Minding her languages

Author Xu Xi tries to put Chinese into her books, which are written in English. [Photo/Paul Hilton / for China Daily]

A Hong Kong-raised author writes in English, but tries to infuse her works with Chinese phrases, Kelly Chung Dawson reports.

Much like the characters that populate her high-rise literary worlds, the author Xu Xi is hard to place. She looks Chinese, speaks English with a British accent, and is a Chinese Indonesian who was raised in Hong Kong.

She crisscrossed Europe, America and Asia in her 20s and now, by her own token, "inhabits the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and New Zealand".

She is the author of eight books of fiction and essays, most recently Habit of a Foreign Sky, which was released last month.

Last week, she appeared at The Asia Society in New York to discuss the novel, and spoke to China Daily about the major themes that inspire her works.

"I have a very complicated relationship with language," Xu said. Her parents are Chinese Indonesians with a rudimentary grasp of Chinese, and so chose to speak English with Xu and her siblings. In school she studied Cantonese, English and French, and as a young adult studied Mandarin at university in the United States.

Xu, who counts Ha Jin, author of the acclaimed English novel Waiting, as an inspiration, is part of a growing number of Asian writers who write in English.

She is in fact the first writer-in-residence at the English Department of The City University of Hong Kong, where she oversees a masters of fine arts program specializing in Asian writing in English. She also serves as faculty chair at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in writing.

"People often ask why I write in English, and I finally just decided, 'I guess this is just the language I use'," she said. "But I keep trying to put Chinese into my English, and that's something that I try to do and think about quite a lot."

Infusing her English writing with Chinese phrases and class-denoting terminology, Xu categorizes her characters with deliberate word choices. In one scene, a mover refers to a businesswoman as "Missy", instantly placing him as a Cantonese man speaking in the local language.

Much of Xu's work traverses precisely these issues of categorization and identity, the bane (and often pride) of every "Third Culture Kid". The term, coined in the 1950s by the sociologist Ruth Useem, refers to a culture created when an individual blends two or more cultures into a third, distinct culture, often as the result of growing up as an expatriate.

"When I was growing up, no one really talked about the third culture," Xu said. "But now the world I'm surrounded by is becoming more and more like that of my childhood, both in Asia and America.

"I'm conscious that there's a changing culture out there. It's so much better than it used to be, to be a person who feels in-between."

Xu said many third culture kids have approached her, inspired by the issues she explores in her works.

"I find the reaction from the third culture generation to be very gratifying, because it makes me realize, 'Oh, I was just ahead of my time'," she said.

"We just didn't have the words for it. I think third culture kids are defying expectations, and that's what I try to address in a lot of my work."

In Habit of a Foreign Sky, Xu's protagonist Gail is an illegitimate biracial woman who, like so many of Hong Kong's elite, attended a Western university overseas before returning to successfully attain a position of corporate power in Hong Kong. Xu relates this to her time abroad, and the transience that defines both the city and so many of its inhabitants.

"Hong Kong has always been an in-between place," Xu said. "But at the same time (for those who have studied or lived elsewhere), your footing is firmer in the city because of the time you have spent in the West."

Like Xu, Gail speaks English and Cantonese fluently, but despite having spent time in the US - as a result of her father's absence and her mother's profession as a high-class prostitute - is not entirely comfortable with either cultural identity.

There is some sense in the novel that one should strive to embrace the less familiar to inhabit both worlds in full.

Although the book is not autobiographical, Xu admits to having struggled with some of the same issues.

Xu referred to Habit of a Foreign Sky as her "women's book" for the questions it raises about the conflicting realities of feminism in a woman's later life. Dedicated to her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, the book was an exercise in placing her mother in a modern setting, Xu said.

"I created a character based on my mother," she said. "What would my mother's life have been like if she had not had these traditional women's responsibilities?

"What if her career had been everything?

"I said, "OK, what happens in your life now?' That was the impetus."

Xu is now working on a novel that will follow some of the characters who have appeared in several of her books, and will focus on Gordie, Gail's American half-brother.

As for Gail's complicated romantic entanglements and her progression toward a whole identity, Xu's story of urban straddlers remains half-unwritten.