Literary Series Starts Strong

The NYU Shanghai Literary Reading Series started strong this fall, headed with one of Hong Kong’s leading fiction writers, Xu Xi, alongside the prize-winning U.S. poet Jane Wong.

Delivering prose with a improv-jazz feel, Xu read from That Man in Our Lives (2015) -- a “transnational 21st century novel” she described having “two beginnings and two endings.”

“One of the things a jazz musician always has to do in improvisation is what they call ‘come home.’ You have to find your way home—and that’s part of storytelling, finding your way back. You have this character doing all these things, but what does it all mean, and where does it go and what does it all resolve to? It’s a kind of resolution that I look for,” answered Xu when asked about the musical quality of her language.

Seattle-based poet Jane Wong read from her book of poems Overpour, from Action Books.

About her poetic process, the former Fulbright Fellow admitted, “I always have a running list of about 10 images or things I’ve written down, and I feel that my job as a poet is to build the bridges between those images. My joy is building associations via sound between those lines.”

Conjuring German scholar Wolfgang Iser and his idea of ‘virtual text,’ Wong imparted that literature is the moment in which the writer and the reader work together to make something occur.

“This is just paper,” she said, flipping through pages of her book before the audience, “but every single one of you has their own virtual text. As you were listening, you each had a completely different understanding of what we read--those associations and leaps you made as a reader differed from what others experienced,” she said.

The reading was presented by the NYU Shanghai Writing Program and was introduced and moderated by Lecturer and curator of the Literary Reading Series at NYU Shanghai David Perry.

Next in the literary line-up, come see acclaimed novelist Gish Jen, who will be reading Wednesday evening, September 28. Details here.

For more upcoming events in the literary series schedule see the calendar here.

Previous guests in the series include Wang Anyi, John Brantingham and Genevieve Leone.