Xu Xi (born 1954, originally named Xu Su Xi (许素细) also published as Sussy Chakó[2]) is an English-language author and lecturer from Hong Kong.[3]
She has been 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: City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English 1945 to the Present (2003), City Stage: Hong Kong Playwriting in English (2005), and Fifty-Fifty: New Hong Kong Writing (2008).
Biography
Xu Xi is an Indonesian Chinese raised in Hong Kong.[1] She worked in international marketing and management in Asia and North America until 1998, when she began writing and teaching full-time.[4] She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Now a U.S. citizen,[1] she served as faculty chair of the MFA fiction and creative nonfiction faculty at Vermont College in Montpelier from 2009 to 2012.[4]
In 2010, she became writer-in-residence at the Department of English of City University of Hong Kong, where she established and directed the first low-residency MFA programme that specializes in Asian writing.[4] 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.[5]
Xu Xi is based between Hong Kong, where she works, and New York.[6]
Xu Xi's work has received international acclaim: her short story collection Daughters of Hui made it into Asiaweek's 1996 top ten books; her 2000 novel The Unwalled City was a Pushcart editor's choice and was named one of HK Magazine's top fifteen best books about Hong Kong; and her essay "The English of My Story" was selected for the Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction list in The Best American Essays in 2016.[1]