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For years bookshelves have
been sagging under the tales of Westerners’ impressions of life and
people in The Middle Kingdom: and now there is a novel that tells
the other side of this exchange, the story of a young Chinese girl
who leaves her inland Chinese town to study English in London.
The girl in question: who goes
by the name of ‘Z’ because no one can pronounce her name, is from a
peasant family who gave up their fields for shoe-making, and have
struck it rich. Z’s parents have mapped out her future, which is
improving her English so that she can help sell their shoes abroad.
Not surprisingly, with the range of freedoms on offer in London,
things do not go according to the parent’s plan: and after the
narrator gets over her shock at the size of English breakfasts, she
soon ditches her Cantonese landlords and moves in with her
boyfriend. Her aspirations turn from footware and present perfect
to love, and sex. Quite different things in the West, Z discovers.
For anyone who read Xiaolu
Guo’s first novel to be published in English, (she has published six
books in Chinese) Village of Stone - a dark and powerful
account of a girl’s life in a fisherman’s village on the
south-eastern coasts of China - then her second novel, A Concise
Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, is a very different, and
hardly surprising, because Xiaolu has switched from her native
Chinese to English to write this novel. The book starts off in
deliberately poor English, which slowly improves as Z’s English gets
better.
For a long time Westerners
have been going to China and writing about their experiences and
culture-shock, and this book is refreshing and genuinely funny
relating the same experience in reverse. Guo Xiaolu pokes fun at
both the English and the Chinese, and hits notes that will be very
familiar with English readers: from weather forecasts to Woman’s
Hour.
There are all the staples of
culture-shock writing: food, cultural misunderstandings, and the
confusion and excitement as the traveler slips into a new skin.
While Western writers have written with generic horror of exotic
delicacies as frog’s eyeballs and snakes’ blood wine, the Chinese
narrator of this novel is thrown by a far more mundane, but
none-the-less horrifying meal: a full English breakfast with baked
beans and sausages.
There is a succession of
amusing and interesting observations of modern London, and English
manners – which changes when Z meets a middle aged sculptor in a
cinema. This is the man with whom she soon cohabits, and he becomes
the ‘you’ of the book, which charts both their relationship and the
narrator’s changing relationship with London and the freedoms and
threats and opportunities it involves.
It’s a fast-paced and funny
novel, each chapter starting with a word and a definition:
irritating when used as a shop sign (Ca-fé: a place to be
overcharged for bad tea) but works well in this book. The
relationship serves as a perfect foil to examine crucial differences
between Western and Chinese culture; and although the set up:
forty-something bisexual man with commitment problems trying to push
away a younger adoring girl, is somewhat old-hat, it works here,
partly because the cutlural problems they are experiencing enliven
and refresh this relationship.
At its best this book is funny
and entertaining, as well as being provoking and informative for a
Western reader about Chinese ideas and customs. But 2/3 of the way
through it seems Xiaolu Guo is unable to sustain the story or the
plot, and the narrator and the writing become a little aimless as
they wander through Europe. Without the tension of the relationship,
it starts to read more like a teenager’s travel diary. But this
does not detract from what is a funny and interesting read.
Recently short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction, Xiaolu Guo
is a fresh and powerful voice in contemporary fiction, and this book
should not be missed. |
