Andrew Xia Fukuda uses a crime thriller to recreate the immigrant experience with disturbing results, writes Heidi Yeung

Xing Xu is a Chinese immigrant living and studying in a small town in the US. He spends his days silent and ignored, except when he is being bullied or underestimated. His quiet demeanour makes him an outsider among his Caucasian peers, and the only other Chinese student in his school, on whom he harbours a crush, has begun to pull away. Rendered an outcast who both embraces and detests the label, Xing finds himself at the centre of suspicions when fellow students start to disappear then turn up dead.

Thankfully, Xing Xu is fictional, and Crossing is not a piece of “scar literature”. Saying that, the author of this debut novel, Andrew Xia Fukuda, can certainly relate to the complexities of living a multicultural life. Literature that deals with the identity struggles of the Chinese diaspora is familiar thanks to works by authors such as Amy Tan and Ting-xing Ye, but the intertwining of this subject with the thriller genre adds freshness and makes for a suspenseful and disturbing read.

Fukuda, who is in town this fortnight to speak at the Book Fair, is half-Chinese and half-Japanese, and was born in Manhattan but raised in Hong Kong. Growing up, Fukuda was among the privileged youth of Hong Kong and befriended mostly expat children. The problem with this, he discovered, was that he fitted in neither with local peers nor with his expat friends who still saw him as Asian. “I have very Asian attributes,” Fukuda explains, “though technically I’m American, I knew very little about America. I’m half-Chinese and half-Japanese, but understood very little of the cultures. So it was an odd experience, growing up . . . Most of my friends were British or Australian, and I didn’t feel British or Australian, but also not quite American. So I felt a bit like an outsider.”

Fukuda returned to America to study history at Cornell University. Throughout his studies, Fukuda found himself drawn to the Asian-American experience, and gained comfort from knowing that others had previously trod his path. The author now resides on Long Island, New York, with his wife and two sons.

Over the phone, Fukuda is cheerful and a friendly conversationalist. So it’s hard to imagine him putting together a story that the Asian Review of Books says, “will scare your pants off”.

Fukuda did not pull his protagonist out of thin air. Post-university, he worked with immigrant teenagers in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and found many of them dealing with problems that other kids their age wouldn’t even fathom. “What struck me is that no one even knows they exist,” Fukuda tells us. “[But] they weren’t walking out hanging their heads. There was almost an arrogance about them. But only in Chinatown; once you put them in an unfamiliar setting, they’d be deeply lost and very vulnerable.”

Because Xing is permanently removed from any environment in which he might feel at home, there is no such discrepancy in his character. However, despite Xing’s appearance as an objective and observant narrator, as the novel unfolds the reader begins to question whether he might be at the heart of these fatal crimes after all.

Besides Fukuda’s experiences with the youth of Chinatown, other real-life events influenced Crossing. Around the time that the novel was written, Seung-Hui Cho and the Virginia Tech Massacre hit the news worldwide. This caused Fukuda to revaluate his protagonist, “because I did not want to encourage that stereotype”. However, he does create tension in the novel by repeatedly referring to the Massacre.

Although he describes writing Crossing as “a freeing experience”, Fukuda readily admits that it was a challenge to balance the two predominate themes of the book. Fukuda hopes that Crossing will interest both Asian and non-Asian readers: “It would be really cool if my Asian-American readers look at my picture at the back of the book, and think, ‘This is someone who understands what I’m going through’,” he says. “And one of the benefits of a suspense thriller novel is that it takes the – for the lack of a better word – white readers along for the ride, and makes them think about the cultural issues raised in the book.”

Crossing is published by AmazonEncore. Fukuda will host a seminar at the Book Fair on July 23, 11.30am-1pm, in room S428 of the HKCEC. To register, see www.hkbookfair.com.