The Condition of Colonialism: A Conversation with Xu Xi

As part of our series on responsible travel writing, we recently spoke with Xu Xi 許素細, Indonesian-Chinese-American, born and raised in Hong Kong. She is the author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction and one of Hong Kong’s leading writers in English. She is also editor of five anthologies of Asian writing in English, most recently The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. She currently occupies the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross and leads international writing retreats through Authors at Large.

You can read her essay, “Travelers in My Backyard,” here.

UNDOMESTICATED: You begin the essay you wrote for us with “Travelers invaded my childhood” and go on to describe the many types of foreigners in Hong Kong during the century and a half of colonialism. Many novels, non-fiction narratives, and films have been written from these perspectives, which give an outsider’s viewpoint. What were some of the key aspects of Hong Kong you wanted to convey when you first started writing about Hong Kong?

XU XI: Nobody writes about what it's like to live here, to grow up here. While I'm not local-local, I'm local enough. I speak Cantonese, I went to a local school. When I look at film and fiction and poetry by Hong Kong Chinese language writers, their concerns are expressed rather differently from mine, because I always had this kind of outsider/insider view. But I understand a lot of what they're writing about, and I can identify with it.

The British invaded and took over, took away the local culture and forced another culture on us. So you became sort of deracinated whether you liked it or not. You were in the specially educated crowd so you studied English and you were taught to love something else other than who you would have been. This is the condition of colonialism.

And that's what I want to write about, plus this sort of demure Asian woman thing, which is also exoticized. That definitely wasn't my life. I was the worst. I was the opposite. In a lot of my early work, I would tell a woman’s story because I thought that that was the story we didn't hear. It was mostly white males from abroad or Chinese males for that matter, who were writing. I didn't know Eileen Chang's work when I was young and came to it later. Once I read her, I realized this is what happens if you're a woman. So if there was an underlying message, it was that it’s not great to be colonized. Yes, I was privileged, and I can write from that privileged perspective, but for the majority of people in Hong Kong, life was tough. Before prosperity began in about the 1970s, Hong Kong was quite poor, and I grew up in a fairly impoverished city. So the veneer of the colonial Somerset Maugham? That's great if you're white or wealthy, but that's a tiny sliver of the population.

You worked for Cathay Pacific’s inflight magazine, Discovery, back in the 1970s. That was probably the last decade in which people weren’t thinking about the handover [of Hong Kong from British rule to Chinese]. It was also a time when China was still mostly closed off to the rest of the world and Hong Kong was seen as a window to mainland China. Do you think that positioning contributed to the exoticism of Hong Kong? It seems like Hong Kong isn’t viewed now in the same “exotic” way as it was pre-handover.

Yeah, I really agree with you on this last point, especially. But also, this was true with a magazine like Discovery and the way Cathay Pacific marketed it. It was very privileged for the white expatriate man. There were fewer women in the field of advertising and publishing at that time. Today, that's completely changed. With the few women I met, I was always struck by how tough they were, by how they had to make their own space because it really was this white guy, Asian woman thing. It was ridiculous how much that was promoted in all the advertising we did.

Are you talking about what some people call “yellow fever,” the idea that Asian women would be demure as you mentioned before?

Yellow fever, yes, which was pretty rampant back in the 70’s in Asia and also in the U.S. where there were larger Asian populations. Mind you, while it was clearly the white guys who usually had the upper hand if they were expats who could be accused of yellow fever, there were also, and still are, Asian women who very much wanted a white guy, any white guy. Back in the 70’s it was mostly because of prestige and class. Today it’s usually much more due to the huge economic disparity in some parts of Asia between, say, a Filipino or Indonesian domestic worker and pretty much any white guy who by contrast is better off financially, regardless of whether or not he is truly well off.

But also in terms of positioning, Hong Kong wasn't modern China. It never went through communism. This is significant. All the feudal ideas were still in Hong Kong and Confucianism never left. I think some good things stayed. Traditional Chinese characters, for example, and this sense of China's ancient history and culture.

I remember going to the border at Lok Ma Chau in 1990 to look at China. We were brought there to look. “There's China!” Now people just go to China.

