When Your City Vanishes

Since July 2020, the city of Hong Kong has gone through what can best be called a political and cultural reboot, erasing (or at least reconfiguring) its former hard drive. Two years on, It seems an appropriate moment to reflect on what the city of Hong Kong was and...

Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations

Synopsis: Observations of contemporary life that make monkeys of us: this existential disbelief thrums through speculative stories and essays in Xu Xi’s latest collection. These 16 short pieces, evenly divided between fiction and nonfiction, are in turn elegiac,...

Insignificance

Synopsis: Sometimes what is remembered is best forgotten. This is the feeling that permeates Insignificance. The protagonists in these stories cannot help but recall their former Hong Kong existence, one that shimmers with beauty and pain. On September 26, 2014, the...

The Unwalled City

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: Xu Xi, one of Hong Kong’s preeminent novelists, examines the lives of four of the city’s residents amid the tension and uncertainties leading up to the 1997 handover to China. Price:...

Chinese Walls

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: It’s the sixties. US sailors on R&R prowl the streets of the waterfront in Hong Kong where the Indonesian-Chinese Hsu family lives. “What’s a prostitute?” nine-year old Ai-Lin...