This Fish Is Fowl : Essays of Being Paperback / softback

by Xu Xi

Part of the American Lives series

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

In This Fish Is FowlÂ Xu Xi offers the transnational and feminist perspective of a contemporaryÂ â€œglocalizedâ€ American life.

Xuâ€™s quirky, darkly comic, and obsessively personal essays emerge from her diverse professional career as a writer, business executive, entrepreneur, and educator.

From her origins in Hong Kong as an Indonesian of Chinese descent to her U.S. citizenship and multiple countries of residence, she writes her way around the globe. Caring for her mother with Alzheimerâ€™s in Hong Kong becomes the rhythmic accompaniment to an enforced, long-term, long-distance relationship with her partner and home in New York.

In between Xu reflects on all her selves, which are defined by those myriad monikers of existence.

As an author who began life as a novelist and fiction writer, she also considers the nature of genre, which snakes its way through these essays.

In her linguistic trip across the comic tragedy that is globalism, she wonders about the mystery of humanity and the future of our world at this complicated and precarious moment in human existence. This Fish Is FowlÂ is a twenty-first-century blend of the essayist traditions of both West and East.

Xuâ€™s acerbic, deft prose shows her to be a descendant of both Michel de Montaigne and Lu Xun, with influences from stepparent Jonathan Swift.Â