reading notes | a concise chinese-english dictionary for lovers - by xiaolu guo
inspiration log > books > fiction > displaced souls
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my rating: 8/10 - enjoyed immensely. I would buy the hard copy and reread it many times.
filed under:
displacement, language play, chineseness, foreignness, cross cultural romance, solo woman adventures, chinese-diaspora, witty, fresh, funny, spontaneous, light and short reads.
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a fellow voyager friend gifted me a slim paperback book, “language” by xiaolu guo (excerpted from this book), and I read it in nearly one sitting. my friend wrote in the title page: “for k, a story not unlike ours,” — and I’d say, she was so, so, so right.
for displaced souls wandering the world — this is one of those books that hits too close to home — holding us in that space of a home we don’t have; except the one we create ourselves, with a foreign man, or a new city, or a new language. it’s everything at once: sweet, sour, bitter, fresh, light, heavy, deep, fun, playful.
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reading this felt like reading a translation of my own life and experiences, told in a different voice/body/soul. I’d say: through its witty, almost spontaneous style of storytelling — and seemingly effortless literary craft — it painted a topographic map of being a woman in a foreign land, trying to understand and be in an intimate relationship with an “other,” while discovering herself.
quotes
“love,” this English word: like other English words it has tense. “loved” or “will love” or “have loved.” all these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. not infinite. it only exists in particular period of time. in Chinese, love is “爱” (ai). it has no tense. no past and future. love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future. if our loved existed in Chinese tense, then it will last for ever. it will be infinite.
“I hate myself being so needy. The way I want of love, is like a hard toothbrush try to brush bad teeth, then it ends up bleeding. The harder I try, more blood comes out. but I believe love can cure everything, and eventually the teeth will not bleeding anymore.”
“home is everything. home is not sex but also about it. home is not a delicious meal but also about it. home is not a lighted bedroom but also about it. home is not a hot bath in the winter but it is also about it.”
what this book is about:
a young woman China goes to London to study english, and falls in love with a British man. the book is structured in dictionary form — and begins with her broken english, and evolve in complexity as her english progresses. she struggles to understand: the culture, her lover, herself — using the lens of language.
what it’s REALLY about:
a very fresh, frank, funny, uncensored examination of cultural dissonance — through the lens of learning a new language, and its limitations and possibilities.
in the end, it shows how language is a tool we use to smooth over the cultural dissonance. but it can only do so much — as a symbolic translation for how we think and describe the world. (ie, if you were to dissect the meaning of the word; you’d also have to dissect all the assumptions of what that word means, and what it says about a culture’s way of thinking and relating.) there are some bridges you just can’t cross.
what I loved about it:
I love what the writer did with english. there’s a deep simplicity and freshness to it - a level of poetry that comes with embracing the foreignness of the narrator. everything feels deconstructed, and reconstructed anew.
the narrator is funny as hell, spontaneous. it’s the kind of funny that lives (is born) between the cracks of english & chinese. if you speak both, you take it for granted and are too focused on “making sense.” but sometimes, NOT making sense or misunderstandings create something entirely new and deliciously illuminating.
you don’t entirely love the narrator, but you always empathize with her. for me, she carried the voice of my mother, and many chinese women I know - blunt, unfiltered, no nonsense.
I loved the literary device of the dictionary format. I found it amazing that such a poetic and “natural” story could be told with seemingly deliberately handicapped english. this could have easily felt cheesy and overwrought, but it didn’t.
reading it felt like being inside the heads of people closer to my parents’ - and I suppose, closer in heart-space to the culture I was born into, and have somewhat distanced myself from. in that sense, reading this felt like a strange sort of homecoming.
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related: this reminds me of the short animation I absolutely loved — agua viva, about a Chinese manicurist attempting to describe words and feelings