Devotion Chat with Hua Xi

"I feel like we were put on this earth to have a fancy little lunch everyday."

“One part of me/ is disappointed in another part,/ like rowers on the lake.”

—Hua Xi, “Going (Guest House)”

A couple years ago, I read a poem called “Going (Guest House)” in American Poetry Review by a poet named Hua Xi. I loved it so much I cut it out of the issue.

Hua quickly became one of my favorite poets, and a friend I’m grateful to get to know. Recently Hua tweeted, “i wish more people would draw a frog and send it to me,” and I still need to draw them a frog.

I asked Hua a few questions about devotion & flowers & sustenance & dreams below. You can read more about Devotion Chats & past interviews here:

Devotion Chat: Hua Xi

Hua Xi (she/they) is a writer and artist. Their work has appeared in the New Republic, the Nation, the Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, Black Warrior Review, the Margins, and elsewhere. They help edit interviews at Guernica and read poetry for the Drift. They also spend some time running workshops with the Spatial Poetry Project. They love large clouds.

What does devotion mean to you? What, if anything, are you devoted to?

Recently, I read the Yiyun Li short story, “A Flawless Silence”. There is a woman in the story who usually is conflict-avoidant and when she disagrees with something or something bothers her, she doesn’t voice her opinion. At the end of the story, she has this realization that silence is not the same thing as dignity. 

I’ve been thinking lately about when to speak and when to not. Your question about devotion makes me think of what it means to devote ourselves to the things we believe in. I don’t know if I have an answer to that. But I’ve been thinking, alongside reading this story, about the value of believing in things and speaking up with your beliefs even when it’s impossible to have a perfect opinion. 

What is helping you feel connected to your body lately?  

I was telling a friend just yesterday that I feel completely disembodied, like a floating head.

How do you sustain or nourish your writing?

I really enjoy eating breakfast and lunch. I like to make myself a little plate with different vegetables and bread and butter and jams and cheese. Or I like to make steel-cut oatmeal and put different berries and preserves on it. I feel like we were put on this earth to have a fancy little lunch everyday. 

What most often gets in the way of your writing/artmaking?  

I get very easily addicted to other hobbies like playing video games, then I spend all my time doing that instead. But that’s okay because I enjoy that too.

Sometimes I can’t write if it’s too hot outside. So, probably global warming also will get in the way of that. 

What is a dream that scares you?  

I used to have a lot of lucid dreams and they probably stemmed from my anxiety. People think it’s a lot of fun but I really didn’t enjoy having them because I would wake up feeling so tired the next day and often the dreams were filled with anxiety. I used to have this dream where I woke up on top of a very large stone head statue and then I looked around me and saw all these other stone head statues buried in the sand. I had that dream over and over again. 

If your creativity resided in a particular landscape, what would that look like?  

Maybe a desert. I spent a lot of time in the deserts in California growing up and I think they’re very beautiful, and I find them sort of centering. They’re very colorful. They have a lot going on but at the extremes, being either very large or very small. 

A song that's on repeat in your life this week/lately?

I left my headphones on a bus somewhere so I feel like I’ve just been listening to my own thoughts.

Favorite flower?

I love a random, weedy flower on the side of the road that is unidentifiable. Especially if you see it from the window of a car passing by really fast. I feel like we live in a time where everything gets documented and categorized but it doesn’t really add any value and only makes beautiful things feel more mundane, so I love a flower that is just passing by, unnamed and unremembered and unexpected. Like, who put it there? Why is the universe like this? Et cetera. 

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