CUSWF Book Club Selections

The conversation with Xu Xi and author and filmmaker Ann Hedreen starts above. 

Why was it important to you and fellow MFA co-director Evan Fallenberg (who lives in Tel Aviv) to emphasize the art of translation along with creative writing? 

Because Evan is a translator and I read internationally—I read a lot of literature in translation—we felt that we’re not giving ourselves (as readers and writers) the benefit of the literature of the rest of the world if we don’t focus on translation. 

What was it like to move into your parents’ Hong Kong flat after 40 years of frequently visiting, but never actually living there? (Xi lived and worked in Hong Kong earlier in her adult life, but had her own home.) 

It was a big decision to have to actually move home. I was kind of shuttling back and forth (between Hong Kong and New York); my then partner and now husband and I, we’re used to shuttling. But I think for me the idea of actually really moving back, living there, taking a job, and the idea of going home to live—the idea that I would actually be in my mother’s home! …I started thinking about the suspending of life. Because life does sort of go into suspension, you know? This is not the thing you ever anticipated you would do… and I have no children, on top of that. If I had been a mother, I might’ve been better at this! But I was like, what? I’ve got to be a mom? How do I do this?! I’m turning 60, and I have to become a mother?! 

The trouble with being a writer is your life is supposed to be so flexible, right? You can work anywhere? And I’m the eldest: that was a big part of it. 

How is caregiving changing in China and Hong King? 

Chinese society used to just naturally take in old people. Hong Kong society does not do that anymore. It’s not the way it was when I was a child. In China, they actually legislated at one point, to make people go home and visit their parents, after everybody came to work in the cities. So what does that tell you? This whole Confucian filial piety thing is not really the way the modern world operates. In China, when you travel so many miles from your village to Beijing or Shanghai or Chengdu to get a job, and whenever you go back home, your parents are wondering when are you going to have children and come home, and a lot of young people, they don’t want to come home.

What were some of the challenges you faced during your years of long-distance caregiving, when you were shuttling back and forth between Hong Kong, the U.S. and occasionally New Zealand?

You can only physically travel so much. It’s a long haul! I got really good at the long haul, but it’s not natural. (Although) sometimes, the travel itself becomes the reprieve. 

How did the time you spent with your mom influence you as a writer?

(Before Alzheimer’s), my relationship with my mother was always very chatty. My family, we were a talking family. We discussed politics, family, why Auntie So-and-so is wearing what she’s wearing. And (as the illness progressed) it was very silent with my mother. And I came to actually appreciate that silence. 

The silence was actually interesting for my writing. Because I wrote an incredible amount at the time I went home to live in Hong Kong. To the point where the book publishing became a little absurd; every year a new book was coming out… But it was partly because of being in Hong Kong at a time of great change. Culturally, we were going through so much change. And my mother didn’t want to leave Hong Kong. We tried to make her go to the U.S., and we gave up. And she never wanted to go back to Indonesia. Which I found very interesting. Even though (my parents) remained to the end very Indonesian, culturally. She didn’t know how to cook Chinese food until she came to Hong Kong! 

I was trying to honor my mother’s wish to stay at home. And home for her really was this flat my family had lived in for almost 40 years in Hong Kong. But that wasn’t home for me, because I left Hong Kong a half a year after they moved there. So it was a curious thing to be in this home, my mother’s home, and I could imagine so much about her and her life in this apartment, and what about her past?

I wanted to write more. I would ask her questions, and she would change the answers, and then I realized: she lies without realizing she’s lying now. It made me think about narrative in a very different way. There’s so much about the way Alzheimer’s is that forces you to rethink linearity, narrative, memory. The idea of fiction and non-fiction becomes very interesting with an Alzheimer’s person. 

Do you fear Alzheimer’s? I know I do. 

I look for signs of it in myself. I actually started to set myself memory tests. I do fear it. I told my husband, if I get Alzheimer’s, just make sure you put me somewhere where I’m reasonably well taken care of, and do not take care of me at home. In Hong Kong, we could hire domestic help. We can’t afford to do that here. 

I do think the big problem now is, there’s so much focus on: how do we cure this? How do we make it go away, take a pill? I think the focus should be: how do we help people who have Alzheimer’s live out their lives in a reasonably good way. As good as is possible. I think government and society should put money into elder care, training, more elder care facilities. I think that’s where better money would be spent in the near future. Obviously we need scientific research, we need to understand it. But we need to learn how to cope. If you want to keep someone at home, how do you do that? Or a facility, what should that look like? 

What are you currently working on?

I’m writing shorter pieces, including an essay on the protests in Hong Kong. I’m also working on two novels. Both books deal with questions of memory. I think it’s probably a direct influence of dealing with my mother’s Alzheimer’s, and investigating in my own mind the question of what memory is. 

Xu Xi is Co-Director of The International MFA program in creative writing and literary translation at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and author of This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (University of Nebraska Press/American Lives Series, 2019), Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City, That Man in Our Lives, The Unwalled City and many other books. 

Ann Hedreen is a writer, filmmaker and teacher. Her memoir, Her Beautiful Brain, won a 2016 Next Generation Indie award. Ann’s writing can also be found in 3rdAct Magazine and other publications. She has just finished a second memoir, The Observant Doubter.