Xu Xi Books

What happens when an intelligent, high-powered woman executive relinquishes all responsibilities? Somewhere between Hong Kong and New York, life does an abrupt shift for Gail Szeto when her mother, her last family member, is killed in an accident. For Gail, a mixed-race, single mother who buried her young son only two years prior, all she has left is a hard-won career at a global investment bank. Life rapidly goes into free fall for this woman with a complicated past, who was once so sure of her direction in life, who can now see no clear future path. With an international cast in New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai, this novel dramatizes a Sino-American balance of power at a staggeringly intimate level.

In This Fish Is Fowl Xu Xi offers the transnational and feminist perspective of a contemporary “glocalized” American life. Xu’s quirky, darkly comic, and obsessively personal essays emerge from her diverse professional career as a writer, business executive, entrepreneur, and educator. From her origins in Hong Kong as an Indonesian of Chinese descent to her U.S. citizenship and multiple countries of residence, she writes her way around the globe. Caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s in Hong Kong becomes the rhythmic accompaniment to an enforced, long-term, long-distance relationship with her partner and home in New York. In between Xu reflects on all her selves, which are defined by those myriad monikers of existence. As an author who began life as a novelist and fiction writer, she also considers the nature of genre, which snakes its way through these essays. In her linguistic trip across the comic tragedy that is globalism, she wonders about the mystery of humanity and the future of our world at this complicated and precarious moment in human existence. This Fish Is Fowl is a twenty-first-century blend of the essayist traditions of both West and East. Xu’s acerbic, deft prose shows her to be a descendant of both Michel de Montaigne and Lu Xun, with influences from stepparent Jonathan Swift.

This new edition includes a reading guide for literature & creative writing teachers and students by Prof. Mike Ingham of Lingnan University. From the turbulent sixties through the nineties, here is a “history” of Hong Kong, told through fiction by one of Hong Kong'’s top writers. Written over the past thirty years, these stories represent the evolution and shaping of a voice, as she strives to create art out of her birthplace, “the city that remains her perpetual concern.” Here are portraits of Hong Kong, painted with compassion and love against the backdrop of historical events.

Observations of contemporary life that make monkeys of this existential disbelief thrums through speculative stories and essays in Xu Xi's latest collection. These 16 short pieces, evenly divided between fiction and nonfiction, are in turn elegiac, satiric, darkly comic, lyrical, even confessional in tone, and traverse the inequities and abuse of power in sex, politics, race history, culture, and language across a disquieting transnational terrain. Prepare to be disturbed, enlightened, and maybe even entertained.