The New York Times named her a pioneer English-language writer from Asia and the Voice of America featured her on their Chinese-language TV series "Cultural Odyssey." She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship, as well as several writer-in-residence positions at Kulturhuset USF in Bergen, Norway and the The Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project of Orlando, Inc. In 2004, she received the distinguished alumni award from her undergraduate alma mater, SUNY-Plattsburgh and is the recipient of Ploughshares' 2005 Cohen Award. She was a featured reader in the recent Hong Kong International Literary Festival.

Xu Xi is an Indonesian Chinese raised in Hong Kong. She speaks English and Cantonese, even though those languages are not her parents' native languages. Her father traded manganese ore and her mother was a pharmacist. Xu started writing stories in English when she was a child. As an adult, she spent several years working in international marketing before becoming a writer.

Xu Xi is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Now a U.S. citizen, she is on the MFA fiction faculty at Vermont College in Montpelier.