I remember that sensation when I was a kid. I had this awareness while hiking in Saikung [near the Chinese border] with family or with my Girl Guide troop that China was just over there. And you could get radio signals from China at night, and I would hear Mandarin and what were propaganda broadcasts. I couldn’t understand it because I didn’t know Mandarin at the time, but I had a sense of what it was. It's what made Hong Kong special in a cultural and cosmopolitan way.

Now Hong Kong is increasingly tied to mainland China. How do you think the way people write about Hong Kong might change with the recent national security law that criminalizes speech the government finds subversive?

It’s going to become even more surreal.

Is it going to be safe to stay there and write?

Ultimately, no. There is a lot of self-censorship so if you’re going to stay you have to be allegorical, you have to be able to use metaphor in new and inventive ways. I think speculative writing will become very useful. Speculative and science fiction writers like Ted Chiang, for example, understand how to build a world. But the tradition in Hong Kong—like Xi Xi, Dung Kai-cheung, and Dorothy Tse—is to write in this kind of speculative way. And you’re very much rooting around the consciousness in the case of Xi Xi and Dung Kai-cheung and also in a somewhat surreal world. And I think this is because Hong Kong’s culture was so hybrid before, but now it will be because there are things we cannot say. You have to find allegory. You have to write Animal Farm or 1984 basically. And already Hong Kong does that on some level.

Isn’t it interesting that for Hong Kong 1984 was such a pivotal year with the Joint Declaration stipulating how the U.K. would eventually transfer control of Hong Kong to China?

Yes. Who would have thought? Journalists are now dead and they cannot report the way they used to. I don’t know how much longer the Hong Kong Free Press will be around. It’s still going strong.

What about the Foreign Correspondents’ Club? That was such a treasure.

I don’t know. I think a lot of the journalists are leaving. Every time I turn around somebody else I know has left. And anyone who has reason to live somewhere else will just go. But you can still live in Hong Kong for quite a while if you are not an activist or a journalist and not too public. You can be there for quite a while still and nothing will change fundamentally. And now that they’re loosening up Covid restrictions, that could bring life back to somewhat normal. You can still go hiking and go out and eat and all of that, but I think it’s what you say in public and what you publish that will come under much more scrutiny.

Do you think you’ll ever go back?

I hope to be able to go back to visit. But I definitely won’t go back to stay. And I think I’m already writing off Hong Kong as any kind of base. I used to offer urban workshops there, but I’ll probably try to do that in Singapore instead. Or somewhere else like Malaysia because Hong Kong people can travel there and I’ll have a lot less trouble in those places. Even Indonesia these days is more democratic than Hong Kong.

Increased prosperity in China, closer political ties and transportation infrastructure has meant that in addition to Western tourists, Hong Kong has seen an explosion in tourism from the mainland. You write about Elizabeth Becker’s 2013 book, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, in which she calls out travel because it causes devastating, irreversible harm to humanity. What are the greatest losses to Hong Kong in this sense?

There used to be many more traditional artisans who could do all kinds of things, even the now no-no trade of ivory. There were the coffin makers, and small shops like herbal tea shops, which are now gone. And the Hungry Ghost festival. I lived in Central near Aberdeen Street, and I think I saw the last year of the Hungry Ghost Festival in the neighborhood. There were also Cantonese opera and dramas [in the street]. So I think these things got lost because the focus became more about what the tourists wanted to buy. You always knew where you could buy the tourist junk, and that's what it was. It was junk. So first it was junk for Westerners and now it's junk for the Chinese. Indian tailors and Shanghai tailors little by little disappeared because it became all about who could make a suit overnight.

I wrote about Canton Road in my essay. Canton Road had a lot of Chinese culture, with artisans and woodworkers. It also had locksmiths, cobblers, hardware stores, and fresh food markets. This is disappearing and it's probably more sanitary now than it was. When I was a kid we knew where to buy fish and meat. The chickens and pigs would come in and be there. It was an organic culture of what neighborhoods need and what ordinary people have. Now Canton Road has become all about designers.

Yes, it’s all about Louis Vuitton and Gucci.

And every shopping mall now is exactly the same. It doesn't matter where in the city you go. That changed in the last 25 to 30 years. Before that, if you went out to Shatin it was different than if you went to Tsim Sha Tsui.

That’s really sad because that was such the draw, to buy handicrafts and local goods.

