Writers from China's diaspora
Although Xiaolu Guo answers earnestly, she rounds off almost every utterance with a smile that suggests unease about playing the oracle.
Wearing leather trousers, a dangly earring and a turquoise shawl at the swanky St Georges Hotel in London, she describes herself as 'an anarchist', attributing the stance to her miserable childhood in a tiny Zhejiang fishing village.
She dolefully recounts how Red Guards forced her skinny artist father to work on a chain gang on a land-reclamation project beside the East China Sea. Her mother performed in a Red Guard circus troupe and was rarely around. When she did materialise, she would often beat Xiaolu, who says the violence was a weird way of expressing love.
Denied a solid early education, Xiaolu landed a place on a BA screen-writing and film theory course at the Beijing Film Academy in 1993. But she says she felt out of place because of the 'huge gap' between her 'peasant background' and her 'civilised middle-class' peers, who had no time for commercial directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, and idealised China.
But Xiaolu channelled her frustration. When she graduated in 2000 with her degree and an MA in the traditional culture of East Asian Film, she had already published work, including Who is My Mother's Boyfriend?, a collection of screen scripts, and Fenfang's Fever, a novel about a struggling actress.