A CONCISE CHINESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY FOR LOVERS

by Xiaolu Guo

Chatto £12.99

When the young Chinese narrator of Xiaolu Guo’s novel arrives in London, she loses her name. Zhuang Xiao Qiao becomes Z, because — as she explains in the impossible English of her first days in the city — “I unpronounceable.” (Also lost are the wheels from her suitcase, an item that, like thousands of others manufactured in her home town of Wen-zhou, is apparently not designed for actual use.) Z’s parents are peasants-turned-factory-owners; speaking only Mandarin, they have sent their 23-year-old daughter to Britain to learn English. Although Z is unimpressed by her “boring little home town”, she is even less convinced by this intimidating task. “Why I must to study English?” she wonders: “I not caring if I speaking English or not.”

In fact, she’s mostly not, although that in no way acts as a brake on her narrative enthusiasm. Her ropy, charming, execrable prose is not unfamiliar; at first it seems she’s simply talking the dialect of the manual that falls out of the hi-fi box (“Before beginning uses must hard finish back screw”, etc). But Guo is cleverer than that, using the necessary naivety of Z’s fledgling English skills to pick out the settled weirdnesses of British life. Z starts at language school, where her failure to manipulate “I” and “me” introduces the novel’s dominant theme: the different meanings of selfhood in Chinese and British society. “But I is only one I,” Z reasons, convincingly mystified by the distinction. Two other fundamentals of British society — chat and manners — make as little sense to her. As she returns from one of her lonely walks around the city, the receptionist at her hostel observes that it’s cold. “Why she tell me? I know this information,” Z wonders. Another time, Z asks someone, “Are you a bit fatter than me?”, compounding this blinder with a cheerful “I don’t believe we same age. You look much older than me.”

Alone in London, Z has nothing to do after her lessons except wander the streets and go to the cinema. Guo (who grew up in a fishing village in South China) is a film-maker as well as a writer, who came to Britain in 2002 to study at the National Film School; facts that surely show in her heroine’s choice of movies. Z meets the man who will become her lover at a showing of Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul at the Cine Lumiere in South Kensington: no Jackass II at the Peckham multiplex for this 23-year-old, even if she does struggle to communicate in anything but the present tense. The man (he’s never named — Z calls him “you”), a Guardian-reading former political activist, is middle-aged, disappointed and living in Hackney. He’s also an artist (his back garden is full of giant clay ears), although he makes his living “doing deliveries in the van to boring rich people”, as he puts it. Furthermore, and horrifyingly for the daughter of Chinese peasants, he is a vegetarian. The first meal he offers her is composed mostly of “raw leafs”. But despite the salads, the age gap, the language gap, and the fact that they have absolutely nothing in common, Z goes to bed with You, loses her virginity, and falls instantly in love.

Somehow, remarkably, Guo makes this love believable, even as the differences between the pair grow wider with every page. Z’s boyfriend believes in living for the moment, seeing where life leads, and similar freshly minted philosophies. Z’s thoughts when she sees a man are “Will he possible become my husband?” Z’s boyfriend goes out with his friends; Z doesn’t understand the concept of friends. Z’s boyfriend likes his space; Z has no need for or understanding of privacy. When he goes away on a trip, she calmly rifles his belongings. “So you’re been through all my CDs?” he asks her, when he gets home. “Of course. . . I read your letters and diaries as well,” she responds. It is impossible not to be charmed by her matter-of-factness. As the story grows in complexity with Z’s growing vocabulary — the narration acquires fluency and tenses almost imperceptibly — it is equally hard not to be impressed by Guo’s vivacious talent.

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