Her work, according to critics and reviewers, addresses "the paradox that is Hong Kong" through a "new and innovative diasporic global language." Much of her writing investigates the trans-national reality of contemporary life, especially through the lives of women, although her most recent novel-in-manuscript is about friendship and three men. There are a few literary awards and honors, including an O.Henry prize story, the Ploughshares Cohen Award for best story, a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship, an Asiaweek "best book of Asia," HK Magazine's "top ten books of Hong Kong," a South China Morning Post short story prize. She has also been writer-in-residence or visiting writer at several residencies and universities, including as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Writer, University of Iowa's Nonfiction Program; the Distinguished Asian Writer, Philippines National Writing Workshop, Silliman University at Dumaguete; Lingnan University of Hong Kong; Kulturhuset USF in Bergen, Norway; the Jack Kerouac House of Orlando, Florida, among several others. She has also frequently spoken and read at writers festivals and conferences internationally, including at several Association of Writers & Writing Program (AWP) conferences in the U.S.; Worlds in Norwich at the University of East Anglia; the International Conference on the Short Story; Byron Bay Writers Festival; Shanghai Literary Festival; Desert Nights Writers Conference at Arizona State University in Tempe; Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival; the Asia Society, New York & DC; the Asian American Writers Workshop, New York. As well, she has regularly appeared at the annual Hong Kong literary festival and the TDC's book fair.

A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, Xu has lived for much of her adult life in her birth city and the U.S., specifically the East Coast and New York City, ping-ponging between the two. For approximately eighteen years, the author had a parallel marketing and management career for several major multinationals in Asia and the U.S., including the Asian Wall Street Journal, Federal Express, the law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, Pinkerton's Inc. and Cathay Pacific Airways. In 1998, she finally surrendered completely to the writing life and for over a decade, inhabited the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand. In 2002, she joined the faculty at the MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) in Writing, Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, one of the oldest and most prestigious low-residency graduate writing programs in the U.S., and was elected faculty chair in 2009 for a three-year term. Her approach to teaching creative writing is as that of a "coach," one who attempts to help students discover the kind of writer they are and need to be; at heart, she believes that writers ultimately must teach themselves to write as well as their talents allow.

In 2010, she returned to Hong Kong to live for awhile. She is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Department of English, City University of Hong Kong, where she helped to establish and directs Asia's first low-residency MFA in creative writing https://www.en.cityu.edu.hk//. Current work-in-progress include a novella and two personal essay series, although she does also write the occasional short, somewhat speculative, fiction, in a bid to make sense of the rapid movements in technology, culture and the environment of what she trusts will not be the last century on our planet.