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trade paper HK$95.00
Chameleon Press
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Overleaf Hong Kong by Xu Xi
People so often speak about globalisation as if it were a new phenomenon, arising from technology and the convenience of international travel. Yet throughout history globalisation has occurred when people have migrated overseas in search of better lives for themselves and their families. They took with them their home cultures which, divorced from their homelands, often became stronger or at least more extreme in this absence. The diaspora of the Jews is one example, stimulated by persecution. Arab traders roamed trade routes looking for opportunities and, like Christian missionaries, spreading their religion.
The diaspora of the Chinese, on the other hand, was fuelled almost entirely by economic objectives. Chinese are to be found throughout East and Southeast Asia and further afield, Europe, Australia, the USA and beyond. Often mistreated and disregarded, their tales have generally been those of relentless toil to acquire material security. But is this all there is the overseas Chinese communities? How do those who have traveled overseas think of themselves? Are they able to assimilate themselves into another society or are they forever bound to remain on the periphery of their new homes? Are those who are only partly Chinese ever accepted into any society?
These are the questions that XU XI addresses in this new and slim volume of short stories and essays. The author is a modern woman, even a post-modern woman in the sense that the many shards of her personality connect and reconnect to form different patterns in her writing.
As a Chinese Indonesian living in Hong Kong, the USA and New Zealand, with a range of positions requiring her to travel repeatedly around the world, Xu Xi communicates in fragments by email, mobile phone and the short pieces that have been placed in this collection. Her identity is a combination of multiple identities, including being Chinese, Indonesian, a woman and an executive. In some ways, she is a symbol of those Asians who cross the borders of different societies and who have no mother language.
The same themes recur with different casts of characters. From among the stories, the best part of the book, Go Parents describes the elderly Mr and Mrs Go, traveling to New Zealand as they have traveled to so many parts of the world, with Henk Go concerned with the surface of his experiences and his seemingly vacuous wife Pauline occasionally connecting with the world on a level simultaneously deeper and more superficial. In Famine, a woman seeks to exorcise the ghosts of her relentlessly abstemious parents by eating the most extravagant and exorbitantly priced food that she can imagine New York has to offer. In The Raining Tree, a Chinese-Malay model in Singapore suffers a form of nervous breakdown as she seeks to resolve the tension between the beauty that the world sees with the `monkey Malay' blood that her Chinese relatives deplore, but which contributes so much to her exoticism.
In these stories, fractured identities struggle to penetrate the visual aspect of their existence to locate greater levels of meaning. These ideas are lent an additional perspective by the author's gender -- she is, as she notes in one of the essays, glad to be a woman and takes great interest in exploring the connections between the different roles women take in modern society, especially in the light of new career opportunities becoming available, at least to some. Indeed, her female characters tend to be rather more lively and interesting than her male characters.
In the prologue to her novel Wah Kiu (Overseas Chinese) included here, Xu Xi suggests that she is capable of work of greater weight than these mostly slight pieces. While there is some appropriateness in exploring this subject in this format, there is also scope for a more developed and indeed lengthier examination of the subjects with respect to multiple perspectives and a variety of contexts. Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable collection from a talented writer and I look forward to discovering some of her novels.
- Editor's note: 'Overleaf Hong Kong' is published by Chameleon Press, a company associated with The Asian Review of Books
John Walsh
19/05/2004
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John Walsh is Assistant Professor at Shinawatra International University, Bangkok. |
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