THE UNWALLED CITY 
Novelist Xu Xi
spoke about her fourth novel, set in the time just before the handover.
Excerpts from her talk:
It's somewhat intimidating to actually address people at the
FCC because I am not a journalist and I have never been one. As
a novelist, my preoccupation is with truth, not facts. Fiction
has always been my way of getting around political correctness
which in my mind is one of the bigger untruths that have been
perpetrated on humankind. Now the fact that I didn't say mankind
is in itself quite PC.
The cast of characters in my novel The Unwalled City are
not nearly quite so coy. They don't have to be. They are not in
a public forum where they might get misquoted. They are just ordinary
people whose opinions are their own and whose lives are as politically
correct or incorrect as ordinary lives tend to be.
How do you get around being PC. Well as a certain sporting brand
says, you just do it. My characters say what they will about China,
the Hong Kong government, the handoverSthey do all of this with
impunity because they don't really exist. Right? Of course, anyone
who believes that needs only to think about Salman Rushdie to
know that fiction can be quite potent in offending the wrong people.
But in my case, these fictional characters behave rather like
ordinary people, which means that they can ignore the handover
if they choose to ...
Anyone who has ever been married knows that the marriage proposal
can be a completely different story depending on whether the bride
or groom tells it, never mind the first big fight of married life.
So the important advantage of fiction is not having to be obsessed
about the actual events, just about the lives I am trying to create.
What I need to borrow of real events, these all will already be
in the archives and I have to just research and pull them out.
Here, I need to backtrack a little bit and tell you that when
I first began the novel, it wasn't in fact about the handover
at all. I stood at this very Club and said to (a) novelist (friend),
"I am writing my women's book" and he replied, "How
frightening." I think, he might have just as easily said,
"How politically correct ...
My Hong Kong novel doesn't have a single British protagonist.
This probably stems from my personal experience because I can
write only about what I know. I had been away from Hong Kong for
about nine years or so. And when I came back to visit in 1991
originally, I was quite startled to find that the American population
was actually outnumbering the British population. Then I returned
to work a year later for Federal Express, an American company,
and this was quite a contrast to my earlier life back in the 1970s
when I worked for Cathay Pacific Airways ... It also struck me
that so many Hong Kong people who chose to live abroad, many for
the passport insurance, would go everywhere but Britain.
Now again this is an advantage of fiction. You don't have to
care what Hong Kongers are supposed to be about. Just what it
is. And the social reality I saw had more locals and non-British
foreigners than not. I did get one minor British character in
and a German just to give the Europeans a shot, and also an American
of Cuban descent, all in minor roles. I suppose in fiction, absence
speaks as loudly as presence ...You don't have, for a moment,
to pretend that a novel is objective. In fact I think the more
entirely subjective it is, the better. I can't imagine writing
without a point of view, which to me is the whole purpose of writing.
As a novelist and social observer, a certain objectivity, of course,
matters which is in part how a women's book can turn into a handover
novel.
The Unwalled City
By Xu Xi
Chameleon Press, Hong Kong
ISBN 1-387-80214-0
PB HK$129.00
