Xu Xi 許素細 is the author of
ten books, most recently the novels That Man In Our Lives (C&R Press, September 2016)
and Habit of a Foreign Sky (Haven Books, 2010), a finalist for the Man Asian
Literary Prize; the story collection Access Thirteen Tales (Signal 8 Press,
2011).
Forthcoming books include Interruptions (Hong Kong University Museum & Art
Gallery, September, 2016), a collaborative ekphrastic essay collection in
conversation with photography by David Clarke; a memoir Elegy for HK (Penguin
China/Australia, 2017) and Insignificance: Stories of Hong Kong (Signal 8
Press, 2018). She has also edited four
anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English.
Since 2002, she has taught for low-residency MFA programs, including at Vermont
College of Fine Arts MFA in Montpelier where she was elected and served as
faculty chair, and at City University of Hong Kong where she was appointed
Writer-in-Residence and founded and directed Asia’s first low-residency MFA. From January to May, 2016, she was
Distinguished Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Arizona State University’s
Virginia G. Piper Center of Creative Writing.
She is also co-founder, with author Robin Hemley, of Authors At Large, offering international
writing retreats and workshops. A
Chinese-Indonesian Hong Kong permanent resident and U.S. citizen, she currently
lives between New York and Hong Kong.
That Man In Our Lives is billed by the publishers as “the
transnational 21st century novel.” It concerns Gordon Ashberry, also known as Gordie, also known by his
Chinese name Hui Guo, a wealthy American sinophile and
unmarried womanizer who has never needed to work. When he turns 50, Gordie
decides to give all his money away. A predatory Chinese authoress, Zhang Lian-he,
also known as Minnie Chang, also known as Lullabelle, makes him the subject of
a book published in America as Honey Money. 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. See here for the
review in Asian Review of Books.
What drove you to write That Man In Our Lives?
Gordie. He wouldn’t shut up in
my head so he eventually got his own book!
But there were a lot of questions that haunted me, most significantly,
the shifting balance of power between China and the U.S. since the economic
rise of China. When I first heard John
Adams’ opera Nixon in China, I was
fascinated by this artistic expression of a major historical moment that was
the beginning of that shift. Nixon’s
subsequent disgrace with Watergate was still a future moment when he went to
China, and Adams’ artistic interpretation of that moment was profound. Nixon & Kissinger meeting with Mao &
Chou En-lai was such a defining point in my life, because everything I lived
after that was colored by this political and historical reality. Although I grew up in Hong Kong, after
secondary school I’ve lived transnationally all of my adult life. Most of the time I’ve bounced between Hong
Kong and New York, both the city & in the northern part of the state (with
a few detours to other places), and my life & work allowed me to see that
shift in the balance of power in many ways - personal, professional and
public. Gordie was an American who
studied Chinese in the late 60’s, at a time when such Americans went to Taiwan
if they wanted to fully steep themselves in the Chinese language and culture. Fast forward a couple of decades or so and that
world has completely changed. As a
novelist, I’m interested in private, rather than public, lives, but am
interested in how the changes wrought by globalization and the movements of world
politics affect private lives.
What did you learn about writing
while you were writing it?
That it’s always back to the drawing board with every new novel or
story (or essay for that matter). That
you never really stop learning how to write, because each experience brings you
something new. But I think I learn that
with every new piece I try to write. With That Man In Our Lives, I discovered
that it was time to write about characters who had lives that were quite
different from mine. Although I’d done
that before in previous novels and stories, I tended to draw on much of what I already
knew in terms of the worlds these characters came from. This book was the greatest departure from
what I knew into what I did not know but was fascinated by. I also discovered that when you set out to
learn about what you know nothing about, the world will give you answers. For example, I knew Gordie’s family had this
townhouse in Gramercy, but when I first imagined it in an earlier novel (Habit of a Foreign Sky), I based it on
the office of an Italian designer I used to know many years earlier who did
have his office on the ground floor of a townhouse in Gramercy. But I hadn’t actually been in that office
since the late 1980’s and no longer knew the designer. So there I was, wandering around Gramercy in
the early 2000’s sometime, looking for Gordie’s townhouse and there was this
one corner building that faced the park - the front door was wide open and a
contractor’s truck was parked outside.
He turned out to be Hungarian, the contractor that is, with whom I
struck up a conversation, and he showed me the inside of this townhouse they
were doing some renovation work for (it was the offices of a nonprofit of some
kind) and I got to wander around inside, memorize it (didn’t have a cellphone to
snap photos with back then), and could reproduce its floor plan and layout in
my mind for Gordie’s reclusive life in the novel. This happened to me so many times in the
writing of this novel that I finally just accepted all this serendipity as fate
and that I was meant to write this book.
