Xu Xi's MONKEY IN RESIDENCE AND OTHER SPECULATIONS

A restless intelligence drives the plotting and thinking in this collection of stories and essays, many of which are about the author's love affair with Hong Kong, where she grew up. The writing is laced with a wry humor and, more surprising, a tender sympathy for the young, particularly young Hongkongers who have to live with the political and social changes that have befallen on their city. There is next-to-no sloganeering in Xu Xi's writing, but plenty of hard-earned insight into what it means to be a transnational and ethnically Chinese writer, born in Indonesia, grown up in Hong Kong, and thereafter gone back and forth between Hong Kong and the United States.

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