grad student will unearth my writing and diaries like the diaries of the pioneer women of America. But seriously, I singled myself out for this marginal situation by hanging around in Asia as much as I do. It’s much easier to make money as an “Asian” writer if you write for the markets of the West, which, I’ve been told,
  I don’t.

  Alternatively, if I wrote in Chinese and French, I could be translated and win the Nobel. Of course, Gao Xingjiang really is a pioneer, just as Ha Jin, for totally different reasons, also is. Both authors’ works appeal to my sensibilities in similar and opposing ways, so perhaps there’s a flicker of hope for me yet.

  DA: You have also been praised for tackling subjects that are normally considered off limits for Chinese women, such as sexuality, adultery, and seduction as part of literature.

  XX: I don’t know how deserved that praise is. Those subjects were only off limits until Chinese women started writing. Some of the best Chinese writers today, especially women writers like Zhang Kang Kang or Hong Ying, write about all that and a whole lot more, and Zhang Ai Ling (Eileen Chang) and Han Suyin who preceded both of them, were not shy about seduction and sexuality.

  Perhaps the rather skewered focus in the West today on the Chinese-women-as-victim memoirs and dissident writing as the most widely read “literature” has limited the appreciation of what comprises Chinese literature.

  DA: It seems that your mother was a great influence on you by telling you stories about Indonesia.

  XX: Both my parents were, as well as an aunt who was the real storyteller. The picture of Indonesia she painted was a place where a girl got away with doing wild things, unlike in Hong Kong. I loved that. Indonesia was my fantasy mythological place where you could walk on the wild side, not look entirely Chinese, and still enjoy being a girl.

  DA: Did you always know you had a gift as a storyteller?

  XX: I don’t know if I ever really thought of it as a “gift,” just as something I did, like eating, dreaming, brushing my teeth. Maybe it’s a Hong Kong thing. One of our leading English-language poets, Agnes Lam, says writing poetry is “pedestrian.” If you are a writer, perhaps writing is pedestrian.

  DA: Much of your early work was inspired by your family, the issues of family being a dominant theme.

  XX: Probably because I didn’t know much about history, biology, science books, as the old pop song goes. but I did know something about love and family. Basically I used to be a lot lazier so I wrote about what I knew. Now I write about what I need to know which includes a remarkable amount of stuff I know nothing about.

  DA: Your current work seems to be based more on yours status as a world citizen for lack of a better phrase.

  XX: “World Citizen” sounds awfully grand; “peripatetic” might be more accurate. Is my current work based on all that movement in our oh-so-confused world? I wouldn’t mind. It would be an accurate reflection of the way of the world, which might finally make me mainstream, as opposed to pioneering.

  DA: You came to the United States and attended college studying English. How did that come about?

  XX: Money and desire. I got a scholarship and desperately desired what I perceived to be an easier life after 12 years of a rigid school system. English was the one subject that was really, really fun, unlike history, biology, science books, etc, and at 17, I thought the U.S. the biggest playground on the planet. Naturally, I was wrong.

  DA: What were the advantages of going back to the working world, as in international marketing? Do you think that ultimately helped you as a creative writer?

  XX: Desire and money. I desired money after being broke as a college student. It gave me plenty to write about, but being broke as a student of life probably helped me more as a creative writer. Having left corporate life now for good, I definitely think my head’s in a better space vis-a-vis writing.

  DA: You interrupted a successful career to earn an MFA at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. What led to that decision?

  XX: Two reasons. I wanted to hang out with creative writers and go back to the U.S. (I was working back home in Hong Kong at the time). There were no creative writers (English language) in Hong Kong, at least none that I could hang out with, and the easiest way for me to enter the U.S. (this was 1981) was on a student visa. I try to be a voyager on the paths of least resistance.

  I used to read the Harvard Business Review while in corporate life, before I headed for the MFA. That probably decided me against doing the logical degree, which would have been the MBA.

  DA: I know you believe in the value of writers’ retreats. What has been the benefit of such retreats for you?

  XX: Silences. I think better when I retreat, which, presumably, should lead to more clarity in my writing.

  DA: You were at the Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida. What was that like?

  XX: Quiet. Kerouac wasn’t there much. I left the jazz station on 24/7 hoping he’d hang out a bit, but he preferred the road.

  DA: Another recent experience has been jazz fiction. You recently gave a live performance at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Manhattan. What is jazz fiction?

  XX: Something I started writing after shacking up with Jack’s ghost; Kerouac was a jazz head in the worst way. A kind of narrative with a distinct story line that isn’t a story in the traditional sense and sounds a whole lot better when performed, accompanied my jazz improvisation. If this seems vague it’s because I still don’t really know what it is, but is just a name I came up with, especially for one particular piece called “Jazz Wife.”

  At Cornelia, which is in the Village, it was an honor to be accompanied by David Amram, who was Kerouac’s original collaborator. David’s an extremely generous patron of the Kerouac Project. When I grow up, I want to be an artist like him.

  DA: I probably should mention that you write under your Indonesian name Sussy Komala.

  XX: Not any more. I’m the only writer I know who’s published under four names, all of which were real, not pen, names. This has to do with the limitations of the written English language, the language I have the misfortune and good fortune to write.

  In Chinese, the written characters of my name can be pronounced a myriad number of ways, depending on the dialect. So, my birth surname was a Fujianese transliteration made up by my grandfather (some of his brothers adopted different ones) KHOUW, because our family was originally from Fujian; KOMALA my current legal Indonesian-English name was adopted because of the anti-Chinese sentiment in Indonesia of the sixties prompted the government to urge its ethnic Chinese citizens to adopt Indonesian names; CHAKO was a former legal English name, one my ex-husband and I made up which combined the first two syllables of our last names — I sometimes refer to it as my American name because I became a U.S. citizen with that name; and XU XI is my Chinese name transliterated in standard pinyin (one of the few true “standards” because it’s widely adopted and recognized world wide and reflects China’s main dialect Mandarin, a.k.a. Putonghua), the intended name my father gave me at birth because he was a Mandarin speaker. Xu’s the surname, by the way. Chinese convention places the family name first.

  DA: And finally, we should mention that you have finished another novel, Habit of a Foreign Sky. What was the genesis of that?

  XX: Emily Dickinson, circa 1894.

  Away from Home are some and I —
  An Emigrant to be
  In a Metropolis of Homes
  Is easy, possibly —

  The Habit of a Foreign Sky
  We — difficult — acquire
  As Children, who remain in Face
  The more their Feet retire

• facebook - https://www.facebook.com/XuXiWriter/

  About

  Suggest Edits
  INTERESTS
  Personal Interests
  Run, Hike Swim, Gym when not Reading or Listening to Jazz.
  CONTACT INFO
  @xuxiwriter
  MORE INFO
  Affiliation
  Mongrel International Inc. & Authors At Large.
  About
  Official Facebook Page for Xu Xi, author of 11 books of fiction/nonfiction; in 2016 a novel THAT MAN IN OUR LIVES and essays, INTERRUPTIONS.
  Biography
  American citizen, native of Hong Kong, Chinese-Indonesian. These days I'm a writer and teacher of creative writing. Had an earlier corporate career in international marketing, but the writing took over after my third book was released. Now I live between New York and Hong Kong.
  Awards
  Best American Essays 2016 listed my essay "THE ENGLISH OF MY STORY" in the notable list; Finalist, Inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize for my novel HABIT OF A FOREIGN SKY;
  2006 O. Henry Prize Story award for my story "FAMINE"; Finalist, Hudson Prize in Fiction for my story collection ACCESS;
  Winner, Cohen Prize for Short Fiction for Ploughshares Magazine for story "FAMINE"; Winner, South China Morning Post Story Prize for my story "BLACKJACK"; New York Arts Foundation Fiction Fellow.
  Gender
  Female
  categories
  Writer

• city U hong kong - http://www.english.cityu.edu.hk/mfa/faculty/xu-xi.jsp

  Writer-in-Residence
  Xu Xi (Fiction/Creative nonfiction)

  www.xuxiwriter.com

  Xu Xi is the author of nine books of fiction and essays, most recently Access: Thirteen Tales which appeared in 2011. Other recent titles include a novel Habit of a Foreign Sky, which was shortlisted for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize and the essay collection, Evanescent Isles: From my city-village. She is also editor of three anthologies of Hong Kong Writing in English including Fifty-Fifty: New Hong Kong Writing..

  The New York Times named her a pioneer writer from Asia in English and the Voice of America featured her on their Chinese TV documentary series 'Cultural Odyssey.' Singapore's Business Times dubs her passion 'Asia as it is today - gritty, modern and confused.' According to reviewers, her work explains 'the paradox that is Hong Kong' that avoids 'the sex and drug and triad stereotypes... portraying the city more accurately and realistically for it.' Her 'new and innovative diasporic global language' is 'uncluttered' and 'arrestingly poignant.' She is 'an alchemist of observation' whose sensibility is 'generous and compassionate.'

  New fiction and essays that are forthcoming or recent appear in the anthologies The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler (Great Books Foundation), Understanding the Essay (Broadview Press), The Jazz Fiction Anthology (Indiana University Press), Another Kind of Paradise (Cheng & Tsui), Imagining Globalization (Palgrave/McMillan), Now Write! (Tarcher/Penguin), Words Overflown by Stars (Writers Digest Books), and also in the journals Arts & Letters, Platte River Review, Cutthroat, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, Wasafiri (London), Far Eastern Economic Review (Author's Corner), Upstreet, Memorious, Muse (Hong Kong), First City (New Delhi), Asian Cha, Brilliant Corners, Silk Road. Awards include an O. Henry prize story, a NYFA fiction fellowship, the Ploughshares Cohen award for best story and the South China Morning Post story prize. The author has also been visiting writer or resident at the University of Iowa's nonfiction programme, Lingnan University (Hong Kong), Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Kulturhuset USF (Norway), the Kerouac Project (USA), among others. In 2004, she received the distinguished alumni award from her undergraduate alma mater, the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. She also holds a MFA (fiction) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

  In an earlier parallel life, the author had a successful, eighteen-year, international marketing career, and held management positions at several major multinationals in Asia and North America including Pinkerton's, Federal Express, Cathay Pacific Airways, Leo Burnett Advertising, Dow Jones Publishing (the Asian Wall Street Journal) and the Wall Street law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. She is currently the faculty chair at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, she now inhabits the flight path connecting Hong Kong, New York and the South Island of New Zealand.

