Fig. 1. Xi Xi, Cover of Hua / Huaben, 1995 —
from Xi Xi, Carnival of Animals, CUHK Press, 2022.

 

In Ann Hui’s recent documentary Elegies (2023), Xi Xi makes an appearance as one of Hui’s most loved contemporary Hong Kong poets. Wearing a bright red hat that exudes a Paddingtonian charm, Xi Xi talks about her creative inspirations, fondly holding a teddy bear she handcrafted. Though the conversation was originally part of Fruit Chan’s documentary on Xi Xi My City (2015), Hui shrewdly adapts it to commemorate the late writer’s playful seriousness that has long captured us readers, and has since remained close to our hearts.

In fact, commentaries on Xi Xi’s writing often denote her childlike playfulness. Jennifer Feeley, the translator of Xi Xi’s selected poetry collection Not Written Words, notes the “centrality of childlike perception and visuality in her oeuvre” (11). Feeley also remarks on Xi Xi’s “urchin style”, a term coined by poet-writer Ho Fuk Yan, a close friend of Xi Xi’s, which describes the “child-like, mischievous, humorous, and at times irreverent” quality of her work (Feeley 17).

I am particularly interested in how Xi Xi’s childlikeness renders itself in her penchant for inanimate objects—an element of her work that often slips our attention. If we intentionally search through the titles of her writing, we easily “gather” a range of inanimate objects—apple, stone chimes, glass slippers, bowl, and so on. It would not be overly challenging either for the more dedicated readers to name a few pieces of her work that revolve around objects. But Xi Xi’s childlike playfulness does not materialise in attempts to simply endow these items with human qualities, or mobilise devices like personification as in many other children’s stories.

By centring her writing on inanimate objects, Xi Xi instead creates opportunities for readers to re-adopt a child’s imaginative point of view to perceive the world. The story “Toys”, for example, conjures up our own childhood memories and fascination with toys to help us understand the child protagonist’s love for hers. Narrated largely in the first person, the story follows the child protagonist who learns about ice carving and receives “ice toys” from her neighbour, a fishmonger by day and ice sculptor by night. In adoration of his craft, the child refuses to see the ice toys only as ice that easily melts and vanishes. Her deep admiration also results in her refusal to admit that her neighbour is a fishmonger. The story appears to end on a disappointing note for the child—where the neighbour admits to a census-taker that his job as a fishmonger, but Xi Xi has skilfully inserted the protagonist’s reflection as a grown-up earlier in the text:

If we consider the actual progression of events, then, “Toys” actually ends with the protagonist’s realisation of the transient nature of ice, and by extension, of dreams. However, Xi Xi does not mean to discourage us here. Such a realisation actually works to reveal our simultaneous capacity to acknowledge the reality and keep a childlike confidence in what we truly appreciate and admire. Essentially, childlikeness does not resemble the protagonist’s childishness when she defiantly rejects the reality as a kid. It might be true that having a childlike mind does not shield us from the harsh truths of reality, but it helps us acknowledge and retain the genuine feelings we have once had, and directs our attention to the essence of things we have once seen in our mind’s eye.

In the poem “Water Heater”, we see how Xi Xi mobilises another inanimate object—the water heater—to register the power of childlike imagination. Unlike the ice sculptures in “Toys” that naturally evokes our childhood fondness for toys and creates in us a sense of connection with the child protagonist, “Water Heater” illustrates the depth of childlike thinking through a water heater, despite its apparent irrelevance with children or childlikeness. The poem begins with Mama’s question to her child: “What do you wanna be / when you grow up?” (15). The child protagonist replies:

