Xu Xi (writer)

American novelist

Xu Xi (born 1954, originally named Xu Su Xi (许素细) also published as Sussy Chakó) is an English language novelist from Hong Kong. She is also the Hong Kong regional editor of Routledge's Encyclopedia of Post colonial Literature (second edition, 2005) and the editor or co editor of the following anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English: Fifty Fifty: New Hong Kong Writing (2008), City Stage: Hong Kong Playwriting in English (2005), and City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English Prose & Poetry from 1945 to the present. Her work has also been anthologized internationally. Hong Kong magazines such as Muse run her writings from time to time, and her fiction and essays have appeared in literary journals such as the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Four Quarters Magazine, Ninth Letter, Arts & Letters, Wasafiri, Hotel Amerika, and Asia Literary Review.

Xu Xi is an Indonesian Chinese raised in Hong Kong. She speaks English and Chinese, even though those languages are not her parents' native languages. Her father traded manganese ore and her mother was a pharmacist. Xu started writing stories in English when she was a child. As an adult, she maintained a parallel career in international marketing for 18 years, working for several major multinationals, while writing and publishing fiction. She left corporate life in 1998. She previously held Indonesian nationality. Xu Xi is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Now a U. S. citizen, she was on the low residency MFA fiction and creative nonfiction faculty at Vermont College in Montpelier from 2002 to 2012; she was elected and served as faculty chair from 2009 to 2012. In 2010, she became writer in residence at the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong, where she established and directs the first, low residency Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programme to specialise in Asian writing in English. In 2015, the university's decision to close the programme, at a time when freedoms in Hong Kong were felt to be under threat, drew criticism locally and from the international writing establishment. Xu Xi is based between Hong Kong, where she works, and New York, where her life partner lives.