Collection gives vivid voice to array of (mostly) female characters

Access by Xu Xi Signal 8 Press

Access is a collection of 13 short stories in English by Xu Xi, a Hong Kong-born writer and one of the city's most successful literary talents. Her last novel, Habit of a Foreign Sky (2010), was a work she described as her 'woman's book', and in many ways the stories in Access follow on from that theme.

They are populated with strong, mostly Chinese or Eurasian women who represent an intelligent variety of personalities, ages and cultural backgrounds. The overarching theme of the book is desire. Xu Xi deals with emotional and sexual narratives unflinchingly, which gives her work a candour, clarity and relevance that is rarely (although increasingly) seen in writing by women from this part of the world.

Her second story, Iron Light, for example, follows 54-year-old Ida Ching to Stockholm with her lover. When he leaves her on a day trip out of town, she finds herself fixating on a past romance: 'It would not do, this simply would not do, wandering around a strange city wanting to f***. Not her. A smart, independent, successful professional, the world in her hands, no longer angry, not really.'

Of the 13 stories, some are large and searching while others are no more than vignettes surrounding a small and immediately significant moment. They are grouped into 'tales', which lends the impression that each story has a moral, like Aesop's fables. And indeed many do. But others don't, because the author has taken a verbal photograph rather than run the full reel, and we must discover meaning for ourselves.

It must be said, however - and on the basis of Access and Habit of a Foreign Sky alone - that Xu Xi seems more comfortable in the longer form.

One story that departs from the feminine perspective is Servitude. It is one of the simplest and sweetest, and certainly relatable to anyone who has grown up with the hierarchy of Hong Kong society.