About
XU XI 許素細 is author of thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories (Signal 8 Press, 2018) and a memoir Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy For A City (Penguin, 2017). Forthcoming are This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (American Lives Series, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2019) and The Art & Craft of Asian Stories, co-edited with Robin Hemley (Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2019-20). She is Faculty Co-Director of the International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, co-founder of Authors at Large and fiction editor at large for Tupelo Press in Massachusetts. An Indonesian-Chinese Hong Kong native and U.S. citizen, she lives between New York and the world. Follow her @xuxiwriter on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
Featured Work
That Man in Our Lives
“Xu’s engrossing, whirlwind metafictional tale effectively demonstrates the far-reaching effects of politics and culture on the smallest, most personal aspects of our lives.”
- Publisher's Weekly
The Transnational 21st Century Novel
In THAT MAN IN OUR LIVES, Xu Xi extends the fictional universe of her earlier novels. New York is the perch from which she examines the shifting balance of power between China and the U.S., set against a tale of lifelong friendships between Gordon Ashberry — “Gordie” or “Hui Guo 灰果” — and his two best friends Harold Haight and Larry Woo and their families. When Gordon turns fifty, he tells Harold, a tax lawyer, that he wants to give all his money away. An opportunistic young Chinese writer learns of this, she approaches him to write a book (Honey Money) about his decision, and upon publication it becomes a minor cult success. The ensuing publicity sends him into a self-imposed exile for several years, including from all his friends. The novel opens in March 2003 when Gordon is fifty-five and decides to disappear during a flight delay in Tokyo. The pre and post fallout around that disappearance informs this novel about the friend who has always been in your life, until he isn’t, and how much or little we know of those we think we know well.
