Author Xu Xi

In Chinese, goodbye is 再見, meaning “see you again,” but for Hong Kong writer Xu Xi, her birthplace may not be one she can quite “see” again. Xu will talk about what Hong Kong is and is becoming through the lens of her two most recent books. As well, she will address the larger question of the shifting balance of superpowers — namely, China and the U.S.A. — that underpin the transnational world of much of her work.

Xu Xi is author of five novels, seven collections of short fiction and/or essays, one memoir and editor or co-editor of four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English. Her most recent titles are a novel That Man In Our Lives (C&R 2016), a memoir Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy For A City (Penguin, 2017) and Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories (Signal 8 2018). An Indonesian-Chinese-American diehard transnational, she previously inhabited the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand. These days, she splits her life, unevenly, between the state of New York and the rest of the world.