If you look through the acknowledgements, there are a number of persons
or texts mentioned there who were central to this serendipitous adventure (Christopher
Phillips, James Salter’s novel The
Hunters, Consuelo de St. Exupery’s memoir The Tale of the Rose, Tim Woo, Nigel Collett and the establishment
of the Tongzhi Literary Group).
Who is your ideal reader, and
why?
The ideal reader most likely reads English, but perhaps not if it’s one
of the translated versions of my works.
I picture this individual, curled up with one of my books, somewhere as
far away as possible from anything resembling my world, whose imagination is
sparked by the world in my books. It
isn’t a reader I may necessarily ever meet, or a reader who cares much about who
I am, but this reader is drawn to the world I’ve presented - all the people,
places, dramas, lives, conflicts, loves.
A poet I knew taught one of my novels (Hong Kong Rose) to undergraduates at her small state college in
North Carolina back in the late 90’s. I
visited her class, wondering what these (mostly) girls from small towns in the U.S.
south would think of this novel, set in Hong Kong of the 70’s, about a Chinese
woman whose upper middle class society marriage to a mixed-race lawyer (Chinese
from South Africa father + English mother) goes south when she discovers her
husband is gay. Imagine my surprise when
these 19 & 20 year old girls - most from working class backgrounds,
most who would likely never go to Hong Kong (if they even had ever thought
about Hong Kong at all) - told me they really liked and understood my
novel because they all knew relationships like that, meaning, compromised
ones. So perhaps it’s appropriate, fast
forwarding almost 20 years later, that my latest novel, That Man in Our Lives, is published by a literary press in North
Carolina.
Do you think readers in the East will
take different things from it than will readers in the West? If you do: what
things, and why?
Possibly, unless it’s a reader who has a similarly transnational
background as the characters in the novel.
For such a reader, it wouldn’t matter whether they were in Hong Kong or
New York. I can’t be sure about
reception, because the novel hasn’t been released in the U.S. yet, but from the
early interviews/readers/pre-release launches, I suspect that American readers
(and perhaps British ones as well - because I did read from the book at the
Oxford Literary Festival) might respond to the racial and marginalization
issues raised in the novel, particularly the question of who is or isn’t
marginalized because of race (or gender or class). New York, in particular, is
used to a diverse society, and the questions around race, especially, are part
of social, cultural and political discourse.
Hong Kong is much less open to questions of race, as it is not a
racially diverse society, being 95% Cantonese, so there is less understanding
of what all that means (as well as, I sometimes think, a denial of the
existence of racism here). Also, I would
expect Hong Kong readers to be more engaged with the Hong Kong aspects of the
story, and less interested in the U.S. one - I may be wrong about this but
I’ve sometimes found readers in Asia have something of a bias about literature
set in the West that involves Asians, and lump all that into “Asian-American,”
and think of it as “inauthentic.” Even
though Hong Kong is a very globalized society, its attitudes sometimes strike
me as more parochial and insular than in New York, at least in terms of
literary tastes and expectations.
A 21st-century novel has to be more
than just a story of some made-up life. Agree
or disagree?
Agree, probably, although not necessarily. There’s still a lot of run-of-the-mill made
up life novels out there that are immensely popular, because the biggest
readership market is for romance, followed by other genre fiction such as scifi-fantasy,
thrillers, horror, mysteries. Genre
fiction has its own shape of storytelling and it’s the escapism that’s most compelling
to readers in any century. But alas,
I’ve never been able to write genre (I’ve tried and failed and hence cannot
count on royalties to make me rich, unlike my genre fiction writer friends), so
I’m stuck with considering the question of what a 21st century novel might be,
ought to be, could be. The increased
importance of literary nonfiction in the 21st century is what seems to most
affect the novel, I think. The author,
as always, is declared dead, but that’s not really the point. What’s intriguing about literary nonfiction
is a little like what’s intriguing about reality TV - we want a kind of
structured reality but still want it to be “art” so it needs the trappings of various
literary devices, such as poetic language (think the lyric essay, for example) or,
say, the freedom to use fictional techniques (e.g. reproduced dialogue in a
memoir that no one could possibly remember unless it was recorded). Which complicates things for the
novelist. I sometimes think that’s why the
historical novel has become so enormously popular in the 21st century - we wish
to reinvent history but also to reproduce history so that the story is not
entirely made up. Alas, I am not a
historical novelist, as I’ve always written about contemporary life and will
likely continue to do so. So have I
written a 21st century novel that’s more than just a story of some made-up life
in That Man In Our Lives? Well, if readers will join me in looking for
Gordie, then maybe I have.
