Xu Xi ran the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing programme at City University of Hong Kong from 2010 to 2015 when it was closed in a move that was criticised by writers from Hong Kong and elsewhere.

This collection was published after that closure, as the territory accelerated from postcolonial status as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China to full Mainland Chinese rule. The stories deal with Hong Kongers as they grapple with the rapid changes.

The protagonist in ‘Off the Record’ is a 62-year-old Hong Kong American journalist who’s moved back to the city after many years abroad to help his ageing mother and dying father. His main preoccupation is women past and present, and most of the story revolves around them.

However, the thing that interests me most is his relationship with the city he grew up in. He is at once disillusioned by it, but at the same time drawn to it, conflicting sentiments that I relate to; it’s possible to love and hate a place at the same time.

The story is set in 2014, during the Umbrella Movement, a time of heightened political unrest.

It opens with a quote from a speech Chairman Mao made to the CCP in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution. The speech in its entirety, we are later told, warned party members against dissent and somewhat pointedly reminded them they were lucky to be alive.

Our protagonist comments that despite the changing political situation and fears about what the CCP might do to quash the unrest, “…people carried on, surviving as best they could, thriving when the heavens smiled upon them, weeping when tragedy befell.”

Whether we like it or not, the places we call home are constantly changing, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Change benefits some people, harms others, and is simply ignored by many as they muddle along. Sometimes, it’s not even that a place is changing, it is our personal attitude to that particular place.

The story ends with these sentences: “History proved the Chairman wrong, spectacularly wrong about so many things. But that one time, at the start of another new moment in China, he might have been right. Familiar old stuff was just that, old, and being alive, having survived, was way better than being dead.”

Collected in Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories, Signal 8 Press, 2018