Sometimes, you talk to a person, and they give you a bunch of hope for the future while simultaneously making it very clear that you still have a lot left to learn.
I’m talking to Xu Xi, Jenks Chair of Contemporary Letters at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, author of 14 books and editor of four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English. Her latest project is , an anthology comprising a selection of works by Asian authors with commentary from Xi and travel writer Robin Hemley (Bloomsbury Academic, October 2021). For starters, the anthology was a hard project for me to wrap my brain around – it isn’t, Xi and Hemley write in the introduction, “meant to silo off Asian writing for Asian writers.” In fact, it’s meant to do almost