Access

by Xu Xi

Xu XI

Genres: Fiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 2011

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

XU XI is the author’s pinyin* short form name which is also her byline, but she is most assuredly not the following beings with the same pinyin name: a Chinese painter & sculptor; the author of tomes about acupuncture; a nationalist or a dissident-in-exile of any nation-state; a reality TV show host in some special economic zone or on YouTube; an Academic in any Intellectual Discipline, real or imagined, as capitalized by Pooh or some other friendly wild thing. She has however had three legal English names (as well as several best left unnamed of dubious legal quality) and strives assiduously not to acquire any others.

However, she really is the author of thirteen books, including five novels, six collections of short fiction & essays and most recently Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories, released June 15, 2018 by Signal 8 Press; the memoir Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City (2017), as part of Penguin's Hong Kong series for the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China. She is also editor of four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English. Forthcoming from Nebraska Univeristy Press in March 2019 is an essay collection This Fish Is Fowl.


A former Indonesian national, born and raised in Hong Kong, she eventually morphed into a U.S. citizen at the age of 33, having washed onto that distant shore across from Lady Liberty. These days, she splits time between New York and Asia (her sights set on the land of her former nationality, Indonesia) and still mourns the loss of her beloved writing retreat in Seacliff, on the South Island of New Zealand, where she hovered, joyously, for seven years.

*pinyin = transliteration for Mandarin Chinese or Putonghua (P), the official language of China although Xu is far more fluent in Cantonese (C), that being the people’s language of her birth city, Hong Kong.

Reviews

[Sabita · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in advance of a "Meet the Author" session of our Literary Group with the author. I am quite glad I read part of it before I met her and the rest of it after the session. Even before the discussion, I was intrigued by the differences in the lives and personalities of each of the protagonists in the individual stories, and similarities in being displaced from their original homeland/habitat and how they deal with it. Although Xu Xi has settled in New York, a number of the stories have Hong Kong as their backdrop, so made the stories come alive in a more meaningful way for me. Most of the stories are human interest in nature, with strong female protagonists, and are a fairly easy read, and so kept me engrossed and involved, contemplating the follies of human behaviour which is universal despite culture differences even though they are short stories: quite a challenge to pull off in the short story format. Meeting Xu Xi was the icing on the cake: we had an engaging, intimate "fireside" chat with her and the inspirations for her books, which made the characters in her stories jump out at me even more. The stories are not complicated or very hugely literary, but enjoyable if you want a good read that is not trashy airport fiction.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Access: Thirteen Tales is an amazing collection of short stories by Xu Xi. Set in Hong Kong and among those in the vast Chinese diaspora, the stories are mostly about women, the ties of family, the inescapable consequences of deep enculturation, the pervasive power of money, sex and loneliness. Some of the women are highly educated and successful and some barely eke out a living. The collection is also very much about what it means to be a Hong Kong Chinese in the opening decades of the 21th century. The people in the stories are very real. Xu Xi makes them come alive for us in just a few pages. We understand the people in these stories and how they got to where they are in their lives. Xu Xi's stories show literature can also help us understand how we got to where we are in our own lives. Xu Xi helps us see the universal in the very particularized people in her stories.


I will spot light two of the thirteen short stories in the collection so readers can get a feel for her work. Most of the stories are between ten and twenty pages long.

"Space" is a brilliant short story about a never married sixty seven year old woman with no children living by herself in Hong Kong. Her brother has recently died and her nephew and his wife want her to move to American to live with them. As the story opens, it was exciting and very interesting to learn the aunt has a close near intimate Internet relationship with a seventy year old American living in New York City who is a self taught Sinologist. Her nephew Francis and his wife are in Hong Kong for a visit. They are doing all they can to persuade Aunt Kar-Li to move to America. They tell her they have a big room for her and also mention a retirement community. Kar-Li suspects their motives may be impure as she thinks they want her to sell her apartment in Hong Kong to invest in the three restaurants they own. There is a great deal in this story. It deals in a very subtle fashion with the conflicts between older Chinese and their younger relatives in terms of adherence to Confucian values. The aunt knows that she is in part going to be used by her nephew and his wife once she moves but the family ties are just too powerful for anyone to really try to throw away.