Real handicrafts!

Right! Who needs to go all the way to Hong Kong just to go to Marimekko? Even with the consequences of so many people traversing the globe, you admit that it’s not realistic that we agree to never travel again, and you hope the next generation will travel with their eyes more widely open. What might that type of travel look like?

Would you believe me if I said that less physical/actual tourism travel and more armchair travel might really be better for the world? To travel with eyes more widely open we need to reform tourist travel which is the explosion Becker writes about. If we could begin to redefine “tourism” into necessary and unnecessary tourism --- I know, this calls for value judgments which everyone is so allergic to — then perhaps the world would be less devastated by travelers. BUT, here are some next generation possibilities that perhaps are less dire.

One - Travel with a real interest in the local culture by experiencing more than partying with other tourists and experiencing only the “native culture” put on display for tourists and simply live like a local for a while. Learn the language.

Two - Think about the business of travel – “cheap travel” has come at the expense of salaries and job security for those in the airline and hotel industries; sacrificing safety and security by cutting those costs; turning the physicality of travel into a cattle herd experience. Ask yourself if it’s better to travel everywhere and land for five minutes or to travel more selectively and deeply into a few places and not profit from all that discount travel that isn’t doing the world any favors?

Three - Think about the ethics of travel — Should it only be about your own eat-pray-love or about subsuming your own ego and self-centered concerns in favor of truly discovering other cultures? Should we travel just to satisfy our own lusts and then come home and impress all our friends or should travel really be more about understanding our world as something so much larger than ourselves?

Undomesticated: What about those writing about travel? How might we write about a place without contributing to its eventual incursion? After all, many travelers also lament how crowded favored destinations have become and seek out more “authentic” locales, which can then create a “go now before it’s too late” mentality.

I can see travel writing become more about advocating for the rights of humanity beyond the borders of our own cultures and privileges. As travel writers, are we going to trot out the same old same old about where to find the best “deals” or would we do better to showcase those things that the local communities are really proud of and /or unearth the history, languages, art or literature that the rest of the world is ignorant of? If we write about restaurants or places to stay or sites to visit, can we move beyond the obvious to offering angles of appreciation that is about what we can learn from these experiences? And perhaps can we publish and edit new kinds of travel media that locate themselves within other cultures, rather than without?

Speaking of language, art and literature, you founded the International MFA in Creative Writing and Translation at Vermont College of Fine Arts, which was sadly shuttered. The program was remarkable for hosting residencies in various countries and for bringing together students frown all over the globe. What did you learn from your students?

I think the thing I kept learning over and over again is that race has nothing to do with what you can write about and what you can understand. Some of the best Chinese stories I got were from white people whose Chinese was way better than the Chinese American or Chinese Canadian who could not speak or read to the same level. I’m thinking of one guy in particular from Appalachia and he just loved poetry. He studied Chinese poetry because his Chinese reading was pretty good. He lived in Shenzhen for 15 years. He could really understand the language and the culture and the literature, especially because he knew a lot of poetry. He read some fiction as well. He understood it in a way that no Chinese American who was born and raised in America could possibly grasp in the same way unless they have had that same experience of studying Chinese. In Singapore there are people who are entirely English educated, but their English is Singlish. They have a completely different perspective about what that English language means. So I definitely think what you look like has really little to do with what you can write. I really do believe that.

And how does writing and reading outside one’s own tradition change a writer’s outlook or approach?

Right now, I'm teaching my new book, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories, as a textbook for American kids. I also have some Chinese students in the class and they are still studying an American curriculum. They're writing their own fiction, but they're reading these stories that are all Asian-based. Storytelling has many universal aspects to it, but there are also some particularly Asian ideas or Asian cultural issues. It really opens up your mind to what a story can be, and how people look at each other and how families deal with each other because they're getting a different cultural situation than they would otherwise be exposed to.

In a way, it’s not that different from teaching a bunch of New England kids Flannery O’Connor and showing them the South. That could be just as foreign to them. Or you give them Black American literature, but when you’re reading from elsewhere, you’re reading either in translation or Asian writers writing in English because of the colonial era. So that gives them a perspective of how literature really belongs to the world. Even if it’s in the English language, it still belongs to the world.