Author XuXi's roots stretch to Indonesia and beyond

Dewi Anggraeni, Contributor, Hong Kong

At a literary festival in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Asia, surrounded by so many successful and talented writers from various countries in the region, it was reassuring and incredibly warming to find a kindred spirit, a well-known writer at that, whose roots, some reaching back to Indonesia, had spread far afield.

Her name alone seems to guarantee success.

Xu Xi. It sounds exotic and looks fetching in print. She has written three novels and two fiction collections which have received critical acclaim.

When her first novel, Chinese Walls, appeared in 1990, the Far Eastern Economic Review wrote that she was "a welcome new voice in the field of Asian fiction writers", and Asiaweek regarded her as "not the typical Hong Kong writer, and (she) speaks with more authority because of it". Then in 1996, Asiaweek named her fiction collection, Daughters of Hui, one of the top 10 "best books" of the year.

Her writing has been described as "arrestingly poignant", with a "crisp, uncluttered style that gets to its no frills target without tedious foreplay" and "tackles taboo subjects for Chinese women, like sexuality, adultery and seduction as an art form".

At first glance Xu Xi does not come across as someone who has the airs of a surfer of the ephemeral world of success. She is petite and smartly dressed, her face only lightly made up. She does not demand to be treated in any special way, nor does she condescend to other writers who are still struggling for recognition.

She lives between Hong Kong, where her parents are, and New York, where she keeps an apartment. Yet many of her short stories transport readers to different cities in Indonesia -- Jakarta, Puncak, Cilacap, Tegal and Purworejo. And an undercurrent of tension is often felt, that of being Chinese and not being Chinese.

"My parents are Indonesian-Chinese. My father comes from Tegal, and my mother from Cilacap. They met and married in Hong Kong. My sisters, brother and myself were born in Hong Kong."

The firstborn, Xu Xi was taken to Indonesia as a baby when her parents visited all their relatives.

"But I have no recollections of that visit," she explained.

It was as an adult, after hearing stories and seeing photographs of her relatives in Indonesia, that she went and visited herself.

By that time she had written many stories set in Indonesia. The country had been fed into her consciousness through her mother's stories, contact with other Indonesian families -- her parents had often taken her to independence day gatherings in Hong Kong -- and through her mother's cooking.

"My mother has always been a good cook. And the cuisine native to her is Indonesian cuisine. You know, at first she didn't even know how to cook Chinese food."

So Indonesia had been in her dreams. And that first visit was crucial to her "returning".

"I remember feeling that I was seeing what had been in my memory, from what my mother had told me, from what my father had told me. I had written about it, but more as an imagined reality. Then everything came to life."

Since then she had been back several times. When her sister went back to Indonesia to live, Xu Xi went to visit her. "That was fun. Having my own sibling there, knowing Indonesian, showing me places and things."

"I've written a novel about a family, where the mother is from Indonesia, the father is a Chinese from Hong Kong. I've drawn very much from my own family and relatives. Some of them came here, married local people, married other Indonesians. A lot of family issues come up in my stories. That has been dominant in my writings."

However, Xu Xi said that she had begun to move away from that theme.

"You have to kind of do that in your early works, I think," she said.

Her more recent stories reflect very much her current state of world-citizenship.

Her latest novel, The Unwalled City, is set in Hong Kong as life hurtles, out of control, toward that inevitable moment, the "handover" to China in 1997.

Somewhere deep in her psyche, Indonesia still stirs. In fact, she also writes under her Indonesian name, Susy Komala.