Interview with writer Xu Xi

Today’s special guest is writer Xu Xi to chat with me about her new collection of short fiction and essays, Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations.

Bio:
XU XI 許素細 is an Indonesian-Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and essayist from Hong Kong who became a U.S. citizen at the age of 33. Author of fifteen books, including Monkey in Residence and Other Speculations (Signal 8 Press, UK, November 1, 2022), This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (Nebraska 2019), Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for A City (Penguin 207), That Man in Our Lives (C&R 2016), she also co-authored The Art and Craft of Asian Stories (Bloomsbury, 2021).  Co-founder of Authors at Large, she is currently William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts. She was writer-in-residence at Arizona State University, the City University of Hong Kong, the University of Iowa, and directed two international Masters of Fine Arts programs in writing. Earlier, she held management positions in Asia and the U.S. at the Asian Wall Street Journal, Federal Express, Pinkerton’s, among others.  A diehard transnational, she now splits life between New York and the rest of the world.

Welcome Xu. Please tell us about your current release.
This is a collection of 16 speculative stories and essays that invokes an existential disbelief at the state of things in contemporary life. I write about the inequities and abuse of power in sex, politics, race, history, culture and language through a darkly comic worldview. My terrain is transnational and the effect is, I hope, disturbing but also entertaining. The line between fiction and nonfiction is lyrically fuzzy.

What inspired you to write this book?
It wasn’t any one thing, because these pieces were written over several years, and many were previously published in journals. Assembling these pieces into a book or collection was however partly inspired by recent events in Hong Kong which have very rapidly changed the culture and life in my birth city. I was living between Hong Kong and New York for many years, mostly to look after my mother with Alzheimer’s, but left in 2018 after she died and now live only in New York. However, I still considered the city “home.” But the enactment of the new national security law in 2020 led to a sea change in the city that has been surreal. The Covid lockdown there also made it impossible to return easily because of the stringent quarantine requirements, adding a further layer of surrealism. Some of the more recent stories and essays in this book wrestle with that strange feeling of the looming loss of this place I knew as home. Looking back at some of my older uncollected work, I realized that these pieces also spoke to a similar existential disbelief that aligned with my feelings of the last few years. This is my 8^th collection of shorter prose work, but the first to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction as much as this one does.

Excerpt from “TST”:
The day he finally left, he told me his real name. It was difficult and he laughed when I tried to say Archambault. So long, I complained, why do you people make such long names? Chinese so much easier! I’ve always wondered, after he left, why he told me his name. He didn’t ask me to remember him like some johns do. Nor did he tell me to look him up if I was ever in Paris the way others occasionally will. As if I would ever go to Manhattan, Kansas, which is where one john was from. He wrote down his address and phone number, insisted I keep the torn slip of paper. I threw it out the minute he left. Such a boy, sweet-faced, told me he wanted to show me off to his friends, to introduce me to his mother. “Dor yu! many fish!” as M. Autre would say, making us all laugh at his deliberate mistranslation by mispronouncing the tones for 多餘, meaning something superfluous or a pointless endeavor. He taught me a lot of English words and phrases, and a little French, although sometimes I think he was poking fun by teaching me deliberately wrong words and phrases. Don’t make me look like a fool, I’d complain and his answer always was you could never be a fool.

Was I a fool? Now that I have all the time in eternity, it is the only question that still vexes and nags. All those sexy clothes and bright shiny things, just to earn a few dollars from so many johns I lost count. Wasn’t there anything else I could have done? M. Autre, he often said, why don’t you go back to school, learn something, but honestly, that would be way too many fishes! He was just as much to blame, don’t you think, because he liked fresh girls? And I was young and fresh and even though my hymen was already torn and too many cocks had come before his, he could still pretend I was his baby girl. Pedophile, that’s all he was. It doesn’t matter now how nicely he treated me, all he wanted was to fuck a child and there’s something so vile and wrong-headed about that, so . . . unnecessary, this burning desire of his. Don’t you think?

You know, I don’t even know to whom I’m speaking anymore. Look around, it’s always only the girls who come when I call. Many of our johns are just as dead as us but do you see them here? No. Bang, bang, thank you ma’am, as the sailors used to say. And then they get to sleep the sleep of the dead. Meanwhile we’re wandering, exhausted, famished ghosts with no hope of rest. What we’re looking for to appease our restless spirit we’ll never find, and what we need to still our hunger pangs is lost to that heaven where emperors rule and girls must remain girls forever.