Acutely aware of what the underprivileged struggles with, the child wishes to provide for the needy by offering warmth like a water heater always does. But the child’s knowledge of the plights of others does not deter her from imagining a better future for them. This reminds me of what Xi Xi mentioned in an interview when she commented on the sense of “fairy-tale realism” in her writing. Xi Xi admitted that even though there are elements of “fairy-tale realism” in some of her works, they were “not written with children or young people in mind” (“A Rare Conversation”). In fact, when she reread some famous fairy tales as an adult, she saw tragedy, terror, and profundity—“[a]s in the case in life” (“A Rare Conversation”). In the same sense, Xi Xi did not write with a happily-ever-after frame of mind, but she wove the poignancy and imperfections of reality into her writing. And this is how we see her work comes to life— and in this case—in “Water Heater”, where childlikeness does not arise from a child speaker’s point of view which presupposes naivety, nor from the playful absurdity that connects oneself to an inanimate water heater; instead, it lies in the childlike audacity to keep hoping for new possibilities—in spite and because of the apparent brokenness and limitations in the present.

Unlike “Water Heater” and “Toys” that figure childlikeness through the speaker’s emotional association with an inanimate object, Xi Xi’s well-loved poem, “Can We Say”, registers childlike perception by way of the imaginative association of items which do not naturally correlate. “Can We Say” presents a list of nouns deliberately mismatched with a range of inanimate items which function as “classifiers” for the nouns. Such incongruence easily stirs in us some kind of discomfort, as discussed by many in their reviews of the text. But I wish to draw attention to the refrain “Can we say …?”, which I believe, plays an even more significant role in giving meaning to the misaligned words and classifiers. The refrain “Can we say …?” in fact works to invite readers to use their imagination and explore the possibilities of these new links between various objects and words:

As such, the moment the speaker asks “Can we say …?” also marks the very moment the speaker manages to say it and bring the imaginative pairings to life. Put differently, whenever the speaker creates new connections between objects, the speaker also begins to challenge our existing preconceptions and established understanding of how these objects and ideas should relate. The speaker’s ongoing questions in the text, therefore, invokes a childlike curiosity that persists in probing, testing, or even challenging what is acceptable and appropriate. Undeterred by any dissonance or incongruity that may emerge, a childlike mind is eager to experiment with the connection of things, as similar to the moments when children playfully put random Lego bricks together, create new inventions with their playdough, or take any scattered nonsensical ideas from their imagination and combine them in their drawing.

But “Can We Say” is not a poem randomly pieced together by just any elements. It is a poem that intends to emulate and encourage childlike inquisitiveness through the mischievous rearrangement and recombination of objects. This also ties in with Xi Xi’s creative endeavours in the previous texts, all of which posit inanimate objects as tools that enable her re-presentations of childlike insistence, courage, and curiosity to come into being—against the setting of a reality which works in quite a different way.

This reminds us that Xi Xi was not only a writer, but also a creator. Just like how the child in “Toys” witnesses her neighbour’s creative ventures, we too have been exposed to myriad ways Xi Xi traversed the boundaries of rules and preconceived notions, and exhibited her imaginative power through her work. As many might know, her creative work is not limited to writing. Xi Xi was also a fecund creator of different inanimate objects she so enjoyed writing about.

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The bears Xi Xi handcrafted (see fig. 2), for example, showcase her creative capacity and the many intricate, yet playful thoughts that went into the process of making. All the interesting details of her Georgian miniature house (see fig. 3), too, demonstrate her vivid imagination and fanciful mind. As for her handmade stuffed animals that are often replicas of real animals, they invoke Xi Xi’s special bond with these members of the planet, as well as her wishful desire to keep them “physically” away from the imminent environmental crises and destruction (see fig. 3 & 4).

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It is widely known that Xi Xi only began this journey of craft making in the 90s—after the nerve damage on her right hand from her breast cancer treatment, meaning that these crafts came to life mainly because of such form of physical therapy as artmaking. But as a reader long inspired by her work, I sense that the toys Xi Xi crafted were not simply products of therapy or leisure, just like how the seemingly childish language she composed in gestures towards something more meaningful and profound. Xi Xi’s afterword to My Toys might be a fitting response to these thoughts: