"Your name or your person. Which is dearer?" In answer to Lao Tzu's ancient riddle, DAUGHTERS OF HUI offers a novella and three stories of four Asian women. All are surnamed Hui, and share at least a casual connection with Boston and New England. And all share that particular Hong Kong world view, one that roots into a past not well understood while reaching out to a future that "speaks too many languages." Who are these women? And who are the men who so often fail them? Xu Xi's world know...

"The Master said, 'Men are close to one another by nature. They diverge as a result of repeated practice." This epigraph by Confucius is at the heart of CHINESE WALLS, Xu Xi's controversial literary debut. This novel-in-stories was one of the first to openly address incest in an Asian family. Told by the youngest child and only daughter, Ai-Lin, the narrative begins in her childhood and wends through the stories of the men in her life: her father, brothers, former fiance and ex-husband, as...

Xu Xi’s body of work witnesses her turbulent love affair with her home-city of Hong Kong. In this probing memoir, she unravels her recently finalised decision to leave the city for good. She critiques a Hong Kong that has, in her eyes, lost its way. And yet, it is only out of the city’s enduring presence in her life, both in the form of memory and periodic homecomings, that she has carved out a personal and literary identity. Dear Hong Kong is a profound reflection on the life of Hong Kong...

The boys love (BL) genre was created for girls and women by young female manga (comic) artists in early 1970s Japan to challenge oppressive gender and sexual norms. Over the years, BL has seen almost irrepressible growth in popularity and since the 2000s has become a global media phenomenon, weaving its way into anime, prose fiction, live-action dramas, video games, audio dramas, and fan works. BL’s male–male romantic and sexual relationships have found a particularly receptive home in oth...

"A collection of heartbreaks and awakenings set to lightning." -Junot Díaz, author, This Is How You Lose HerA siren call to Hong Kong's yesterday, today, and tomorrow, envisioned by one of the city's most prescient and unapologetic writers.One of Hong Kong's leading English writers, Xu Xi investigates and invigorates the transnational, transcultural, and translingual dimensions of her beloved city in these 22 stories covering the 1...

"Showcases the extremes of one of the world's capitals. From ghost stories, to historical thrills, to underworld brutality . . . endlessly fascinating."— CrimeReadsAkashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. In Hong Kong Noir, fourteen of the city's fin...

For the millions of wah kiu or "overseasChinese," life in the world beyond China's borders is fraught with thequestion of identity. In these stories and essays, written over the pastthirty years, Xu Xi explores the joys, fears, idealism,disappointments, dreams and lives of the wah kiu. In Overleaf Hong Kong,she takes us around the globe, from Southeast Asia to Europe to NorthAmerica to the Pacific, in her quest to...

This book offers case studies on the emergence of aesthetic consumption in China, that is, daily consumption in which aesthetic and spiritual benefits play a dominant role in consumers’ decision-making.The book opens by discussing the rapid economic and cultural development of China, as well as the influence of social media in expressing consumer cultural capital. It then discusses how the country’s new middle class, in particular high-income urban residents, are shifting away from...

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 ...

From the turbulent sixties through the nineties, here is a "history" of Hong Kong, told through fiction by one of the city's leading writers. These stories represent the evolution of a voice, as she strives to create art out of her birthplace, "the city that remains my perpetual concern." History intrudes into private lives and more in the thirteen tales, collected here for the first time. The volume includes several new, never previously published pieces.

An all-in-one craft guide and anthology, this is the first creative writing book to find inspiration and guidance in the diverse literary traditions of Asia. Including exemplary stories by leading writers from Japan, China, India, Singapore and beyond as well as those from Asian diasporas in Europe and America, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories offers an exciting take on the traditional how-to writing guide by drawing from a rich new trove of short stories beyond the western cano...

Interruptions is rooted in the tradition of contemporary ekphrastic writing, where an author creates a literary response in order to confront or narrate a work of visual art. Here, the photographer and writer engage in a dialogue between David Clarke’s selections from his photographic archives and Xu Xi’s essays written in response to each photo, which, in turn, triggers the next photographic choice.David Clarke 祈大衛is Professor in the Department of Fine Arts, Unive...