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[REVIEW] โHorizon Hong Kong: Xu Xiโs Hong Kong in Words and Picturesโ by Susan Blumberg-Kason
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on Horizon Hong Kong.
Xu Xi. Horizon Hong Kong: Selected Stories, Gaudy Boy, 2026. 288 pgs.
I first learned of Xu Xi when I was working at the Open University of Hong Kong, a year before the Handover. Even then, I admired how her writing often centres on the changes she has witnessed in Hong Kong since the 1960s. As I have observed since, no other Hong Kong writer has published in English for as long, or as prolifically, as Xu Xi, whose first book appeared when she was forty. She has now published more than sixteen books, including novels, short story collections and a memoir, among others, not to mention the numerous anthologies in which her work appears.
More than thirty years after the publication of her first book, Chinese Walls, Xu Xi has released a new collection bringing together twenty-two stories previously published across a wide array of books and journals. Horizon Hong Kong is an exquisite retrospective of her stories, all set in or concerned with Hong Kong, arranged in the chronological order of their original publication.
Some of her stories draw upon her childhood in Tsimshatsui, at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula. Unlike the many tourists and servicemen who have passed through TST, for Xu Xi these streets were no exotic playground of bars and clubs; they were her backyard. In an early story, “Chung King Mansions”, she writes:
From our veranda on the seventeenth floor, I can watch the Kowloon-Canton Railway trains pull into the station and the grey US battleships dock in the harbor. The sweep of the islandโs hills is like a picture frame for the buildings dotting the hillside and the waterfront. At night, the neon lights go on. My favorite is the one on top of the low building in the middle with the three red Japanese characters, which Dad says is an advertisement for monosodium glutamate. It isnโt lonely in Tsimshatsui, or quiet and scary.
The Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR) stopped going to TST when I lived in Hong Kong in the 1990s. Soon afterwards, the KCR was absorbed into the Mass Transit Railway, or MTR. She covers the early years of the MTR, beginning in the late 1970s, in her story “The Yellow Line”, a haunting tale of a little boy who becomes obsessed with the new MTR. This story takes place when the Central MTR station was still called Chater. It has a noir feel, and this tone is present throughout many of Xu Xi’s stories in this collection, including two that appeared in Akashic Books’ renowned noir series.
“Crying with Audrey Hepburn” was published in Manhattan Noir in 2006, and her last story in this collection, “TST”, is one dear to my heart. It was part of Hong Kong Noir, which I co-edited with Jason Y. Ng in 2018. I still remember the first time I read “TST”, the story of the ghost of a prostitute brutally murdered by a john, whose former home is now only a relic of what it was when she was alive. I am touched that she ends the collection with this story, for it is usually the first and last stories that readers remember best. Towards the end of “TST”, Xu Xi writes:
But look at us, weโre all here, and we havenโt shut up, not like those johns whose dead-to-the-world sleep is peacefully silent. If thereโs one thing Iโm sure of, itโs that I have to keep talking-story until you hear me, until you truly listen, until you fix this mess you call life.
This story includes a few photographs of the remnants of a sign on a building in Minden Row before its demolition. Xu Xi set “TST” in this building, and her photographs add an extra layer to this memorable story.
Xu Xi includes several other photographs in this collection, including an Edvard Munch sketch and a wall of Post-it notes from Occupy Hong Kong in 2014. Not all of her stories include images, but her writing is so vivid that it is not difficult to imagine the places she writes about, whether Hong Kong, New York, Stockholm or the other cities in which the collection’s stories are set.
The thirtieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s Handover will take place next year, and I cannot think of a better book to encapsulate all that took place in the couple of decades before the decision was made to hand Hong Kong back to China, as well as the decades since. It is also a reminder that, however much Hong Kong seems to have changed over the last ten years, if we look back over the decades, as Xu Xi does in this collection, we see that Hong Kong has always been a city in flux. It is impossible to tell what tomorrow may bring. Yet whatever changes are to come, Horizon Hong Kong is a treat for anyone who has visited or lived in Hong Kong, or who knows the city through film or television. And for those with no prior exposure to Hong Kong, it is a perfect introduction.
How to cite: Blumberg-Kason, Susan. “Horizon Hong Kong: Xu Xiโs Hong Kong in Words and Pictures.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 1 Jul. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/07/01/xu-xi-hong-kong.
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardineโs Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, a 2023 Zibby Awards finalist for Best Book for the History Lover. She is also the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair With China Gone Wrong and the 2024 Zibby Awards winner When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicagoโs Chinese American Service League (University of Illinois Press, 2024). She is the co-editor of Hong Kong Noir and a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, Cha and World Literature Today. Her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and PopMatters. Visit her website for more information. (Photo credit: Annette Patko) [Susan Blumberg-Kason and ChaJournal.]
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