Chinese Walls

'The Master said, 'Men are close to one another by nature. They diverge as a result of repeated practice.' This epigraph by Confucius is at the heart of CHINESE WALLS, Xu Xi's controversial literary debut. This novel-in-stories was one of the first to openly address incest in an Asian family. Told by the youngest child and only daughter, Ai-Lin, the narrative begins in her childhood and wends through the stories of the men in her life: her father, brothers, former fiance and ex-husband, as the adult woman tries to come to grips with the meaning of love, sex and relationships. The title borrows the term 'Chinese Walls' from Wall Street, referring to the practice used often in finance or law of erecting an invisible barrier between two teams working on opposites of a deal or case, to prevent the sharing of information. When the novel appeared in 1994, Xu was praised by the Far Eastern Economic Review as 'a welcome new voice in the field of Asian fiction writers' whose 'insights into Eastern family culture ring consistently true.' Xu is described as 'a skillful storyteller,' with an 'impressive ability to create believable characters . . . fully human in their inner contradictions and complexity,' whose writing is 'unpretentious' and 'like listening to a close friend talking about her life, her family, her love and her frustrations.' The novel was considered a breakthrough that 'avoids the sex-and-drug-and-triad stereotypes that plague so many English language novels on Hong Kong,' and was an instant bestseller in Asia. This new EBook edition allows readers worldwide to once again traverse between the invisible walls of a Chinese-Indonesian family in 1960's Hong Kong. It remains a surprisingly relevant and contemporary transnational story in the 21st century.