  Xu Xi participated in the 2011 Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) Book Fair. An interview has been made with HKTDC for her talk in the Book Fair. In the following interview, she also offers a preview of her upcoming novel Habit of a Foreign Sky, which was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Please click here to watch the video. You can also hear her talk about her writing and life in a series of recent video interviews.
  Teaching Philosophy

  1) You need to shape the kind of writer you're trying to be, and 2) You must be your own best editor. These two beliefs underlie my approach to teaching creative writing. I don't teach; I 'coach.' My advisees learn to become their own best critics. As well, I constantly pose the question of what kind of writer you are and wish to be or are trying to be. I think this is at the heart of the creative writing process, figuring out what it is you want of yourself as a writer and doing whatever it takes to get there. My idea of a successful mentor-writer relationship is that the writer should come away from the encounter as a more thoughtful and critical reader of her or his own work. In the end, we all write alone and a writer is, after all, that 'loneliest of human creatures.' (Lawrence Durrell)
  Books

  Access: Thirteen Tales, story collection, Signal 8 Press, Hong Kong/Washington, 2011.
  Habit of a Foreign Sky, novel, Haven Books, Hong Kong, 2010.
  Evanescent Isles: From My City Village, essay collection, Hong Kong University Press, 2008.
  Fifty-Fifty, anthology of new Hong Kong writing, ed., Haven Books, Hong Kong, 2008.
  History's Fiction: Stories from the City of Hong Kong, 2nd ed. critical reading guide, Chameleon Press, Hong Kong 2005 (1st ed., 2001).
  City Stage: Hong Kong Playwriting in English, ed. Ingham/Xu, Hong Kong University Press, June 2005.
  Overleaf Hong Kong: Stories & Essays of the Chinese, Overseas, Chameleon Press, Hong Kong, 2004.
  Hong Kong Rose, novel, 2nd edition, Chameleon Press, Hong Kong, 2004 (1st ed. Asia 2000 Ltd., 1997).
  City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English (an anthology of prose and poetry from 1945 till present), ed. Xu/Ingham, Hong Kong University Press, 2003.
  Chinese Walls, novel & Daughters of Hui, fiction collection, 2nd ed. (compendium), Chameleon Press, Hong Kong, 2002. (1st ed. Asia 2000 Ltd., 1994 & 1996 respectively)
  The Unwalled City, novel, Chameleon Press, Hong Kong, 2001.

• asian literary review - http://www.asialiteraryreview.com/interview-xu-xi

  Interview: Xu Xi
  Interviews | ALR Staff

  Xu Xi – an Indonesian-Chinese born and raised in Hong Kong who went on to university in the US – is one of Hong Kong’s leading writers. Her transnational background gives her insights into the impact that shifting geopolitics and intertwining cultures have on individual lives. She has both written and edited compilations of short stories and essays, many set in Hong Kong. Between 2010 and 2016, she was writer-in-residence at City Univer­sity of Hong Kong’s Department of English, where she founded and directed their low-residency MFA creative writing programme.

  Her fifth novel, That Man in Our Lives, was released in June 2016. The story is centred around a character – Gordon Ashberry – who appears in three earlier novels, Hong Kong Rose (1997), The Unwalled City (2001) and Habit of a Foreign Sky (2010), a finalist for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her writing has been widely acclaimed, described as ‘beautifully refined in both intelligence and prose’ by Robert Olen Butler, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

  The Asia Literary Review recently spoke to the author about the themes in the book and her views on Hong Kong, China and the changing balance of power between East and West.

  Your new novel was originally inspired by the opera Nixon in China. What is it about that work, or that event in 1972, that motivated you? What relevance do you think it has to the current political environment between China and the US?

  When Nixon met Mao, it was a bit like when Harry met Sally – the beginning of a long relationship that would prove to be fraught with tension and arguments, but also involved cooperation, mutually beneficial trades and cultural, artistic and personal interaction. It was also the beginning of a challenge to US supremacy as the world’s superpower, because China’s subsequent economic rise proved so startling and fast, much faster than the world expected. When I first heard Nixon in China, something exploded in my head. Art has always interpreted history in unexpected ways, but here was one that was close to my heart. I was a college student in the US in 1972 and was fascinated by Nixon – both his paranoia and passions – and later, was living and working in Hong Kong when the US formally recognised China in 1979. Adams’ opera, which premiered in October 1987, placed history into the context of our global cultural life. The opera also happened to come out in the month I pledged allegiance in New York and became a US citizen and a couple of years before Tiananmen happened. Today, the US and China are on more of an equal footing economically, and the political balance of power is changing the way we think about our future world. For me as a novelist, this history as art and the evolution of the balance of power is riveting, especially in relation to long-term personal friendships and relationships, which is in large measure what That Man in Our Lives addresses. On an artistic level, the novel’s tropes are gender, love, romance, sex, power, marriage, family – everything a novelist needs to observe the world at an intimate level. What happens in the larger world – politically, economically, culturally – is simply an extrapolation of private lives, writ large, warts and all.

  Describe your character Gordon Ashberry, the ‘man’ in the book’s title. Who or what was the inspiration for him?

  No ‘Gordon’ or ‘Gordie’ exists in my life as a single person, although he is drawn from a number of men I’ve known, both real and fictional, from a variety of places and cultures. He first appeared in my 1997 novel Hong Kong Rose as a boy whose father brings him to Hong Kong. He falls in love with all things Chinese. I invented a back story and life for him, although he was a minor – albeit important – character. He’s a failed entrepreneur on Wall Street with a somewhat questionable or shady side, as well as a romantic wise guy. He then re-inserted himself into my next novel published in 2001, The Unwalled City, set during the years prior to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong back to China. Again, he was a minor character, though more about Gordie’s character and life emerged. Gordie had a much larger part to play in my 2010 novel Habit of a Foreign Sky. Now he has his own book, mostly to finally shut him up and to write him out of my over-active imagination. Some of the inspiration for him is jazz, the music I (and Gordie) love. But if I had to trace Gordie back to his ‘original sin’ source, as it were, it would be my fascination as a child with Bugs Bunny. I loved Bugs – the way he spoke, his wise-guy personality, his nonchalance as everything explodes around him, his irritation at all disturbances to his equilibrium. He is the nemesis for a host of characters, especially Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck. Bugs’ accent is Bronx-Brooklyn – a more literate Archie Bunker – which is of course not Gordie’s natural accent (he’s from a wealthy, patrician East Coast family in Connecticut) but it is one he delights in imitating. One of the more profoundly memorable moments of my adult life was to arrive in New York in 1986 and hear people (including colleagues who were former NYPD colleagues) who actually spoke like Bugs. This was when he transformed from a cartoon character to his origins in real life, and it proved one of my conduits into understanding American culture. So Looney Tunes, and Bugs in particular, were the earliest inspira­tion for the man in my life that became Gordon Ashberry.

  What are the core themes in your story and in your work?

  The core themes in my work have evolved over my ten books and other published stories and essays. Among the central concerns in my writing are the Chinese diaspora family, feminism and the Asian woman, America’s influence on global culture, the politics of sex, and being Chinese in the world today. I’ve always been interested in politics, and after an eighteen-year former career as a marketing professional for multinationals and other businesses, I am concerned by the impact of capitalism on culture, society and individual lives.

  In That Man In Our Lives, the idea of the balance of power in the larger world is examined through that more intimate power balance amongst friends, lovers, spouses, acquaintances. This novel took me a very long time to complete – a little over nine years, actually – because I found myself revising, complicating and expanding the fictional universe where Gordie hung out. My MFA advisor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the Hungarian novelist Tamas Aczel, told me that my early attempts at novels needed more complications. I’ve heeded that advice over the years, never settling for the predictable or the easily explained or just the mechanics of a clever plot. The world deserves better than that from its novelists.

  Why is ‘transnationalism’ such a major element in your novels? Is it simply because it mirrors your own life, or is there a broader point you are exploring?

  My writing does of course mirror my own life, but my interest in transnationalism goes far beyond my personal experience. Many of the transnational lives I write about are quite different from my own, some significantly more privileged in terms of wealth, opportunities, intelligence and talent. Partly it’s to invent what I perhaps wished I had, but more importantly, I am extremely interested in the imbalance of wealth and opportunity in the world. Growing up in Hong Kong, and having lived and worked there, I am very aware of the huge divide between those privileged to be ‘transnational’ versus those who are ‘local’ because that is the only choice that life presents them. Modern urban reality is extremely stratified by class, even in the presumed democracy of the US.

  In Hong Kong, there are also many small traders of daily goods who transit through Chungking Mansions, many from African nations, as well as the sex trade – primarily Thai, Filipino, Mainland Chinese – or the Filipino, Indonesian and South Asian domestic helpers. In other words, there are many from third-world nations who can profit from the disparity of income with the first world. I’ve written about Filipino domestic helpers and their lives in some of my work, just as I’ve written about the intersection of local lives with transnational ones. It can be very easy, as a writer in English who is also read by third-culture kids in Hong Kong and Asia, to forget that not everyone gets to learn Mandarin or English well enough. Many, many are left behind because of globalisation. The current US presidential election, as well as the rise of right-wing political parties in Europe, offer evidence of this divide.

  What is your view of Hong Kong as a place for creative writers, given the sudden shutdown of the City University MFA program? What concerns do you have for Hong Kong?

