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More reviews by Shahbano Bilgrami
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A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers by Guo Xiaolu
GUO XIAOLU's A CONCISE CHINESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY FOR LOVERS was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. A determined reader who manages to get past the first few pages of deliberately 'bad' English will soon see why the thirty-three year-old Chinese filmmaker was shortlisted. The novel offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a non-native English speaker, following her halting progress from nervous beginner to more self-assured user as she negotiates language, culture, love and sex on her first trip outside China. At times hilarious, at times heart-wrenching, Guo's debut novel in English is a wonderful testimony to the raw power of language.
A CONCISE CHINESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY FOR LOVERS is the story of Zhuang Xiao Qiao, or 'unpronouncable Ms Z', who is sent to London by her parents to learn the 'Queen's English'. Of peasant stock, Ms Z's parents, who now own a factory that manufactures shoes, want their daughter to be fluent in the international language of commerce. When Ms Z arrives in London, she arms herself with a Concise Chinese-English Dictionary, enrolls in a language school in Holborn, and keeps a diary chronicling her adventures in 'The West.' In an effort to widen her vocabulary, she begins going to the Cine-Lumiere to watch foreign films. It is there that she meets the great love of her life, a bisexual middle-aged sculptor with whom she starts living soon after she misinterprets his casual 'Be my guest' (in response to her wanting to see his house) as a firm offer of cohabitation.
Ms Z's diary, whose structure is reminiscent of a dictionary with headwords and definitions at the beginning of each chapter, is more than just a simple yet passionately-told love story. As she grapples with words, her frustration with the inability to communicate her thoughts to others raises some fundamental questions about the nature of language and culture. At the beginning, for example, she marvels, 'I study little red dictionary. English words made only from twenty-six characters? Are English a bit lazy or what? We have fifty thousand characters in Chinese.' Later, feeling lonely and isolated, she wonders despondently, 'Every night, when I write diary, I feeling troubled. Am I writing in Chinese or English? I trying express me, but confusing -- I see other little me try expressing me in other language.' Language and culture, as she learns in London, are intimately bound.
Her attempts at communication and self-expression illustrate how language can be both stumbling block and enabler, particularly as regards personal relationships. For example, her obsession for the English sculptor (who remains nameless but is addressed as `you' throughout, giving the narrative a sense of urgency) begins with a misunderstanding over semantics, as described above. Later, when he says that he has 'tried to love men', she agrees that 'I think is good try love men. World better place.' Initially, the English sculptor finds her broken English charming and enjoys giving her lessons, delighting in the freshness of her vision. Later, however, he tires of constantly having to explain things to her.
Alongside her English language training, the inexperienced Ms Z undergoes a sexual awakening on her travels. When she arrives in the United Kingdom, she is still a virgin, her supposedly unattractive physical appearance the reason for her shortage of beaus in China. She slowly becomes acquainted with her own sexuality, first through her relationship with the Englishman, and later through pornography, peep shows, and a trip to the continent. Food and sex, both fundamental to human existence, go hand in hand: Ms Z loves to eat and yearns for the food she left behind in China. The vegetarian diet of her lover and her own carnivorous instincts are curiously at odds.
As the intensity of her love for the English sculptor increases in the face of their obvious incompatibility, Ms Z's writing comes into its own. Despite grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors -- or perhaps because of them -- the diary acquires a lyrical intensity that has the power to move at deeper levels. She reflects, '"Love", this English word: like other English words it has tense...' In Chinese, however, love `has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.'
Guo's Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers makes one reassess the traditional view that there is a particular 'standard' in language that makes for effective communication. Bypassing convention, this remarkable writer has produced a novel that is entirely free of restrictions, that uses words, pictures, drawings, and dictionary definitions to give us a complete picture of a woman's love for a man.
Shahbano Bilgrami
08/07/2007
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Shahbano Bilgrami's first novel, 'Without Dreams', was published in November 2007 and was longlisted for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize. |
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