What is your relationship with
X-woman, a character who guides some of the narrative, and whom readers may
identify with you?
She’s very interesting, because sometime in the late 90’s, a friend
called me X-woman and for a little while the name stuck around our circle of
friends. But like all names it came and
went. I had forgotten all about X-woman
until she reared her head again into this novel. She can’t possibly be me because she knows
all these people in the book and has spent time with them at various moments of
time when I was definitely otherwise engaged (for example she knows Stella Shih
from a long while back and I certainly didn’t).
And I can’t claim to know all the characters in the novel she knows with
the same shared experiences and intimacies - I’m just the author who made
them up. Also, she tells stories that
simply aren’t true! I know that because
I wrote the story of Gordie and all these people in his life, and I know for a
fact that she makes up stuff, constantly telling wild tales about these folks
and they don’t always get to defend themselves.
You describe three minor
characters as “upwardly global” What do you think it means to be upwardly global?
Is X-woman upwardly global? Which, if any, of the novel’s main characters are
upwardly global?
I think it means that the world opens up for you because of your particular
brush with globality or globalism. X-woman
is more likely downwardly global, because she isn’t playing with Gordie
anymore. But in the novel, Violette Woo
is upwardly global, as is Fung Suet-fa (to use her real name, though she doesn’t),
John Haight, probably Laura Polk Silverstein now that she’s more or less
shacking up with Harold, Stella Shih, and I like to think that Zhang Lian-he
will eventually find her way to a more peaceful place that is both local
(Beijing) and global (anywhere she wishes to go). I feel the most for her in a way, because she
desired that upward global mobility, glimpsed it for a moment, but then had it
snatched away. And yet, she so much
wants to just be Chinese but can’t anymore because of her brush with globality. She is my most conflicted and probably, the saddest
character in the novel. In writing her,
I came to feel deeply for her plight, due in part to her lack of insight and
stupidity despite her inherent intelligence and privileged access.
Why read (meta)fiction about
globalization when we can read the newspapers?
Because the newspapers only tell us the news of the day but not why the
news of the day matters or what it means for you. Globalization affects us all, but in the end,
it’s the personal impact that matters the most, not whether or not the U.S. and
China are in yet another military standoff (unless, of course, you happen to be
a sailor on board either a Chinese or American vessel in the South China Seas,
caught in that standoff). Meanwhile
metafiction can teach us how the mind works, how we imagine the world into
story, and why it should matter. It’s
not just metafiction that does that, all literature does, as metafiction is
after all just one form of literary expression.
Why do so many of your characters
have multiple names?
I think that’s because in the two places that are most like “home” for
me, i.e. Hong Kong and New York, everyone has multiple names. Most Hong Kong
Chinese friends I know never go by just one name - there’s the legal Chinese
one and in some cases a legal English one as well, although for many, the
English name is just something they’ve adopted.
And among the younger generation, the less outrageous examples include
Milk or Apple or Prince. In Chinese
families, most everyone has a nickname, or is referred to by their birth order
- as in 大家姊 which I am in my family. This makes my brother, who is condemned to suffer
three older sisters, refer to us as his big sister, his second older sister,
and his just older than him sister. My
mother came from a family of eleven children, my father from one of three plus
five half-siblings. Numbers (or roles)
are unique when you forget names (and by now, my mother who is in a pretty late
stage of Alzheimer’s, remembers no one’s names, but she does sometimes recall
that she had a “husband,” “sister,” “daughter” or “son”). Plus the non-Chinese I know who live in Hong
Kong often have Chinese names as well as their own name from whatever country
they’re from. In New York, because of the
seriously diverse racial population, chances are pretty good these days that
you’ll meet someone from some country or ethnic group you’ve never encountered
before, you’ll ask their name and they’ll say something unpronounceable and
add, but my friends all call me _____, which is either a short form of their elongated,
tongue-twisting “foreign” name or some Anglo name like Dave or Britney.
What are you working on now?
Several books actually, as well
as individual stories and essays, but principally on a new novel titled The Milton Man, which, I like to say, is
all about fishing, something I know nothing about. But I do have several new titles forthcoming
in the next couple of years so there is still work to be done on two of those
(one is finalized with the press already).
I also have an essay collection that is sort of finished called This Fish Is Fowl, but I may go back to
tinker with it some more as I’ve only just given it to my agent to look at.
Follow Xu Xi on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @xuxiwriter.