  My concerns for Hong Kong have less to do with whether or not creative writers can write here (writers can write anywhere they wish, Hong Kong included, and always will), but rather, whether or not Hong Kong will have a future that furthers the position it’s achieved as a major international city. Right now, I hear, Hong Kong is the top competitive city according to some study (I think it’s Swiss), beating out the US. As a city, we are consistently ranked with nation states for all kinds of international indices – competi­tiveness being one – but also happiness, stress level, liveability, etc. The city is right now experiencing what is arguably its most political moment ever – topping even the 1967 riots.

  Years ago, I wrote a novel about Hong Kong called Proximity. In it, a local political party arises that wants independence for the city, calling itself The Free China Movement. No one would publish the novel back in the seventies; no one cared about the Handover then. Fast forward and guess what, here we are, a little later than I perhaps anticipated, but certainly not far off. The first version of my novel projected a future-shock moment when Hong Kong sank like Atlantis. Such a dystopian ending has been echoed in a video that went a little viral after the Umbrella Revolution and also in an indie film about Hong Kong (Ten Years). Reality is often even more bizarre and stranger than fiction. Am I hopeful for the city’s future? Right now, I really don’t know. Trepidation is the prevailing mood in the world, not just in Hong Kong, as many uncertainties and mass movements of people daunt us. Meanwhile noisy people shout nonsense into our airwaves and cyberspace.

  Do you think that it’s possible for Hong Kong to maintain its own identity separate from the PRC, given the gradually strengthening hand of Beijing in the SAR’s affairs?

  I think Beijing would actually like Hong Kong to maintain a somewhat separate identity from the PRC, as long as the economy is stable and society is not in a state of turmoil. My reading of the tea leaves (i.e. what the PRC officially says) suggests that they want us to read between the lines, because that way everyone can pretend that they did not mean X or Y if the wrong things come to pass, which is just so Chinese. The Chinese leadership has enough on its plate to worry about without having to waste either ‘too much saliva' or grey matter on tiny little Hong Kong, this ‘pimple on the backside of China’ as I once described the city. There are plenty of creams to get rid of zits, but right now, the zits won’t go away – they erupt and grow ever more explosively red. For me it comes down to the local Hong Kong government, and whether or not it can rise to assume the mantle of real local leadership, as opposed to shutting out the voices of the people. There are real social problems in Hong Kong that need to be addressed locally, and is it any wonder that political movements have risen up through frustrated people who feel they have no voice that the local government appears willing to hear? Never mind the PRC.

That Man in Our Lives
263.29 (July 18, 2016): p182.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
That Man in Our Lives

Xu Xi. C&R Press, $19 trade paper (270p) ISBN 978-1-936196-50-0

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When enigmatic sinophile Gordon Ashberry disappears one evening during a flight delay in a Tokyo airport, investigators are stumped, as are Gordon's friends, admirers, and--perhaps most confused of all--his godson Pete Haight. Xu's (Habit of a Foreign Sky) novel enlists a large and varied cast of characters to search for the missing protagonist. The sprawling narrative moves seamlessly in and out of Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York, Taipei, and Tokyo. In keeping with her abiding interest in Sino-American relations, Xu, a U.S. citizen of Indonesian descent who was born and raised in Hong Kong, explores the ever-changing ties between China and the United States, between past and present, motherland and adopted country, and home and the unknown. With its deft shifts in point of view and its range of voices, places, and ideas, Xu's novel can feel intentionally frenzied: the frenetic movement of the plot parallels the ungrounded movements of the investigators and Gordon's concerned family and friends. Inspired by John Adams's opera "Nixon in China," Xu's engrossing, whirlwind metafictional tale effectively demonstrates the far-reaching effects of politics and culture on the smallest, most personal aspects of our lives. (Sept.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"That Man in Our Lives." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2016, p. 182+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459287494&it=r&asid=8804d632d118823112bb3fd8bbfbf37a. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A459287494

Habit of a Foreign Sky
Joanne Wilkinson
107.4 (Oct. 15, 2010): p19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Habit of a Foreign Sky.

By Xu Xi.

Nov. 2010. 284p. Haven, paper, $15 (9789881896728).

Prolific Asian author Xi profiles a mixed-race Hong Kong resident who has a high-profile career at a global investment bank that sees her traveling frequently between Hong Kong and New York and now Shanghai, locus of the emerging Chinese markets. Tough-minded Gall has an MBA from Harvard, but she has been hit hard when, within a few years, her husband leaves, their young son dies, and her mother, with whom she had a complicated relationship, passes away. She is shocked to learn that her mother, a dance-hall girl and sometimes prostitute, has left her millions, and Gail's serious demeanor begins to give way in the face of her emotional stress and newfound freedom. Her mother's death brings her closer to her American half brother and plunges her back into her childhood world spent in the company of her mother's many lively dancehall friends. It also frees her up to initiate an intimate relationship with a struggling French businessman. This cosmopolitan novel, a finalist for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, dramatizes one woman's struggle to finally acknowledge and act on her own complicated desires.--Joanne Wilkinson

Wilkinson, Joanne

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wilkinson, Joanne. "Habit of a Foreign Sky." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2010, p. 19. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA246013107&it=r&asid=c06c332d0fbcf885231625c9ea7177c4. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A246013107

THE UNWALLED CITY
248.33 (Aug. 13, 2001): p286.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Xu XI. Chameleon, $16.96 paper (320p) ISBN 1-387-80214-3

It is 1995 in Hong Kong, which in two years will be returned to China as part of the handover, and "life is surreal, swift, out of control." But in this aimless novel crammed with extraneous detail ("Water pressure was unusually low, although it never was high") and an abundance of cliches ("He hadn't called even though he said he would. Men"), Xi (Hong Kong Rose) focuses so tediously on the pasts of her four main characters that a vivid picture of modern-day Hong Kong never materializes. Andanna is a part-time fashion model and jazz singer trying to endure a split with her musician boyfriend. Vince is a divorcing, middle-aged New York photographer with a penchant for Asian women; one of them is Colleen, a friend of Andanna's who is happily married but "free to date others." Gail, a single mother and senior executive at an investment bank, longs for Vince, but Vince suspects she's his "wife all over." Much of the "action" takes place on the phone (some readers will find this the equivalent of being chatted up by a telemarketer), and habits used to distinguish characters are as trite as cigarette smoking or cola drinking. Granted, many of the characters are vapid by nature, hut their shallowness is surpassed only by their treatment: "He was appealing in his sensuality, the way a movie star or stranger could be." The novel has credible aspirations: to explore multiculturalism among the well-off in a land where the line between East and West is perhaps more blurred than anywhere else in the world. Unfortunately, readers are offered only a glimpse, at best. Agent, Ben Camardi. (Sept.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"THE UNWALLED CITY." Publishers Weekly, 13 Aug. 2001, p. 286. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA77454832&it=r&asid=121a78c7806a98849ffae3d3f2c408f9. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A77454832

City stage; Hong Kong playwriting in English
22.3 (Aug. 2007):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
9622097480

City stage; Hong Kong playwriting in English.

Ed. by Mike Ingham and Xu Xi.

Hong Kong University Pr.

2005

274 pages

$24.95

Paperback

PR9570

This collection of short plays and excerpts from longer dramas includes productions mounted in the last ten years. The major focus is identity, whether as a native of Hong Kong, an expatriate, someone with strong Chinese identity, or someone who is losing identity within new understandings of self or increasing multiculturalism. The plays and excerpts are powerful, living artifacts of changing times from within and without, and with each comes commentary by authors and critics about their themes and inspirations. Distributed by the U. of Washington Press.

([c]20072005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"City stage; Hong Kong playwriting in English." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2007. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA167160907&it=r&asid=c4682219480b2d7a909b1aa903485063. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A167160907

Asia's writers turning to English to gain readers
Doreen Weisenhaus
Born: 1954 in Hong Kong
Nationality: Chinese
Occupation: Writer
(Dec. 25, 2001): L, Arts and Entertainment: pE2.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
In the 1970's and 1980's, when she was developing her fictional voice, Xu Xi felt alone in her homeland. Unlike most Asian writers here, she wrote in English. Twice, for long periods, her antidote for isolation was to live in the United States.

When she returned to Hong Kong from New York for publication of her latest collection of short stories, the loneliness seemed a memory because at least half a dozen other Asian writers also released their books here the same week, all in English.

English-language writing about Hong Kong and much of Asia has long been the province of Western expatriates or writers passing through, but increasingly this work is being done by Asian authors like Xu Xi, who is of Chinese and Indonesian descent. This year she also published her third novel about Hong Kong, ''The Unwalled City.''

Hong Kong has been a source for such disparate English-language writers as Rudyard Kipling, W. H. Auden, George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, John le Carre. James Clavell, Richard Mason, Paul Theroux and Stephen Coonts.

The city had an international literary festival in May, drawing more than 30 Asian writers, including two Booker Prize nominees, Timothy Mo and Romesh Gunesekera; and two universities here have started literary journals. And the Internet has two Web sites in English, www .asianreviewofbooks.com/arb

/cover.php3 for books by Asians or about Asia and www.dimsum .com.hk, the digital version of Hong Kong's English-language literary journal founded in 1999.

''Writers from here are giving you a Hong Kong and Asia you've never seen before,'' said Xu Xi. ''You've seen James Clavell, but you haven't seen Hong Kong the way we've experienced it from the inside.'' The Hong Kong transformation has echoes in India, where many writers over the last two decades have used English instead of indigenous languages like Hindi, and this has led to a wider audience and recognition for Indian authors by British and American publishers.

Will Atkinson, who heads British sales for Faber & Faber, the British publisher, attended the festival to scout for new talent. ''Location is actually not important,'' Mr. Atkinson said. ''If you're writing about an Asian family in Hong Kong, and it has universal value, then it will find a universal market.'' And that is what Hong Kong's and other Asian writers want to do. By writing in English instead of Chinese, Malay or Tamil, they hope to reach readers worldwide.

''What's new is that English is now an Asian cultural language,'' said Shirley Geok-lin Lim, a Chinese-Malaysian poet and novelist who came here two years ago from California to head the English Department at the University of Hong Kong. ''The first thought is get rid of the master's language. But the way culture works it is not so easy. Language seeps into one's consciousness.''

Also in the consciousness of many here is reunification with China after 150 years of British rule. Many savor a shared Chinese heritage but fear the changes to be made to their capitalistic society. So rethinking who they are and where they are is being expressed in literature.

''Cartharsis as a result of the hand-over adds creativity,'' said Michael Morrow, founder of Asia 2000, Hong Kong's largest local publisher of English-language fiction and nonfiction. For example Xu Xi's collection ''History's Fiction'' explores the lives of ordinary people during Hong Kong' s historic moments, including the hand-over.

The emergence of English as an Asian cultural language is likely to spread beyond post-colonial locations like Hong Kong. English is being taught in primary schools in South Korea and Taiwan. Japan is debating how to improve citizens' command of English. And more authors from mainland China are following the example of Ha Jin, whose English-language novel, ''Waiting'' (Pantheon), about love and life during the Cultural Revolution, won the National Book Award in 1999.

Annie Wang, 28, is a new convert to English writing. She grew up in Beijing and moved to Hong Kong after years in the United States. Her five earlier books were in Chinese, but this year Ms. Wang published her first in English, ''Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen'' (Pantheon), about a disaffected woman in her 20's in China during the 1980's.

Ms. Wang said she switched to English because she found herself, like other mainland Chinese writers, censoring her work. ''When people write in Chinese, they worry they will get punished,'' she said. ''When I write in English, I don't want to worry. I can use profanity, street language, bad girls.''

Hong Kong traditionally lacked local authors because it lacked major publishing houses, editors and book agents. ''The whole food chain was missing,'' said Nury Vittachi, a Sri Lankan writer here who edits Dimsum.

Mr. Vittachi said this was changing. ''Asia is the printing station of the world now,'' he said, with international publishers printing in Hong Kong, Singapore and southern China. At the same time authors are getting together. The Hong Kong Writers Circle, founded in 1992, provides workshops, editing and publishing information.

''The interesting thing about this particular generation is that they read each other, so their work is informed by their knowledge of this Asian diaspora,'' said Shawn Wong, a Chinese-American novelist who teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle. ''Pioneer writers often had to figure it out on their own or the writers that they learned from were classically British.''

Alex Kuo, a Chinese-American novelist who often writes about Hong Kong, said publishing opportunities for native voices the last few years were better. ''The days of W. H. Auden going through and writing a piece are over,'' he said.

By Doreen Weisenhaus

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Weisenhaus, Doreen. "Asia's writers turning to English to gain readers." New York Times, 25 Dec. 2001, p. E2. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA81812294&it=r&asid=c62d0577f67989680215a80db8f3ed3a. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A81812294

"That Man in Our Lives." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2016, p. 182+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA459287494&asid=8804d632d118823112bb3fd8bbfbf37a. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017. Wilkinson, Joanne. "Habit of a Foreign Sky." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2010, p. 19. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA246013107&asid=c06c332d0fbcf885231625c9ea7177c4. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017. "THE UNWALLED CITY." Publishers Weekly, 13 Aug. 2001, p. 286. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA77454832&asid=121a78c7806a98849ffae3d3f2c408f9. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017. "City stage; Hong Kong playwriting in English." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2007. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA167160907&asid=c4682219480b2d7a909b1aa903485063. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017. Weisenhaus, Doreen. "Asia's writers turning to English to gain readers." New York Times, 25 Dec. 2001, p. E2. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA81812294&asid=c62d0577f67989680215a80db8f3ed3a. Accessed 9 Apr. 2017.

• south china morning post
  http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/1967001/book-review-hong-kong-author-xu-xi-explores-shifting
  Word count: 977

  Books

  Reviews

  Rosie Milne
  Book review: Hong Kong author Xu Xi explores shifting identities with her latest novel

  An American Sinophile goes missing en route to Hong Kong, a simple plot device that Xu Xi uses as a catalyst for her metafictional reflections on the self in the age of globalisation. There are jokes too

  7 Jun 2016

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  That Man In Our Lives

  by Xu Xi

  C&R Press

  4/5 stars

  The man in the title of the upcoming book by Hong Kong author Xu Xi, That Man in Our Lives, is Gordon Ashberry. But who is he? And where is he? And in what sense is he, or isn’t he, the protagonist of That Man in Our Lives? And is he or isn’t he somebody in whom the reader can wholeheartedly believe?

  Questions such as these tease the reader of That Man in Our Lives. Gordon Ashberry, also known as Gordie, also known by his Chinese name Hui Guo, is a wealthy American Sinophile and unmarried womaniser who has never needed to work. When he turns 50, Gordie decides to give all his money away. A predatory Chinese authoress, Zhang Lianhe, also known as Minnie Chang, also known as Lullabelle, makes him the subject of a book published in America as Honey Money.

  Author Xu Xi offers Hong Kong public tips on writing at CityU workshops

  This is a success, and the resulting publicity sends him into self-imposed exile. He disappears from Tokyo airport, en route from New York to Hong Kong. Naturally, this leaves everybody in his immediate circle bemused, upset, and keen to track him down. The novel is particularly concerned with the reactions of his two closest friends, Harold Haight, and Larry Woo, and their families.

  The blurb describes That Man in Our Lives as “The Transnational 21st Century Novel”. It’s certainly transnational. The action ranges between the US and Asia, with quick diversions to Europe. Xu Xi calls three New York women “upwardly global”, a brilliantly funny description that could apply to most of her characters. She is much concerned with the effects of globalisation: on individual lives; on nations, and diasporas; on languages.

  Xu Xi’s ethnically Chinese characters in America frequently comment on whether they mix their English with Cantonese, or Putonghua/Mandarin, and whether they call it “Putonghua” or “Mandarin”, or whether they use Taiwanese terms, or a mixture of some or all of these. In this English-language novel, Chinese words are scattered throughout, some transliterated into roman script, and some left in Chinese characters. The author’s interest in the use of Chinese language beyond China is of a piece with her interest in Chinese identities in a globalised world.

  [Xu Xi mines the idea of identity in her new novel. Photo: Oliver Tsang] Xu Xi mines the idea of identity in her new novel. Photo: Oliver Tsang

  Like Zhang Lianhe/Minnie Chang/Lullabelle, Larry Woo, a naturalised American academic in the field of cultural studies, is also writing a book about Gordie, and, by extension, about Sino-American relations. He comes up with a novel distinction: “Sino-Chinese relations, that’s what he’d rather write about. If you’re from the Mainland, Beijing, or even Shanghai these days, you’re Sino, the fact of Chinese-ness being a given. All the rest, Hong Kong, Taiwan, American- and other hyphenations, or, as his two daughters are so fond of saying in unison, Daaaaadddd, wha da? are merely Chinese.”

  Indeed, personal identity is something Xu Xi explores in many ways and at many levels. How does naming influence identity? Whatever the answer to that, characters with multiple names abound; particularly appealing is Suet-fa, a Hong Kong Chinese woman dating Gordie’s American godson, Pete Haight, who first changes her name to Tiara, and then to Tempest. And a missing protagonist whose history is slowly being revealed by a host of other characters immediately raises all sort of questions about how, for each of us, our identity is constructed, and deconstructed in the eyes of others, and hence also in our own eyes. Or vice versa.

  Collection gives vivid voice to array of (mostly) female characters

  The nature of the self and the shifting nature of personal identity is not the only postmodern theme or motif running through this book. As well as Honey Money, and Larry Woo’s book on Gordie, Pete is also moved to write about his godfather – his rather ill-advised online musing was the original spark for Minnie Chang’s book. Indeed, That Man in Our Lives is itself a metafiction, much concerned with texts and their production.

  There is no 19th- and 20th-century pretence that the characters in the novel are not inventions – with the possible exception of X-woman, an ethnically Chinese female author now resident in New York, of whom, one imagines, the reader is bound to ask: is this Xu Xi?

  Xu Xi’s presumed avatar X-woman is pulling the strings of this novel – and she is as much in search of Gordie as any of her (or Xu Xi’s?) characters. Throughout she offers comments on the authorial process, especially in a series of “interludes” in which she apparently meets some of her more minor characters.

  That Man in Our Lives is an ambitious, witty and generous novel, which also has enough mystery to keep even somebody with 20th-century tastes turning the pages. It also delivers an Asian perspective on the challenges and opportunities of globalisation, while exploring the loss of traditional ideas about the self, and what that loss means for authors and readers.

• Dock: Hayden's Ferry Review
  http://haydensferryreview.com/haydensferryreview/2016/9/19/an-interview-with-xu-xi
  Word count: 8572

  Dustin Pearson Interviews Xu Xi About Her New Novel That Man In Our Lives

  Dustin: So I understand that this novel took you nine years to write. Can you explain your process of writing the novel over those nine years?

  Xu Xi: Okay nine years is sort of deceptive. What happened in those nine years was I moved from New York back to Hong Kong, and to find a full time job I put out two books, three, actually, if you count the one I was editing plus some second editions of other books that came out. So all this other stuff was happening but the actual writing of the book took a little longer than nine years. I hit a point about five years along where I’d thought I’d finished it, and this was in Switzerland at a writer’s residency and I was like “Yay, the book is done!” I went back to Hong Kong and I went “Oh my God, this is all wrong.” And I literally threw it out and started over again. I think it’s because, well, the book is somewhat metafictional. That was something that happened in the second half of the nine years. In the first half of the nine years the book was kind of like a straight novel but something wasn’t quite working. I even had different roles for the protagonist and also one of the main, well he’s not exactly a main character but he’s a very significant character, Peter Haight. He only appeared towards the end in the third or fourth or—it was like the sixth draft I think. I kind of invented him and I thought “Yeah, that’s it, this is a good way to end.” And then I thought “Wait, I can’t end with him, I’ve got to start with him.” So you know how the end is sometimes the beginning when you draft? Well it happened with this book.

