Xu Xi's Book Tour Disaster Story

One feature common to a number of great book tour disaster stories is what we might call "The Visitation," an odd member of the audience, a crackpot, an insistent or obnoxious audience member . . . Such is the case in the following anecdote of Xu Xi.

"Okay so when is the worst possible time to begin a book tour? Try right after 9-11, which is what happened for my last novel THE UNWALLED CITY (a novel of Hong Kong). This was worse than even my next book launch for an anthology of Hong Kong writing two years later, right when SARS hit our fair city (the publisher canceled the book party, we all took our masks, went home and I accepted a travel writing assignment to Hainan Island instead where there at least was no SARS, the promise of one US dollar a word and a new luxury hotel).

But back to the post 9-11 era where I arrive in Seattle at Elliot Bay Books on the heels of Jonathan Franzen who, the weekend prior, drew a crowd of some 200 people. My crowd was somewhat more modest, and I knew at least four people in the audience of twenty or so. 20% friends & family isn't too bad as bookstore audiences go (better than 100% in Orlando of the audience of 2, and the bookstore forgot I was coming . . .;)

But to make this long story shorter there I was reading, keeping up spirits, trying to forget my Chelsea neighborhood I'd left behind where police barricades cordoned off life. The Q&A began, my friends asked the good questions to get things going, a couple of other typical reading questions followed (q: Where do you get your inspiration? a: Would you believe the city of Hong Kong? q: Do you write in Chinese? a: No)

And then the man in the middle - you know the one, intense eyes, frown of concentration, bad hair, bursting to speak - he raised his hand. What he wanted to know, what he desperately wanted to know, was what could I tell him about Chinese art? The old kind you know. All those scroll paintings in museums around the world? What could I tell him? Please?

To begin with, not a lot. I know as much about traditional Chinese art as I know about hydraulics. Hills. Water. Flowers. Birds. Bloated goldfish. Much Mist. I mean, I'm not much better with the traditions of Western Art either; my obsessions begin with the Surrealists. So I told him, honestly I thought, I'm not an expert. Next?

But he was the man in the middle, the one who doesn't give up. Surely there was something I could tell him, something about all this great Chinese art I could say?

My novel is about contemporary Hong Kong shortly before its return to China. Ambivalent characters. Sex. Miscommunication. Divorce. More sex. Advertising. The Inconsequence of politics in an apolitical city. It is not about art. There isn't even an art dealer, or a Chinese painter, although there is one modern Chinese opera scene (Tan Dun's "Marco Polo") and an American Sinophile who probably does know more about traditional Chinese art than I do (she definitely knows more about marriage to a Chinese businessman with a Harvard MBA than I care to). But she's fictional. I made her up. She's not the one at Elliot Bay Books trying to re-direct a mis-directed question.

By now one of my friends in the front row is making throat-slitting signs. My face pleads with the audience, quick someone ask me something, anything. Perhaps now is the time to burst into song, "The East is Red" anyone?

And fortunately someone does ask a question, what I forget, and then, mercifully, time's up, I soon get to go for a drink and dinner with my friends, which is the best part of all this travel, when you end up in places where your friends are, the people who rally round when it matters, despite the man in the middle, the one who, after the reading, still tries to corner you and demand satisfaction about Chinese art. Read a book, you want to say, but you don't, because he isn't there for you, your reading, or even the bookstore. He's there because he has nowhere else to go and this leg of your book tour was as good a place as any for him to perch for an hour or two, before heading off into that wild blue and all the Chinese art in his dreams.

It could have been worse. He could have asked about kung fu fighting, grasshopper."

XU XI is the author or editor of ten books, most recently a collection of personal essays Evanescent Isles: from my city-village and Overleaf Hong Kong: Stories & Essays of the Chinese, Overseas. She teaches on the prose faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, she now inhabits the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand. Visit www.xuxiwriter.com