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 I'm
not used to taking stock tips from fiction writers, but author and Hong Kong
native Xu Xi wasn't shy about offering some.
The author of three novels and several short story collections, including her
latest, Overleaf Hong Kong: Stories and Essays of the Chinese Overseas (Chameleon
Press), Xu Xi has led a creative, well-heeled, international life. She said
that she owes some of it to futures trading.
"I lived off my capital gains for a while - oil futures did very well for me
recently. When stocks are going south, futures are going north,'' she said
during an interview in the lobby of the Mandarin Hotel. "I trade online because
I don't want to have to get dressed in the morning to go out.''
So much for the starving artist cliche. But like all good writers, Xu Xi, 50,
writes about what she knows and the multinational corporate world in which she
also worked for 18 years, including stints with Cathay Pacific and later at the Asian
Wall Street Journal, threads through her works as much as the vibrant
patchwork that is Hong Kong.
But the question of identity is what continues to consume her and feed her
stories. Not surprising, though, considering she's the child of
Indonesian-Chinese parents (she also writes under her Indonesian name, Sussy
Kamala), has been an American citizen since 1987, writes in English, speaks
Cantonese and, according to her publicity blurb "inhabits the flight path
connecting New York, Hong Kong and New Zealand''. That route also detours to
Mountpelier, Vermont where she's on the Master of Fine Arts fiction faculty at
Vermont College.
There's often a subterranean tremor running through her stories, a vibrating
tension of simultaneously being Chinese, and not Chinese.
"Yeah, I feel like a mongrel,'' she said, laughing a little. "Usually people
write because they have something to say and they are trying to sort out
questions of identity, a sense of belonging, which is a common theme with both
Chinese and English-language writers in Hong Kong.
"This is understandable given that Hong Kong is all about confusion of identity,
a place where identity is always an issue. My father came here from Shanghai in
1949 ... .'' She paused for a moment and laughed again at the unspoken
significance of the date.
"Nineteen forty-nine. It was time to go, you know. My mother came here from
Indonesia in 1947 - there was a diaspora of Indonesian-Chinese and my parents
found each other here. Most people who populated Hong Kong were fleeing from
something else, mostly communist rule.
"So, we aren't the same as mainlanders, we qualify ourselves as Hong Kongers.
But my family was part of the overseas Chinese who came here and the local Hong
Kongers didn't see us as Hong Kongers. My father spoke Mandarin and felt
alienated here and he looked down on the Cantonese.''
The stitched-together identity continued with a generous dose of Catholicism at
Maryknoll Girls School. "My mother was a convert, my father a reluctant
convert.''
A paragraph from her 1994 novel, Chinese Walls sums it up:
"`Say your dynasties,'' my mother commands, and we three children begin our
recitation, first in Mandarin, then in Cantonese, while Mum listens for
mistakes or mispronunciations in Mandarin, as if she could tell the difference.
We drone our litany, a litany we know almost as well as the Our Father, Hail
Mary and the I Believe.'''
Xu Xi began writing early and was first published at the age of 11 in the South
China Morning Post
.
"I didn't mean to become a Hong Kong writer - I wrote about things like space as
a kid and later I wrote about being Chinese in Paris and Greece and New York.''
She drew from personal experience, but the flourishing imagination that flew to
space as a child also transformed her stories from simple memoirs into complex
and controversial human dramas. Chinese Walls, written in the first
person, again serves as an example. One storyline includes incest between the
narrator and an older brother, something that caused some familial
consternation.
"Everyone thought it was a memoir because it was written in first-person, but I
liked the idea of the first-person as a character. Fiction becomes art when it
transforms raw experience and emotion into something more complex. But my
mother had a fit - women at her church thought perhaps there was a problem at
home. But I said, `Mum, I don't even have an older brother!' My father sent the
book to relatives and friends but he also told them: `You have to realise that
my daughter writes in a very surrealistic vein.'''
While she has found success in Hong Kong and garnered rave reviews locally and
regionally from the likes of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Asiaweek
and the Asian Review of Books, Xu Xi is still relatively unknown in the
United States where authors such as Amy Tan, Gish Jen, Chang-rae Lee, Ha Jin
and Lan Samantha Chang have overshadowed her. And though she gave a talk
recently at the Shanghai Press Club, she's not published on the mainland,
primarily due to references to Tiananmen Square in her work.
"The mainlanders don't know who the hell I am, which is really just as well,''
she said wryly. "And in the US I've been told that I'm just `too Hong Kong' -
what the West is interested in is China. But being Chinese is passe in America;
now it's Vietnamese and Korean authors. And to Americans Hong Kong is Jackie
Chan, it isn't literature.'' She smiled and her tone changed to one of
mock-bravado.
"But I can change that.''
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