XIAOLU GUO: Love in translation

An accomplished novelist needs many attributes: imagination, empathy, perception and perseverance. But one thing we take for granted is fluency in the language. Xiaolu Guo arrived in England from China just over four years ago, and after only eight months began to write a novel in beginner’s English. But the tentative use of tenses and poor grasp of pronouns hasn’t held the book back: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers has just been shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

Although Xiaolu scoffs at the idea of autobiographical fiction, she has used her experiences of adapting to life in Britain — spending hours watching the world go by in greasy-spoon cafés — for her enchanting tale of a young Chinese peasant girl sent to the West to learn English. “Z” (her real name, Zhuang Xiao Qiao, proves unpronounceable to the British) records her experiences in diary form, with each chapter taking a different English word as its starting point, so that the whole work amounts to a very personal dictionary.

She falls in love with a moody artist and their relationship is recorded through a series of at first charming, then hurtful, misunderstandings. When Z says: “I want to see where you live,” he replies: “Be my guest.” A week later she moves out of her flat, assuming that the word “guest” was an invitation to move in. Different definitions of love pepper the narrative. When her boyfriend politely tells her that he “would love a cup of tea”, Z is shocked. “How you use word ‘love’ on tea?”

Although Xiaolu’s spoken English is now near-perfect, her origins are not so different from Z’s. Born in 1973 in a fishing village in southern China, she lived with her grandparents until she was 8. It was a conservative, repressive environment. The only book in the village was Mao’s Little Red Book; the only music came from pop songs drifting over the waters from Taiwan. Xiaolu was frequently beaten by her mother.

At 18 she escaped to Beijing, where she studied at the Film Academy. She fell into writing purely “from hunger”; first working on soap operas and then, after graduating in 2000, writing her first novel. But she felt stifled by a series of restrictive relationships and in 2002 she escaped again, to London, on a scholarship to study documentary film-making at the National Film School. The fruit of that scholarship, Far and Near , about a Chinese writer’s arrival in London, won an ICA/Becks Futures prize in 2003.

Xiaolu divides her time between China and Europe, and writing and film. Her new project, How is Your Fish Today? has just been screened at the Sundance Festival in Utah. But writing is the form that Xiaolu finds “more pure”. She is working on another novel and, luckily for us, we won’t need a Chinese-English dictionary to read it. TOM GATTI

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