The Far Eastern Economic Review hailed the appearance of her first novel, Chinese Walls, "a welcome new voice in the field of Asian fiction writers." "Not the typical Hong Kong writer," Asiaweek noted, "and speaks with more authority because of it." In 1996, Asiaweek named her fiction collection Daughters of Hui, one of the top ten "best books" of the year.

The author of three novels and two fiction collections, her work has been published and broadcast internationally. She is a former fiction fellow of the New York State Arts Foundation, and holds a MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

A native of Hong Kong from a Chinese-Indonesian family, she has been a resident of that city, intermittently, for some thirty years. After some 18 years in international marketing and management, she quit the corporate world to write, and live, full time.

She currently lives somewhere between New York and her home city.

A prolific writer, Xu Xi has been writing all her life under several identities, reflecting her “mongrel international” heritage. In 1995, she returned to the original Mandarin-Chinese name conferred by her father as her final nom de plume.

One morning at four a.m., at the age of 11, she privately absorbed the silence of the Hong Kong harbor and wrote an essay of that moment. It marked the beginning of her publishing career. Her first stories and essays appeared in the South China Morning Post, under her Fukienese-Chinese name S. Khouw (1965-1967).

In 1979, her first short story written as a quasi-adult, The Sea Islands was published in Imprint, a now-defunct literary journal from the University of Hong Kong, under her Indonesian name S. Komala. Some earlier fiction appears under her former American name S. Chako.

Since then her fiction and essays have been widely published, anthologized and broadcast. Recent fiction and essays have been featured widely, from the The Asian Wall Street Journal to New York's WKCR radio station and numerous US and Asian literary journals.