An Interview with Xu Xi - Issue 1 Contributor
Xu Xi is the author of eleven books, most recently That Man in Our Lives (2016) and Interruptions (2016). Forthcoming titles include – a memoir An Elegy for HK (Penguin, 2017), a short fiction collection Insignificance (Signal 8 Press, 2018) and an essay collection This Fish is Fowl (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2019-20). She co-directs Authors at Large. She spoke to Creative Writing Student, Wentao Zhang, on behalf of The University of Nottingham about her writing.
Xu Xi’s fiction explores what it means to be transnational with a rare clarity. Fresh and cosmopolitan, her work is informed on matters of identity, geopolitics and culture, and her characters voyage from the intimate to far-flung places. Her work has global recognition, largely due to her unique insights on living in Hong Kong and further afield which break with restrictive stereotypes, and in 2000 she was coined as ‘a pioneer writer in English from Asia’ by The New York Times. ‘To me,’ she told The LA Review, ‘being “authentic” in terms of culture, language, or nation is highly problematic, because that presumes there is an absolute standard that defines what being, say, “Chinese” is.’ Xu Xi’s personal experience of some of the trappings of identity give rise to nuanced work.
A former Indonesian national, Xu Xi was born and raised in Hong Kong, and later became a U.S. citizen. She writes in English but her fiction is stippled with Cantonese-speaking scenes and phrases. ‘It’s natural to merge linguistics,’ she says. ‘I’ve always joked that ESL and CSL (English and Cantonese as second languages) are my mother tongue, as neither are my parent’s first languages. But they are two of Hong Kong’s official languages and Chinglish (Chinese English) in Hong Kong is common.’ Her readers are intrigued by the translation process and she explains it’s more literal than one might assume: ‘For example, she says, ‘there’s a saying in Cantonese “你闷到我抽筋 (You bore me so much)”, and I directly translate it into “You bore me into a muscle cramp.” Although there is no such an expression in English, English native speakers know what I mean. It makes sense to them.’
With international themes embedded in her literature, it’s no surprise that Xu Xi has a taste for travel. Hong Kong, the USA, France, Greece, the UK and Norway are just some of the places globetrotting has taken her to. ‘The truth behind much of my travel is that I didn’t really like living in Hong Kong. As a child, I always wanted to leave but with family there it’s not been easy to put the city behind me entirely,’ she admits. ‘I much prefer living in the U.S. and still do. Some of my travel has been due to work.’ Prior to writing full-time, Xu’s career was corporate marketing management, mostly for major multinational companies including Dow Jones (The Asian Wall Street Journal) and Federal Express. She has also taught Creative Writing at universities internationally.
On the subject of travel, I ask Xu Xi to share an enlightening experience from when she was on the road. ‘In Thessaloniki, I met a young boy who took me to his shanty home where I met his mother and sister. They were desperately poor. He had probably never seen a Chinese person before and was naturally curious. What was most surprising was when he told me he was 17, but in size he resembled a 12-year-old at most. Malnourishment of course. It made me appreciate how lucky I am. They were delighted to have me as a visitor, gave me food and drink, and then he walked me back to the main road where we met. It was a startling moment, one to reflect on, and something that could only have happened to a traveller.’
Xu Xi’s most recent novel, That Man in Our Lives, (C and R Press, 2016) is based on a man’s disappearance and tells with wit and mystery the impact his absence wreaks on those left behind. Metafictional in style, it has been highly received and The Asian American Literary Review describe it as ‘a novel which celebrates the pleasure of movement, of lawless mixing of language and register, and of reinvention.’ With Xu Xi’s memoir An Elegy for HK also due to be published by Penguin, it looks set to be another productive year.
You can download Xu Xi’s letter ‘Hong Kong’ (Issue 1, Autumn 2013) from our archives here.