I’m an English speaker. I speak Cantonese, but my parents were overseas Chinese “wah kiu” from Indonesia. We all felt a bit foreign [in Hong Kong]. Back in the 60s this was not a good place to be a bit foreign.
My mother got a visa to go to America. My father didn’t want to go. He was an independent businessman and he probably couldn’t have done what he did [in America].
Our life here was very international. When you go to America as a family, you run a laundromat.
When I was about 15, I discovered that there was something called a “world passport.” I tried to get it. I later realized that the passport was only recognized by minor African countries and no one allowed you to travel on it.
A borderless world is what I would really like.
I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve traveled on an Indonesian passport, which is really difficult to travel on. But I could travel to Russia easily and I went into East Germany before the wall went down.
To me, nationality is false. Culture isn’t false though. I speak Chinese, Cantonese, and I was interested enough to learn Mandarin. I wouldn’t have bothered if that culture didn’t matter to me somehow.
I’ve got one [sibling] who’s a French citizen, another one who’s American, one who’s still with an Indonesian passport but with Australian permanent residency. To us, the world was a place where we could go wherever we chose, and that’s not something most Americans feel.
He [Xu Xi’s father] passed away in 1998. He passed away the year I quit my corporate job.
I published three books at that point [upon quitting her management role in marketing] and my partner, the guy I was seeing, was in New York and I was in Hong Kong. It was a combination of love and principle—I had hit a certain level in corporate life.
You have to know who you are. I knew I was a writer.
I started writing very young, when I was eleven.
I didn’t publish my first book [“Chinese Walls”] till I was 40.
A book I have just finished is based on two families—one that is rooted despite being quite transnational and the other, rooted and suddenly broken apart because of divorce. But the central characters are the most rootless ones. I’m drawn to this because I’m rootless and I don’t find that it’s a bad thing. I think that the idea of roots is false.
A lot of Asians in America and a lot of the [Asian-American] writing and literature is about seeking out cultural heritage. What’s “cultural heritage”? You like Chinese food? Big deal. That’s not really cultural heritage. Heritage is something in you, and that can be very mixed up.
I lived in New York part of the year, Hong Kong part of the year, and I bought a house in New Zealand and spent time there.
Then my mother started behaving strangely and we realized it was Alzheimer’s. We had to manage her care. I actually live with my mother [in Hong Kong].
I started this MFA program here [City University] for Asian Writing in English. We recognize that if you are Asian, live in Asia or you are somehow connected to Asia, you may have something to say and a perspective that might divert a bit from doing say, an MFA in Iowa or Vermont.
It’s just that having gone through an AmericanMFA in Massachusetts myself back in the 80s, thinking back, there were things I wanted to talk about then that no one talked about.
I’m trying to remove that American centrism to show that we’re more multinational.
Keep up with the latest from Xu Xi by logging onto www.xuxiwriter.com. Her newest book, “Thirteen Tales,” will be released in November 2011.
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