Excerpt from “When Your City Vanishes”:
1997 used to be the flash-forward year of my childhood and early adult life. Until the early eighties, it remained that 99-year mark, the year the lease on a part of my city’s land mass was due to expire on June 30. How was it possible to rent a piece of a country, I wondered, when this anomalous arrangement of the Convention of 1898 first entered my consciousness, a Sino-British agreement to lease the New Territories and 235 outlying islands to Britain, expanding the colonized city’s territory. I think I was around nine or ten when the true meaning of Boundary Street became clear. My school was located on the north side of the street, which meant I daily crossed the border from the British colony of Hong Kong into the People’s Republic of China, geographically and politically a part of the leased New Territories. How was that possible, my yet-to-be-decolonized mind inquired. Dad’s answer was unequivocal: this is why you do not want to be a colonial “British,” although he never fully clarified why I wasn’t entirely “Chinese” either — since we were Indonesian citizens — although I walked, talked, and certainly looked Chinese enough, despite my mixed blood. National affiliations are, however, difficult to ignore when I recall my passport. During the global Covid pandemic, my present document is getting a long reprieve, resting between its midnight-blue, made-in-America covers, unable to take me across borders that remain closed, forcing me to be only a virtual citizen in my city.

I never did become British, privileged as my family was to be Indonesian, although I retain my Hong Kong permanent residency. Back when I sported a dark-basil covered passport, it felt odd rather than privileged because I looked and sounded nothing like most Indonesians. There were quite a few of us foreign Asians perched in my British colony for many decades before 1997, mostly from Southeast and South Asia, as well as some from Taiwan and Vietnam. The Filipino invasion happened later, in the late eighties and early nineties, when prosperity demanded a serving class of domestic helpers. Many of us were ethnically Chinese. Among those who were not, many, myself included, spoke Cantonese like natives and several generations of these families called the city home. It was true for some British and other non-Asian nationals as well. Even though Cantonese people comprise the majority population, my Hong Kong is a city that has always looked out towards the world, this SAR that still is, and will be, for the currently foreseeable future, an exclave of China, one not entirely subject to Chinese national law. But this is changing even as I write this, and at the time of publication, it’s difficult to predict how much of an exclave we will remain.

What exciting story are you working on next?
Two stories, actually.

There’s this novel The Milton Man which I’ve been dragging around for over 30 years and I think it’s time I finished it. Few literature students read much Milton anymore nowadays, but he was an important poet and also an intriguingly conflicted figure. Suddenly, his work and life seem relevant to me today for my protagonist Frank Ong, a mixed-race, conflicted guy from Northern New York state, who would really rather just go fishing, but who finds himself leading a life he never imagined. He started out as a Milton scholar and professor of English (borrrring), but destiny had other ideas for him. I recently spent time in England doing some research for the novel and now will complete it — I’ve promised myself by early to mid next year at the latest.  Once I make a deadline for myself, I tend to keep it. Also, when I’m willing to talk about a work-in-progress, it usually means I’ll get it done.

Meanwhile, I recently published what will be a chapter from a memoir-in-progress The Work Book which is all about my work life. What I want to write about is the nature of working for a living, something most humans (who are not part of that 2%) have to do. I’ve had a pretty varied work life that took me around the world, a work life that helped me understand how the world operates and what money means. As I’m very close to retirement from any work other than my writing, it seems a good time to consider – borrowing from Milton – “how my light (has been) spent.”

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I published my first piece when I was 11, but I started writing a few years before that. I don’t think I considered myself a writer then but did know that writing was something I just did and would likely always do (which has been the case). But when I first realized that writing was serious for me was sometime in my mid 20’s. I had left my job, given myself a “gap year” to write and applied for a MFA, which I did end up doing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. At that point I knew I was a writer, and that writing was my life’s work, regardless. Strangely, when you actually take what you do seriously, then you make a real career out of it, which is what I did.

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I have written full-time at various points in my life, but I’ve also had two careers — in business and academia — that comprised part-time or full-time jobs. So my writing work day changes depending what job I have. The ideal writing day always begins early in the morning and I write till I stop, usually to go for a run or swim, or to face the day, or preferably because it’s time for cocktails and dinner. But finding time to write is something I’ve simply always done.  For instance, whenever I’ve had a heavy work and international travel schedule, I learned to write on board long plane trips and at different hours of the day or night, whenever I could find time. If writing matters, you just make the time. I’ve always admired mothers with children who made time to write, especially women who also have to work outside the home, because motherhood strikes me as the most time-consuming job in the world. I never wanted children, and part of the reason for that (besides simply knowing from a young age that I had no desire for children) was that I did want to write. I couldn’t see how to be a mother and write without going crazy. Too many women writers with children didn’t fare terribly well, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to name two.  Despite their literary success, I never wanted to end up like either of them.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
To write, I really need to get the housework done. Whether it’s doing dishes, ironing clothes or cleaning house or my desktop, I cannot leave a mess and try to write. It just doesn’t work. So getting up in the middle of the night to write works for me because at that hour, the housework is usually done.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Astronaut, missionary doctor, nun, ballerina, concert pianist, but I flunked math, hated biology, gave up religion, could not dance terribly well, and knew, when I heard a classmate play piano for Artur Rubinstein in a master class that she was a real prodigy while all I was, was someone who could just read music and play a little. So writing was the only thing left that I could do, although I still play piano today, but purely for my own pleasure and never to perform.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
I hope you’ll read my book!

And also, I invite you to check out my e-book sampler. It includes some of my earlier work, as well the entire essay, “When Your City Vanishes.” https://signal8press.com/when-your-city-vanishes/.

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