Xu Xu

Chinese writer (1908-1980)

Xu Xu, aka Hsu Yu (徐訏), was the pen name of Xu Boxu (徐伯訏; 11 November 1908 – 5 October 1980), a Chinese writer.

Xu Xu
Chinese徐訏
Alternative Chinese name
Traditional Chinese徐訏
Simplified Chinese徐訏


He was born in Cixi in the coastal province of Zhejiang. Xu Xu went to Peking University between 1927 and 1932 where he studied philosophy and psychology. In 1932, he moved to Shanghai where he had contact with Lin Yutang.[1] He later moved to Hong Kong.

Career change

Xu Xu wrote the wartime novel The Rustling Wind. It was printed (as a series) in the wartime newspaper Enemy Annihilation (掃蕩報), in 1943.[2]

Between 1956 and 1961, Xu Xu published his major work, the novel River of Fury (江湖行). It is a bildungsroman. In 1972, the novel was turned into a martial arts movie under the same name, and produced by Shaw Brothers Studio.


References change

  1. Green, Frederik H. (Winter 2018). "The Torment of Exile and the Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Transnational Chinese Neo-Romanticism in Xu Xu's Post-War Fiction". Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese. 15 (2): 73–98. ISSN 1026-5120.
  2. Christopher Rosenmeier, On the Margins of Modernism: Xu Xu, Wumingshi and Popular Chinese Literature in the 1940s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), page 73.