  Dustin: Gordie, your novel’s main male protagonist, has been described as a Gatsby figure, and your novel exhibits a large cast of characters. Both are notes that put your novel in conversation with other works. Can you talk about those other texts and how your novel is in conversation with them?

  Xu Xi: It’s very funny, while I was writing the book I never really thought of Gordie as Gatsby, because he’s very wealthy. He comes from wealth whereas Gatsby didn’t. Gatsby made his wealth. I mean there were some superficial resemblances in terms of the extravagant life they had but, I mean, I’m talking about Gordie at a time when he’s doing the opposite of his extravagance, you know? But when I finished it I realized, but I am talking about what it means to be rich in America, and I think that’s one of the things that struck me. Usually you don’t know what you’ve written until you’ve finished the book, at least I find that’s true, and so the book is ended and I’m thinking about the novel and I think, “You know he is sort of Gatsby-ish.” And I thought more about that and I thought about what I was trying to say about the disparities of income, about what it means to acquire and desire and need and depend on wealth in the way that somebody like Gordie does and to so cavalierly say he wants to give it away, which we still don’t quite believe he can do. Nobody in the novel really believes he can do that, but he keeps saying he’s doing that and he keeps behaving as if he does. So that’s part of it, but what was more interesting to me that struck me even more than the Gatsby thing, because that’s the American side of the novel, is the Chinese side of it. Which I started thinking about when I was talking to my publicist, I said “You know, it’s like The Dream of the Red Chambers,” which is a classic Chinese novel which has something like four hundred characters with fifty main characters, or fifty crucial ones, forty, I think, crucial ones that you’re supposed to be able to remember. And I thought, I’ve never written a book with as many characters as this one, of which so many play a part, even minor characters. Because in Dream of Red Chambers what happens is all these tiny little minor characters make appearances but they all have a role in some ways because it’s to try to show you a kind of society and a kind of world. I’ve been writing this world for a long time. Gordie first appeared three or four novels ago in Hong Kong Rose. At the time he appeared I thought “Oh good! Here’s an interesting guy.” He just kept following me around and part of those worlds intersect with this novel—not directly, you don’t have to have read any of those books to read this one, and all my books are standalones because I’m not trying to write a series, you know? But I realized that the characters intersect because they are a part of Hong Kong, they are a part of New York, they are a part of China, they are a part of Asia, just a very transnational, globalized world. They could just as easily be in Switzerland as they could be in, you know, Norway, as they could be in Abu Dhabi or wherever. And that’s kind of the world I’m representing and I thought, well, there’s a lot of people in different places, and so you need to try to express that. And so I think I realized I was kind of doing a little bit of what Dream of Red Chambers was doing. Which is, you know, that classic image we have of what a Chinese novel coming into the modern world was like. And actually Alex Kuo, the Asian-American author, he compared Gordie to the Monkey King. And Gordie is kind of a monkey character, he’s mischievous in a way, you know, he has a crazy sense of humor, he imitates Bugs Bunny. So, I mean, he’s like a cartoon character at some level, which, in a way, Monkey is too. And although the novel is not episodic in structure, there’s a certain episodic underbelly to it. Especially with the minor characters. So I realize, yeah, I suppose I wrote the Monkey King crossed with Dream of Red Chambers in an American setting, so we have to think about Gatsby.

  Dustin: This novel is part of a fictional universe that you’ve built over the course of your other novels. What context might readers miss having just begun their foray with That Man In Our Lives? Might you feel that the universe you’ve created has a certain trajectory or might resolve itself at some point?

  Xu Xi: Well if you’ve read the other ones then it becomes that much more rounded and richer. Interestingly, I was looking at Hong Kong Rose again, I kind of forgot about the book because I wrote it a while ago. It came out in ’97, and I realized “Oh goodness, look at that” because, you know, Gordie’s father is the Flying Tiger’s pilot, and there is a character in Hong Kong Rose, Rose, the main character, her father was also a Chinese fighter pilot who flew for the Americas in CAT, and he trained in Arizona at a nuke airfield. I had forgotten that—so the author forgets things. I can imagine if you had read that, you know, it’s that much richer. And, I mean, coincidentally here I am in Arizona as the book is coming out. [jokes] You know, I sort of arranged this, actually, it all came together—no. You know, the idea in fiction is never to have coincidences, but of course life is full of coincidences—but I don’t know that you would miss a whole lot, because the role he played in those other novels was different from the one he’s playing here. Here he’s his own person, whereas there he was always kind of an appendage to the other main characters that were there.

  Xu Xi (in reference to being asked if the novel may resolve itself): I think that when you’re writing about a large universe and lots of characters, the idea that you can resolve it all would be artificial. I mean, you could insist on that artifice, something like The Transit of Venus surely has—it’s a wonderful novel in which you can follow every thread to its end. I didn’t want to do that, because I wanted to think about how messy the twenty-first century is. And so the trajectory really is about moving from one mess to the next mess. One of the things that doesn’t seem wrong is that as things are going through, it’s like hell in a handbasket, you know? That’s how the world is sort of going. At least that’s the way Gordie feels at that point in time. But I think that speaks to a larger sense of the twenty-first century. From the questions of technology, to the questions of the environment, to the idea that we don’t have enough food to feed the planet, or that we could be running out of water, there’s so many larger geopolitical issues. And anybody that’s flying around the world, you know, wasting too much of a carbon footprint around the world, which is something I do, there’s so few answers to that. I think fiction has to find a way absorb those issues and speak about them. So I didn’t want to be definitive, I didn’t want to have an arc that was as clear because I think that the arc of our century is so uncertain. I used to feel like Cassandra when I was younger. I always felt like I could see the future, and for a long time I was actually right, because every novel I wrote seemed to come true. And I was a little bit daunted by the idea that I’m foretelling the future, and I got a little bit upset at this—not power—but this propensity I seemed to have. So for this novel, I was struck by how hard it was to see the future. I can’t see Gordie’s future. I thought I did. I thought I did when I first started writing and even halfway through, I thought I did. In fact, there were many earlier, very different versions where you actually know where Gordie ends up. Yes, I sometimes think I know where he ended up. But I’m still not certain, and I kind of want that unknown to be part of the trajectory, because I feel that’s the way the world is right now.

  Dustin: Your novel has been said to “examine the shifting balance of power between China and the U.S.” I feel that examination largely plays out in your characters’ desires and their acting on those desires. In the novel’s prelude, the narrator states, “When you arrive in America, China becomes merely a thing of the past, of foreign bodily feeling. You arrive in America because to arrive is to shed the longing for self in favor of the self America confers. Can choose to confer. Gordie was America. All that was so easy to love, to idolize, all others above.” At times, your characters demonstrate a longing for China. Do you agree that the theme of desire factors into your examination, and if so, how?

  Xu Xi: Oh yes, it’s all about desire. Actually the word that I think is more interesting than “desire” is the one that Robert Olen Butler likes to use, which is “yearning.” I think that that’s the underpinnings of a lot of fictional characters. You want to get to what they yearn for, because that speaks to the human condition. I do think that there’s a longing for China or something about the culture that is China. It’s perhaps not actually the physical geographic space of China, but what it represents, what it means, what its culture and history is about. Certainly for Gordie, you know, he studied Chinese at a time when it wasn’t necessarily the “it” language to study. Every dude’s doing French still at that point. But he did Chinese early, and he kind of fell in love with China as a young boy, or Hong Kong really, and by extrapolation, Hong Kong was a Chinese space and world, and he found himself quite comfortable in that. So I think, yes, that idea of a longing for something that you can glimpse at, but can’t completely see and that you feel deeply inside of yourself because, you know, you’ve studied it or you’ve lived there like, say, Harold for example, one of the main characters. He actually moves to Hong Kong and works there for a while and his life transforms. He ends up divorced as a result, he didn’t expect that part, but his life does transform and in the end he becomes a different person. I think we are all very different people, and since this is a long period of time of the friendship of these three men that I’m writing about, I think over time we all become different people at different stages of our lives. We’re fundamentally the same person, but we can watch ourselves and perhaps not even recognize who we were when we were twenty or thirty or whatever, you know? And I think that that’s sort of what is going on for these three characters. They are speaking to some of the desires that they had, and yet at the same time, they are also finding that some of those desires that they had so much when they were younger are so different from what it is they yearn for now when they’re in their fifties and sixties. It’s probably at the fifty point, really, where they all are at.

  Dustin: The novel establishes a color spectrum that’s at once racial, otherwise social, and linked to China’s colonial past. At one point near the middle of the novel, the narrator states, “Bino is dark chocolate Asian while I track somewhere along the spectrum between Meyer lemon and chocolate. The thing is, we both surface from time to time when the fiction becomes too real. We pretend like our race and complexions really mean something but we’ve been whitening, lightening, de-tanning, demeaning anything darker than white.” Can you speak to this moment between the narrator and Bino?

  Xu Xi: Yeah, this was one of those great moments in writing a book where you never thought you were gonna put something like this in, and all of a sudden you go, “Hang on! This is what it’s about!” and you gotta put that in there, you know? It’s funny because Bino is a real person. Bino Realuyo is a real novelist. In fact, I saw him a few weeks ago and I said, “You remember when you said to me, you know, ten years ago this?” And he said, “Oh yeah, I vaguely remember,” and I said, “Well, here’s the novel,” and he said, “Really?” He was really really surprised. I mean, it’s not China’s colonial experience, I think it’s sort of the colonial experience largely in Asia, of which China was a part. And it’s interesting because, China itself was not, per se, colonized, but bits of China was. And how do you define colonization? Because, you know, the Philippines, which is what Bino is speaking to, is a kind of American colonialism, American imperialism, and of course Hong Kong is British, you know? As is much else of Asia. But also the presence of the West in China, especially in Shanghai, and the concessions—it’s a part of Shanghai that still feels like the middle of Paris or something, you know? So, I mean, there is that sort of dangling ahead of you, this idea that the West was the thing to be. Which translated into “white,” basically. And while within China itself there is a color spectrum, the beauties of China, the famous beauties of China, are all fair skinned. And if you look at the paintings, that’s the whole idea. The ideal is this fair skin, and in the modern incarnation of that, sadly, very often, you see so many young women in Asia doing this skin lightening to the point of burning themselves and really destroying their complexions. Because to be dark skinned meant that you were lower class, you were a peasant, you were, you know, working in the sun, say the qua women, you know. So that wasn’t as prestigious. So you wanted to be closeted away, you know, in the red chambers, because that’s what the chambers were all about for all the concubines and the women with bound feet. But, hello, that’s a pretty weakened state to be in also, so it depends how you look at what privilege is. And I think that the color spectrum borrows from what we know, say, in America, say, the black/white question for certain. But it’s not the same kind of thing, and yet, there are many parallels you could probably draw. Like, dark skin is not as good. I mean, I grew up with this idea being I’m mixed, Chinese and Indonesian. So I have Indonesian blood and I just go brown, I don’t have to think about it. But it’s something that the Chinese side of my family says, “Oh, you can’t get dark. Oh, that’s terrible.” And I’m like, why? Why is it terrible? So, I’ve always challenged that idea even as a child, and I’ve always wanted to play it out. And Bino is kind of perfect, because he is kind of chocolate colored, and I can go sort of dark, you know, as well. And that’s kind of interesting. Well of course the idea of yellow, you know, is also the color that’s ascribed to Asian, or what do they say, Oriental skin. And yellow is such a peculiar color when you think about it.

  Dustin: The novel doesn’t shy away from discussing the social and sacred meaning of sex and sexuality, and how those two meanings have changed over time. I’m going to quote a bit from a draft of Larry’s book, “This world, in its Chinese context, is meant to be joyous. In an era where sexual relationships are not necessarily the most intimate connection any longer, a platonic friendship can prove equally as, or even more joyous while still allowing room for others.” I found some of the sexual relations between characters to be moving and sad if only because of how empty they ended, despite the intention behind the gesture of entering into those relations. Can you say more about this subject?

  Xu Xi: I was listening to, I think it might have been NPR or a documentary on television, where the subject was sort of the sexualization of young children today and how readily they are exposed to a sexualized idea of how to behave, how to dress, even how to have sex. And one of the sort of stats that was being quoted was how many young men and women just sort of, readily engage in oral sex, which, when they compared to say twenty or thirty years ago, would not have been so common. And so I think about this in these characters who are all trying to connect in some ways. The intimacy that they all seek and desire is for a deeper connection. And the term that Larry is referring to is the Chinese term “yee yan sai gai” or “er ren shi jie” which is a two person world. It’s an expression. It’s used a lot in Hong Kong for romantic ads for weddings and things like that, “Oh, these two people in the world,” and how wonderful it all is. And it’s all an illusion, of course. That’s the thing, like most weddings are illusions, and all wedding advertising tends be, “Oh, here’s this perfect most important day.” And I’m like, but you have a whole life, you know, it’s not just one day of the wedding. And of course with what happens to Gordie, often, there are those grand gestures that completely go awry. He has this great romantic thing and then it completely disappears. I think that a lot of my earlier work, especially my earliest books, were very sexual in nature. I was considered transgressive because I wrote about incest in families. My second book was about very promiscuous women. And since this came out in Asia this was very controversial. But it’s ironic, I think, because despite all that controversy, Asia likes to present itself, and China especially, I don’t know if the term is moral. Maybe it is. So very moralistic and prudish, rather, and conservative about how to have sex. But in the meantime, everybody has mistresses and people have concubines, and even though concubines are not legal anymore, a lot of men have what virtually are concubines and second families, and this just goes on. So I look at that, and I look at say, America, where here the idea of romantic love and the idea of two people having a relationship, I mean, I think among young people that’s probably the big question. If I look at fiction by young writers it’s always about “the relationship.” The relationship takes on this, you know, paramount importance. Which is quite different than in Asia where it’s about marriage. It’s about doing the right relationship as opposed to the love relationship. You know, you still have arranged marriages today in China and India etc., and even among very modern young people. So you have the sort of contrast of how people behave and yet how do we actually achieve that intimacy? Sometimes it’s not in the situations you would expect. They need not even be that familiar, like Patti and Gordie for example, who have this weird sexual relationship over the years, and yet they don’t really know each other that well. But Patti has always had a thing for him, and he obviously has had a kind of thing for her, too, and she is his best friend’s younger sister. And of course the best friend, in the meantime, completely has no idea and he keeps thinking, “What a shame they don’t get together,” you know? And I wanted to look at how we try to achieve these forms of intimacy, even in what would seem like that’s not gonna work, you know? Because sometimes the marriage is where less intimacy happens, or at least some intimacy happens, but other things are kept out of it and it goes somewhere else. So that’s what I was looking at a lot, especially thinking about how in Asia it is. I grew up at a time in Hong Kong where concubines were legal. So I had friends who were children of concubines and I used to wonder about that. My mother used to always joke about my dad and say, “Oh, he goes to Japan all the time, he wants to go to all the Geisha houses,” which he did, but because that’s what you did, you know? And she always said, “Oh, he would just love to take a concubine.” And I used wonder about that, what would it be like to have another family, you know?

  Dustin: Given Gordie’s talent for impersonating Bugs Bunny, I found Larry’s prospective comparative study of Bugs Bunny and Yogi Bear to determine their symbolic significance for American culture to be fascinating. At one point, in a conversation with Wing-gaau, the narrator asserts that Bugs Bunny, if not gay, may have been travestite, which is interesting given the ambiguous nature of Gordie’s sexuality throughout the novel. Do you have any thoughts about the conflation of Bugs Bunny, sexuality, American culture and Gordie or Gordie’s character.

  Xu Xi: It’s funny, you know, the idea of Bugs Bunny. You know, my partner who is an American, and who is as lunatic about cartoons as I am, you know, we both kind of grew up on a diet of cartoons and we can quote cartoons to each other. But the first person who actually said to me something about Bugs, he’s like, you know, that transvestite thing that he does. And I thought about it and I thought, you know, Bugs was always dressing up as a woman and Daffy did too, you know, Daffy Duck. And I was like, of course it’s like a cartoon thing, it’s meant to be funny, but it was a way of doing it at that time when American culture was not yet as comfortable about talking about transgendered or homosexuality or, you know, gay culture and all that. And of course I can’t say it’s completely changed, but it’s come a long way and we have a much more open culture here to talk about these things. So I always thought that it was curious how Gordie—since this is a book about him and his two best male friends—how male friendships skirt the lines sometimes about what is gay and what isn’t. And how men of their generation, born in the late forties, fifties, would be very allergic to the idea of being considered gay, you know, the homophobia was much higher in those times. And yet Gordie, he was very close to his mother, he’s very comfortable cooking and doing a lot of very domestic things. There is a kind of, I don’t want to say feminine side, but he’s certainly comfortable around women. One of the reasons he’s such a great lover of women is that he knows how women think, you know, and he knows how to get inside their skin and that’s why he’s successful as a lover with his many conquests, if you like. So I do think that one of the reasons I had Larry, and Larry was a later character too, he wasn’t one of the original characters. I came up with this idea for him and I started thinking about him and I thought, you see, years ago when I was in Greece one time I was talking to a couple and the guy was a scholar in pop culture, and he studied Superman, and we started trading Superman trivia, and I thought, oh my God, somebody in the universe that actually studies this stuff. And that planted the seed, and so it was that idea that years later I put into Larry, because I thought he could be somebody who wants to study pop culture. And it’s interesting to me because I looked around to see how much was written about, you know, my favorite was the Warner Brothers, and there wasn’t that much. And I’ve spent time sort of analyzing Warner Brothers vs. Hannah Barbara and there’s a distinct difference, you know? Just like you look at Superman and Batman, you look at Marvel Comics and all that, there’s some distinct differences and that speaks a lot to a kind of American popular culture at least, which is reflective of the larger culture out there. And certainly this sort of uncertain sexual identity and I think, again, the twenty-first century is a time when I think there’s much more tolerance for transgendered people now. Again, this was something I was watching on television recently and thinking, “Oh my God, twenty-five years ago we wouldn’t have seen a program like that talking so comfortably.” It was about a young woman swimmer who was transgendered, and she became a man, and now she had to swim with the men’s team. One of the things she said was, “Well, I had a choice. Did I want to be more a man or did I more want to win,” because as a woman she always won, but as a man, she said, “I come in fourteenth.” And I thought that is so interesting that this young twenty-something year old person can talk about this so openly and had very supportive parents as well, and a supportive university swim team, and a supportive university. And I’m thinking, in my lifetime, this is really change, because I would not have seen something like this on television, on national television. And I just think that that slipperiness, for me, it’s actually an evolution of our understanding of gender, we’re not so strictly, you know, we’re not so restrictive in our thinking that one is either male or female and they can only be this or that, you know? And Gordie’s just somebody who, I think, even as a child was probably sliding between both and not worrying too much about it. I think he just naturally was like that.

  Dustin: Your narrator seems to have an intimate knowledge of your novel’s entire cast of characters, in addition to having her own plot arch within the novel, but her identity is never revealed. There are what I’ve taken as clues in the novel’s dedication and acknowledgements. Both sets of clues point to you as the narrator, which I’ve taken to make sense in both a meta and possibly autobiographical way. Can you walk me through your narrator’s conception and larger role within the novel?

  Xu Xi: Well, like I said, this meta part came in late. And it was because I was thinking about what Bino said, you know? And I thought, you know, because he said, “You’re just too much in love with your character,” and I’m like, “Screw you, of course not.” But in fact he was right, and I had to examine that question, that idea, because I’m in love with an idea essentially, because this is my own creation, right? And I started listening to a lot of, you know, the American songbook and jazz standards. I was most interested in the American songbook songs that moved over into jazz standards. And there was one in particular “Isn’t it Romantic?” the song which is sort of an underpinning to this. And I remember, this is long before the novel, that I first heard this song on Sabrina, the movie with Audrey Hepburn. It’s an interesting tune because there was one point that, and I play piano, I tried to play it and I thought, “This is a really tricky rhythm, I can’t get it right.” And I kept listening to it and figuring out why can’t I play it right, so I listened to as many versions as I could. Then I started looking at the words of the song, at first I thought, “That’s just a silly romantic song,” but it’s not. It’s actually quite interesting, the lyrics, and then of course, as in a lot of American songbook songs, and this was Rodgers and Hart in the early days, there’s an introduction section. And those introductory lyrics are sometimes very revealing. So I went and read those and I thought that this is the lyricist really having fun with, you know, being ironic and just doing all the crazy things that he wants to do. And as I looked at all of that I thought, you know, lyricists often write intros almost like a meta comment on the song itself, but sometimes they’re not exactly like the song. I thought, “I wonder if I could do that too,” and I think that’s where the gem of it started. And I heard that song again. I remember the second time that it really struck me. I was having lunch in some hotel in Cincinnati when I was working there, and all of the sudden the band started playing and I thought, “I recognize that,” and instead of paying attention to this business meeting I was supposedly in, I kept thinking about this song. And so this song had dogged me for a long time too. I guess I was sort of trying to figure out, you know, as a novelist you’ve made up all these characters, you put words into their mouths, you put the consciousness into them, you try to make them have their own story arc, but with so many characters going on, I’m thinking, but while all this is happening, there’s all these other people that exist in their lives, because the title is That Man in Our Lives and I deliberately wanted to do that. Those people could tell me quite a lot about what the heck is going on in terms of “What are they thinking about?” And so I got this idea that I could actually have a narrator of sorts talking to these people. You know, I’ve been talking to Gordie for years, I mean he travels with me. We have these conversations, we have lunch together regularly, we have dinner, we have drinks together, and I yell at him a lot. And he’s very charming, he never yells at you, you know, and that makes him very irritating also. It’s like, “Goddammit, why won’t you get mad at me?” you know? So I’ve had this kind of a conversation with him probably more than with any other character I’ve ever created. I talk to all my characters, but him in particularly I found myself yammering away with for a long time. Plus, I had to do so much research to create his background because I know nothing about the Connecticut coast, I had to actually figure that out. I don’t know a whole lot about the Flying Tigers, I did a lot of research on that in order to get to understanding where Gordie could have come from. I was not born on the East Coast, you know, I didn’t go to an Ivy League, and Gordie went to Yale, so I did all this research on Yale. I didn’t study Chinese at Yale, and the interesting thing about studying Chinese at Yale is that it uses a different transliteration. It has it’s own, which I found very interesting, and I had to go chase down that transliteration as well, which I found in New Zealand of all places, in a library. A librarian found and got it for me, which was really nice. Because I’ve been talking for him for so long I wanted some relief, and he wasn’t going to talk to me in this novel because he disappears at the beginning. So I’m like, “Okay, you’ve disappeared. Who am I going to talk to about this?” So I started talking to the other characters, the minor characters, and they started to reveal all kinds of things about him that I hadn’t thought about. And you can say there’s a sort of autobiographical element, but if there’s anything that is autobiographical at all it’s me and Gordie, because we’ve been together for so long. The other characters are actually a lot less autobiographical, because they’re based on different people I might have known, all that, but I can’t really pinpoint, I mean Stella, for example, is a character I have no idea where she came from. She’s so kind of odd, in a way. Patti is another one that I can sort of see, but I can’t quite tell you where she came from. I mean, what she does in her work and all that, I sort of know where that comes from because I’ve done a little bit of investor relations type work as well, but I didn’t really know who she was. But I knew, strangely, some of the more minor characters. John Haight, for example, her younger brother who’s really minor in this book. He was in one of my other books, but I thought, “I know him, I’ve met him.” I’ve met his type, if you like, many times. I knew Violette. I didn’t know Colette. I was like, “Who is this woman who cuts her hair in two lengths and has a tattoo on her tummy?” I don’t know people like that. But I knew Violette. So I knew the minor characters better in terms of the kinds of people they were, so I thought, “Well I’ll talk to them, and then I’ll figure out more about the book.” That part is definitely meta, you know, it is a narrator. On the other hand, the autobiography really stems more from Gordie and me, and then, because he wouldn’t talk to me and I couldn’t rely on autobiography anymore, I had to turn it into fiction.

  Dustin: With such a large cast of characters, and the roundness of each of those characters, I found myself somewhat surprised by who ended up being major and minor characters. Given that you write out of and maintain a fictional universe, do you see yourself returning to any of the secondary characters in future works? Or returning to any of the characters in general?

  Xu Xi: Actually, that’s something I’ve done for quite a long time. The characters that appeared in my first books, novels, usually the ones in the novels repeat, although some come out of short stories and then turn into a novel or something like that. They do repeat, and one who was a minor character becomes a major character. Like Gail, who is a very minor character in this book, she’s just mentioned once, is Gordie’s half-sister, but she was the protagonist of my last book. And prior to that, she was in a previous book where she and Gordie had some role, but she wasn’t the main character. And I was thinking about that with this book, because I created all these minor characters, and I thought, “Which one of these will come back?” And part of me sort of wants to make John Haight come back, because he was first imagined back in, you know, I can’t quite remember if he was in Hong Kong Rose, I don’t think he was. But he was definitely in Unwalled City in a very minor way, and then he reappeared again in a more significant way in the last book, Habit of a Foreign Sky. And I think the idea of somebody who’s life, in some ways, is a kind of more conservative version of Gordie. I mean, he actually has a real job, you know, he is lawyer where as Gordie doesn’t really have a job, but who seems so easily able to, you know, woo women but doesn’t commit to anyone. And he strings them all along, you know? But he also studied Chinese and Japanese early in life at a time when nobody was really doing it. Well by the time he did it, there were a lot more people studying Japanese, and so that’s where he goes first, he goes to Tokyo, and then he ends up in Hong Kong. And I kind of thought, “Now why did he make himself present?” He does something very interesting in this novel in terms of refusing to go home for his mother’s funeral. In a family that is actually a very close knit family where everybody looks out for each other, and I’m thinking, “Now why doesn’t he do that?” And I figured I didn’t have to answer it in this book, but then it got me thinking maybe I’ll answer it in another book. So yes, I find that they do re-“present” themselves in some ways. Sometimes I just kill them off, that’s a way to take care of them. But yeah, I think they do.

  Dustin: I was getting really into, even though he was in the book in a kind of minor way, he seems to have a very strong personality, and seems to—I guess I got really invested in the ending of the relationship between the narrator and—

  Xu Xi: Wing-gaau, is that the one?

  Dustin: Right.

  Xu Xi: Yes. Now that was an interesting turn, and I think actually that’s informing the novel I’m writing right now. Although, it’s not in the form of Wing-gaau. He doesn’t actually appear as a character. Years ago I read a book by, I think his name is Robert Rodi, he’s a gay writer, and it was a book titled Fag Hag and I had never seen that term before. It was years ago in Singapore, I saw it and I thought, “What is this?” And I picked up the book, and then I was on a flight and I could not put it down, it was so funny. I met him some years later. I went to a reading he was giving, and I told him that I actually had read that book and I really liked it, and I bought another one of his books. But he has a really comic sense and he’s able to talk about something like that. But one of the reasons I was interested is that I did know a woman when I was much younger who was very much in love with a gay man, and you sort of look at that, and go, okay, maybe when you’re a teenager you have a crush on a guy who’s gay, and you don’t know he’s gay, that’s one thing. But here was somebody who had a crush on a guy who was gay, and it was pretty obvious that he is gay. So you think, “Where does that go?” And of course you see this now in television and movies, it’s in popular culture. So I was kind of curious about, again, this idea of sexual identity. I think writing that scene with Wing-gaau, that section with Wing-gaau, was a way for me to explore something that I’m already thinking about, which I’m working out in my new novel, where somebody wants to see this woman that he had an affair with years ago and has always sort of carried the torch for, so to speak, and then discovers she’s lesbian now. I mean, she wasn’t when he knew her, she was married, as a matter of fact. So the relationship, his desire for her, has always been somehow outside the bounds of what you’re supposed to do, you know? And so I’m thinking, “What happens there?” He finally gets to see her again and then lo and behold, she’s got this beautiful female partner, and he’s actually very attracted to the female partner. So I’m thinking, you know, this is a good way to examine it, in this scene, and now I think it’s going to inform, and I think that’s why it was so strong. Because I was thinking about it, and I think it’s where some of my thinking had gone, and some of the short stories I’ve been writing also have sort of that slippery gender identity. I do think it’s a big issue in the twenty-first century. I think it’s something that’s very much a part of our culture. I mean, with gay marriage being legalized, I thought that was a big turning point in the culture, and that’s something you cannot avoid almost as a writer. Also, because I do have a lot of gay friends and gay associates and always have. So I’ve been interested in that. And at one point in my life, when I was in grad school, I worked in a lesbian book shop, or at least a lesbian run bookshop, I should say, even though the books were everything. In fact, it was second-hand books and a lot of romance novels and all that. It was quite an experience for me. So I wanted to kind of examine that, and I think you’re right, that is one of the characters that comes across quite powerfully, more so than some of the other minor characters, who maybe helped move the plot along a little more than, you know, that.