"Lady Day" is a really amazing story about a post operative transsexual prostitute. The story line is very interesting and kept my attention level very high. This is a story about deception of the self and the other. About the power of sex to dominate and the reverse side of this when a person reduces them self to a commodity. All swords seem to be two sided in the world of Xi Xu. "Lady Day" is fairly explicit in its descriptions of what the clients want her to do. It is in a way a woman's fantasy story about how the life of prostitute works out when things goes very well. Of course the story ends before Lady Day's looks begin to fade and we know the dark side of this fantasy world will take over soon.

The people in these stores are often defined by their jobs. Almost everyone works hard and is very money driven. I was glad to see that many of the women in the stories are very high achievers both in commerce and education.

Xu Xi is from Hong Kong. She has published nine books. She won an O Henry prize for best short story. (It is included in the collection.) She has been a distinguished visiting writer at the University of Iowa. She teaches at the City University of Hong Kong as well as the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

[Ashleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book caught my eye because I was looking for an X author for an Author A-Z and I was drawn to this from the really high rating over both goodreads and Amazon - but even then, after reading reviews, I still didn't really know what to expect and it was really quite exciting!

The collection as a whole is really streamlined; with two very simple themes running through it - multiculturalism and strong, female protagonists - which makes it really easy to go from one story to the next. Each woman is so very different, taking the reader in completely new and unexpected directions, radically shifting perspectives between types of women, circumstances, and even countries with each story.

My personal favourite story is 'Crying With Audrey Hepburn' - mainly for the way it's written, it's that one that really stood out (although all stories in the collection were strong). One of my favourite quotes in the entire book is in this story:

"He was like the sun in this solar system, burning bright, in whose orbit everyone sparkled and spun."

As with all collections, there were a few stories I didn't like so much, but on the whole I loved them. It was one of those books I am so grateful to have stumbled upon, it's one of those treasures you find when you're not really looking.

[Annabelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found Xu’s writing uneven: some of the stories clung to me, but some fell far away. I struggled to find any sort of a thread connecting these stories or characters, except perhaps a voice to globalisation and cultural heterogeneity, but this was tenuous at best.
I couldn’t understand her use of sex, as some sort of character building or literary device, I found it too easy, clunky in execution.

I was disappointed.

[Dana Burgess · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thirteen tales in this little book are connected by a single theme: desire. Not necessarily sexual desire but desire none-the-less.

The author has broken her stories into five categories: tall tales; circular tales; fairy tales; old wives' tales and beastly tales. The separation is nice because if you find one category isn't to your liking, the stories change form in the next category.

Probably the hardest thing about reviewing collections is that there are some stories that really appeal to me - 'Access' in the fairy tales department - and others that are really not my cup of tea - 'Iron Light' in the tall tales department. In this collection, I found the balance about 60/40 in favour of the stories I liked.

All of the stories are very well written and remain true to the theme, which I appreciated. It was easier to move from story to story because of that thread. Many of the stories made me think and some just entertained. I didn't find that I seriously hated any of the stories although I felt a little let down by a few. I would say that is the way many collections hit me. I'm sure someone else could read Xu Xi's stories and enjoy some that I didn't while disliking some that I enjoyed.

One of the things I loved about this short story collection is that each story introduced me to new and varied characters in a variety of situations. There were no two stories the same. If I'm going to read a collection like this, I don't want to be re-reading the same basic story over and over. This is definitely another good purse book.

[Jan Reinhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do not know where the Paris Review crowd would place Xu Xi in their narrow literary firmament, but I think she is one of the really fine chroniclers of this age of cosmopolitan migrants. The author is a woman who navigates between multiple cultures and languages, so she knows the territory.

The stories in this collection are not groundbreaking but they are often lovely, like the story of an almost 50-year-old woman taking a jog along an unfamiliar stretch of Stockholm. The story seems like a travelogue, but a series of mysterious and confounding encounters raises the stakes and makes the reader question his assumptions.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Lady Day" = hermaphrodite noir revenge tale clinches the collection. Lots of well-modulated nasty here.

[Ryan Marney · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5