A Literary Genius Rediscovered

One day in the early 1990, a student at Yangzhou Normal University went to the university library in the hope of finding a good subject for his graduation dissertation. In a special storage room of the library he ran into a large stack of books entitled the “Complete Collection of Xu Xu”. To his surprise, the student had never heard of the author. Compared with the complete collection of Lu Xun just standing adjacently on the same bookshelf, Xu’s complete collection had more volumes. The student wondered how any other writer could have been more prolific than Lu Xun, a milestone thinker and writer of the 20th-century China. Out of curiosity, he took a volume from Xu’s collection and began to read. As time went on, he ended up going through the complete collection and chose the writer for his dissertation. In 1993, the dissertation grew into a book on Xu Xu, published by Suzhou University Press. Since then, Xu Xu has become a regular subject for literary research and study at some colleges and universities of liberal arts.

Xu Xu (1908-1980) was born in a small village in Cixi County, which is today a part of Jiangbei District of Ningbo, a prosperous port city in eastern Zhejiang Province. His father Xu Hejun was a provincial graduate in the 30th year (1904) of Emperor Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). After the Qing Dynasty collapsed, the senior worked as a secretary at the finance department of the national government and then a secretary at the Shanghai-based Central Bank.

Xu Xu spent four years studying philosophy at Beijing University from 1927 to 1931. After spending another two years studying a postgraduate course in psychology, he began in 1933 to work as an editor at “The Analects” and “Society”, two literary magazines. Three years later he went to France where he studied philosophy at Paris University. He rose to national fame in 1937 when his novelette “Ghost Love”, written while he was in France, was published in China. The debut was followed by three more novelettes, which combined to build up his reputation in the literal circles in China. In 1943, the Chongqing-based Sao Tang Pao serialized his novel “Winds Blow”. The story was so popular that it has been adapted to film three times. The latest version was made in 1995 by Chen Yifei (1946-2005), an acclaimed painter and filmmaker.

Xu Xu was a loner and some people nicknamed him “a wild boar” traveling alone on decisions made on impulse and disappearing fast into nowhere. Before the New China was founded, he turned down an invitation to go and live in Taiwan. In 1950 he moved to Hong Kong.

In 1966, Xu Xu wrote a novel entitled “The Tragic Century”. It took the form of a fable that depicted the Cultural Revolution as a disaster. It is now viewed as the earliest literary disapproval of the political movement.

From 1966 on, he served as a professor with the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University. Xu published his first collection of essays in 1939. In the following decades, the prolific author produced novels, poems, essays in more than 20 million characters.

His descendents and relatives in the home village have vivid memories of the writer. Xu married three times in his life. Two of the three weddings were held at his home village Hongtang. His daughter stayed with his mother in the village for a long while. Living in Hong Kong, Xu missed his mother and home village very much. His last visit to the village was in 1949, a year before he migrated to Hong Kong. The poems and novels he wrote later reveal his memories of Hongtang. His love for the home village became his only spiritual pillar for his life away from home. He passed away in October 1980.