  Dustin: Is there anything you’d like to say about the novel that I haven’t given you the opportunity to say? Or might there be anything you’d like to ask me as a reader of your novel?

  Xu Xi: Well, I wondered about the musical backdrop to it, because it’s not essential that you even know any of these songs, but I’m actually quoting a lot of American songbook lyrics. One of the early inspirations was Nixon in China, the opera by John Adams. But, you know, I wondered if that musicality that I injected into it, how does that come across to a reader? I’m curious about that.

  Dustin: Well, I thought about that when I was reading over that Gordie was involved in jazz, and I know that one of his past serious love interests had this relationship to music, and it kind of came across in Gordie and his abilities, and, I guess, his philosophy. I kind of just attached it more to his other talents, you know, being in this world that he’s involved in, the kind of people that get attracted to that world, and the kinds of politics that end up, I don’t know, coming out foremost in their lives. You know, when they’re involved in the entertainment industry and are around all of these people and this lifestyle. So I thought it blended right in with that world. It kind of made a lot of sense for another way of characterizing Gordie, and perhaps some of the things we find Gordie doing. I think, at first, I got really into him being this vocalist. That was a conversation I think that, when Larry was explaining his experience, his last time seeing Gordie, that was one of the major discussions that he had. And just thinking about how Gordie acquired his Chinese name. There were different associations that I made with it, but I think ultimately I just felt the musical aspects, specifically, as being more of a cushion for the world and the drama that surrounds Gordie and how he infects the people that he’s interacting with.

  Xu Xi: That’s very interesting because I wondered how it would play out. Because in writing it, of course, I spent so much time with the music, but I knew that you can’t write music onto a page, at least I can’t. I mean, they’re have been novels that have tried to do that, but I think it’s hard. I think it’s hard to write music onto the page, because it assumes that the reader knows the same song, can hear it, and even if you were going to put in, like say, an electronic book, okay link it, so you can play this song, that still doesn’t do the same thing. They are quite separate. You’re asking that to sort of invade the universe of the novel. But I had to spend so much time with the music, I have like, I don’t know, ten versions of “Isn’t it Romantic?” I don’t know how many versions of “My Romance” and all these songs are a part of it. And I listened to that Teresa Tang song until it was driving me nuts. That’s a very popular old song, you know, old pop song in Chinese, especially in Taiwan, Hong Kong, you know. She’s very well-known from an early era, and I don’t sing Mandarin lyrics easily, not Cantonese either actually, although Cantonese is easier, and I had to listen to it and I got somebody to write down the lyrics for me so I could try to hear the sounds of it. And it just took forever. And yet so little of that really needs to be, you know, up front in the book. It just needs to be layered in so that when you use a line or something, it doesn’t matter whether the person recognizes that this is a lyric, just so long as you have some credit for it or acknowledgement in the book, which I do. But I spent all this time thinking about lyrics, and discarding some, and actually finding names for characters from some of these song lyrics as well. That’s how I got Rosemarie Haddon’s name. There’s a song, “Rose Marie,” it’s really corny. It’s an operetta and at first I was going to use it, and I was like, “No, this is just too awful.” But it was, in its day, a very popular song. Well thank you, that’s interesting to hear.

  Dustin: Absolutely, thanks for sitting down with me. I’d say that one of the quirks that I think that I’ll be taking away from this novel, that doesn’t really matter in any kind of scope, is “gan bei.” I looked that up on YouTube, there’s actually quite a funny video that shows a bunch of people toasting at the end of the dinner.

  Xu XI: Yes, well now you know that, so you can use it when you’re in Hong Kong and China, yeah.

  Dustin: Absolutely, I think that will help.

  Xu Xi: Actually around Asia it’s quite common, because a lot of people speak Mandarin anyway.

  Dustin: Good deal, thanks again.

• asia society
  asiasociety.org/xu-xi-habit-foreign-sky
  Word count: 694

  Xu Xi: Habit of a Foreign Sky
  Novelist Xu Xi reads an excerpt from Habit of a Foreign Sky before an appreciative Anna Sherman in Hong Kong on Oct. 7, 2010. (1 min., 53 sec.)

  Novelist Xu Xi reads an excerpt from Habit of a Foreign Sky before an appreciative Anna Sherman in Hong Kong on Oct. 7, 2010. (1 min., 53 sec.)

  HONG KONG, October 7, 2010 - Suffering, innocence and self-discovery—these are the themes of Hong Kong-based author Xu Xi's latest novel, Habit of a Foreign Sky, as Xu made clear at a book reading and discussion at Asia Society Hong Kong Centre.

  Habit of a Foreign Sky takes its title from the Emily Dickinson poem, "Away From Home" and is set in 1997 Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Manhattan; as the author explained: "This was right after Hong Kong's handover from Britain to China, which was an 'unmoored' time for Hong Kong. This was followed shortly thereafter by the SARS outbreak and the Asian financial crisis, and these events were front of mind as I was writing. I write very contemporaneously. I'm always thinking about what has recently happened in the world that I am trying to document."

  Xu's protagonist, Gail, is a mixed-race single mother who loses both her only child and her mother in the span of two years. Untethered from the future she has imagined and her connections to the past, she is left with nothing but a hard-won career at a global investment bank.

  As Xu's "women's novel," Habit of a Foreign Sky centers around the relationship between Gail and her mother. "The suffering Gail encounters forces her to confront her past; her mother's rather seedy past. When Gail was younger, she believed her mother to be a dance hall hostess, but as she grows older she realizes her mother was a prostitute and that in fact she, Gail, is an illegitimate child. Her father was a member of the Flying Tigers, the American volunteer pilots; he is conspicuous by his absence in her life.

  This illegitimacy is something Gail has always hidden—she has buried all that in a very respectable life. But something then opens up—in losing everything that is familiar, she is forced then to confront not only her mother's life but also who she herself is. There is a release in her as a result of all this tragedy. The realization she comes to is that her life is a vast comedy of wasted effort."

  The novel also facilitated Xu's exploration of the masculine and feminine worlds her female characters inhabit, and the "reinvention" these women undertake when moving between the two: "I worked for 18 years in corporate life, in some rather masculine industries. I was often the only woman on the management team. I found that women behaved and communicated one way in work situations and very differently when with their girlfriends. There is something different about what happens to women when they are out in the masculine world compared with their more feminine world. There are a number of scenes in the novel with the mother and her old girlfriends—all of whom are former dance hall hostesses or prostitutes—that enabled me to explore how differently they think about, and behave with, men."

  One of the recurring metaphors is the loss of the protagonist's watch at the beginning of the novel: "Hong Kong has been described as a place of transit, where everything is fluid: Time, boundaries, relationships. The novel is also set in a time of great uncertainty: No one was sure of the impact the financial crisis would have on Hong Kong. The main character spends the whole novel not knowing what time it is, because time doesn't really matter anymore. With Gail's losses come a need to revisit and relearn new patterns of behavior. To a certain extent she makes peace with the events of her past. But I am not sure she actually finds herself by the book's end. Resolution doesn't happen so quickly in life."

  Reported by Natali Pearson, Asia Society Hong Kong Center

• city weekend
  http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/shanghai/article/book-review-access-thirteen-tales-xu-xi
  Word count: 530

  Book Review: "ACCESS: Thirteen Tales" by Xu Xi
  By carlonseider | Wed, Feb 29, 2012 06:28 PM , Updated: Thu, Jul 9, 2015 06:13 AM

  Thanks to the success of her 2010 novel Habit of a Foreign Sky, Hong Kong writer Xu Xi’s new book was highly anticipated worldwide. A collection of 13 short stories written between 2004 and 2010 and published in various international journals, Access: Thirteen Tales does not disappoint. The anthology’s theme is the accessibility of what we need and what we want, played out over five sections: Tall Tales, Circular Tales, Fairy Tales, Old Wives’ Tales and Beastly Tales. Xu Xi has said in interviews that she prefers to think of the stories as “tales” because they are incomplete sagas instead of finished plots. She is also keen to point out that the uniting force of the book is situations, not the ethnicity of her characters. Still, the fact is most of the lead protagonists are Asian. Xu has always written best about Hong Kong-born women, such as Gail Szeto in Habit of a Foreign Sky and the lead character in 1997’s Hong Kong Rose. The stories in Access feature an array of intriguing women, each dealing with their own struggles in their own way. Among stories that span the Chinese diaspora―all the way from Amsterdam via New Zealand and New York―the stand-out piece is Famine, which won an O. Henry prize and appeared in the 2006 competition anthology. The narrator is a middle-aged Hong Kong woman who is finally free from family duties when her aged parents die. To protest against her mother’s stringent attitude toward wasting food during a childhood marred by poverty, the woman undertook several hunger strikes when she was young. Now, on her first trip outside of Hong Kong, she laments the failures of her life while ordering lavish feasts at a hotel in America. Another striking tale is Lady Day, in which a male-to-female transsexual prostitute plans her revenge on the boys who abused her at boarding school in England. Lady Day is the “dream Asian seductress,” turning to prostitution and moving to Amsterdam after her father denies responsibility for her. Regret and reflection seep from the pages: “What if doesn’t make a life. What is, does.” The variety of situations depicted in the collection is impressive, from the corporate American backdrop of The Wang Candidate to the dingy Tsim Sha Tsui massage parlor in To Body to Chicken. Behind the themes of access and desire, racial and cultural issues abound. The elderly Kar-Li in Space laments the attitude of gweilo in Hong Kong: “these ‘white ghosts’ who still boss us around, even after the end of colonial rule.” The narrator of Famine effects a complete cultural shift by learning English: “I changed my language to change my life.” Xu Xi’s style is eminently readable, with a refreshing lack of overly elaborate language. Her no-nonsense prose draws the reader in. Although she has found international renown relatively recently, her career is a long and prolific one. Her first book was published in 1994, and she has won several important literary prizes and accolades. Access proves the longevity of her success and talent.

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